With
Milosevic gone, what shall the West do?
PressInfo #
102
October
23, 2000
By Jan
Oberg, TFF
director
The Milosevic-West
symbiosis
In handling the Balkan crisis the last ten years, the
United States and European countries could have chosen a
pro-active policy based on conflict analysis and a fair,
principled implementation. They could have avoided
today's intellectual, political and moral cul-de-sac and
avoided the bombing last year. They would not be de facto
protectors of Bosnia and occupiers of Kosovo/a.
Most Western actors grossly underestimated the
complexities of the Balkans, they were occupied with the
end of the Cold War, they chose to perceive it all in
simplified black-and-white terms. They never acted to
only help the parties solve their problems, but were
guided by their own more or less nationalist, competing
interests in the Balkans. And then, above all, there was
the "Milosevic factor."
The West is cosmologically burdened with a tendency to
write simplifying, fail-safe recipes for the solution of
extremely complex economic, constitutional, historical
and structural conflicts: one issue, two parties, decide
who is good and who is bad, elevate yourself to judge and
solve the conflict by punishing the culprit rather than
attack the root cause of the problems that stands between
the opponents and the structure around them that made
them quarrel.
The name of the game was Milosevic. More than any
other single factor the love/hate relationship between
him and the West has determined the course of Western
conflict-(mis)management this last decade. He was the bad
guy par excellence; he was also a man who could - and did
- deliver when he had put his signature on a deal; he was
the actor who could be blamed for anything that went
wrong whether in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo or Serbia
itself.
When the West recognized that it had lost a decade of
perfectly possible violence-prevention in the case of
Kosovo and the man also continued to stand up against
pressure - and not, in that situation, without support
from the citizens of Yugoslavia - it began calling him,
for the first time, "cruel dictator." They compared him
to Saddam Hussein and mobilized a propaganda and
misinformation machinery to make people believe that he
was a new Hitler with an extermination plan. Then emerged
the weird indictment (see PressInfo 100) and the
stepped-up efforts to destabilize Yugoslavia.
Strange as it was and is, this petty power politician
leading a small country - dictator no, authoritarian yes
- had the Western leaders spellbound and blinded -
vacillating between blind love and blind hate. But blind.
Say what you want, he was a formidable chess-player, a
remarkable personality who, for those many years kept a
series of games going with various actors in the West
while also playing double and triple games with other
leaders in the other republics and with his shifting
allies and opponents in Serbia and Yugoslavia. Whether an
ally with whom you could do business and more or less
dirty deals or the beloved hate object needed to fuel
Western self-righteousness and cover-up our own mistakes,
he was a treasure to the West. He was the single most
important factor in interaction with whom the West shaped
its policies.
The end game for
Milosevic - and the West
Well - that is, until the West cornered itself and he
began to look insecure and lose his strategy. The
West's great mistake was the bombing and the indictment.
It meant that it became virtually impossible to deal with
Belgrade and that the people made him look stronger (for
a while). But every sensible person knows that no
solutions can be found for Kosovo and Montenegro - not to
mention overall Balkan stability - without Serbia or the
Serbs.
The Clinton administration's ill-conceived, hotheaded
policies shipped all of the West into the mentioned
cul-de-sac. The end game started when then "super"
diplomat Richard Holbrooke brokered the deal with
Milosevic about the OSCE Verifiers' Mission in
autumn 1998 while the United States encouraged KLA/UCK -
the Kosovo Liberation Army - to take over where the
Yugoslav forces withdrew and set up an "extraction" force
for them in neighbouring Macedonia which was destabilized
and turned into a combined military base and refugee
camp. And then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
began threatening bombing.
Then came the negotiation and peace agreement fraud
called Rambouillet, then the bombings, the incredibly
quick building of the American Bondsteel base in Kosovo -
the largest US base since Vietnam. None of it
created peace, of course. It wasn't meant to. The UN and
NATO/KFOR let the hardline, non-elected Albanians with no
legitimate political mandate carry through the largest
ethnic cleansing in the Balkans saying it had an
understandable revenge and could not be stopped.
The West had thereby managed to politically kill three
- nonviolent and democracy-minded - birds with one
stone: Macedonia's very decent gentleman president Kiro
Gligorov, the moderate, elected leader of Kosovo/a, Dr.
Rugova, as well as the civil society and political
opposition in Serbia. Obsessed with the real Milosevic
and no less with a phantom Milosevic seen to lurk in
every bush, the West trapped itself - and so did, in
reality, Milosevic. Neither he nor the West cared about
real problems or real people; they cared about
themselves, their image-making, propaganda, about power
and about humiliating the other. Even as Milosevic
violated laws and refused to start real negotiations with
the Albanians, the West violated international laws, its
own democratic and human rights principles - and refused
to set up decent negotiations and honest mediation (as is
known now, Rambouillet had none of that). And just as
Milosevic could always fall back on his superior violence
apparatus, the West could always threaten him with its:
NATO will come, if...
Like in so many other tit-for-tat games, conflicting
parties sooner or later end up looking like mirror images
of each other.
With Milosevic gone, the love/hate symbiosis between
him and the West is lost. How will the EU and the US
navigate without their beloved enemy in Belgrade? How
will Western governments sell the policies of theWest in
this new situation? What will they do with the
accumulated effects of the last decade's
conflict-mismanagement caused, to a large extent - but of
course not only - by that symbiosis.
What will the West do when conflicting - which it is
bound to do - with president Vojeslav Kostunica? During
my conversations with him, I have perceived him to be
honest, moderate, patriotic and humble, to believe in
law, democracy and civil society, to have no blood on his
hands, and to be morally, intellectually and economically
uncorrupted - all in contrast to Milosevic. BUT he has
come to power on promises and policies which are, in
essence, quite similar to those of Milosevic.
To be continued in PressInfo
103.
© TFF 2000
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