Some Damn Thing in the Balkans

...In a syndicated column, William Pfaff writes that Kosovo is "where the vast majority of the former Serbian population no longer choose to live," as if they had retired to Florida...

...When the streets cleared, my friends and I pressed on to Gra canica, a monastery as sacred to Serbs as parts of Jerusalem are to the Jews...

...Milosevic speaks fluent English, understands the nuances of American politics, and participates freely in most negotiations even if, like the Serbian government in 1914, he rejects the ultimatum to accept the jurisdiction of foreign forces...

...has jettisoned a historic ally from two world wars, in Europe's most unstable region, to take up the Hapsburg legacy, that of "teaching the Serbs a lesson...

...In the brave old world of the Hotel Metropol, I seemed to be the only guest...

...As European history, however, Holbrooke's account lacks the depth of a downloaded Internet term paper...

...But the long rows of unclaimed room keys and the stillness of the breakfast room suggested nothing had been quite the same since the Marshall died the death of a salesman...

...Everything about Belgrade suggested a city under siege...

...It was Rose who collected evidence suggesting that one of the hideous shells fired on the Sarajevo market (for which the Serbs were blamed and punished with air strikes) might have been fired from Bosnian positions...

...In the end the champion of Greater Serbia found his people living in three independent, sovereign states...

...Less felicitous diplomatic contacts, after he left government, cost him $5,000 to settle an The American Spectator • May 1999 ethics-violation claim brought by the Justice Department...

...Bosnia, for example, was last an independent state in the thirteenth century (if then...

...Although Serbs dominated the ruling Communist party, Tito drew the country's constitutional lines according to the principle that a weak Serbia meant a strong Yugoslavia...

...troops into the peacekeeping], President Clinton was, in effect, playing with the lives of soldiers from other nations...

...As long as Yugoslavia remained solvent, it mattered little that the internal borders were no more accurate than colonial frontiers drawn in African sands or that several million Serbs were scattered in a diaspora outside Serbia...

...But the Bosnian government also found ways to exploit its image as a victim, with the goal of entrapping the U.S...

...During the wars of the Yugoslav succession, as today in Kosovo, the Clinton administration had the luxury, in Lord Owen's phrase, "to practice realpolitik and simultaneously preach moralism...

...But it matched my own reading on the Yugoslav break-up, when nationalities found themselves isolated across fateful lines...

...To stay in power, I often heard, Milosevic would betray friends, much as on his climb to the presidency he cast his mentor, Ivan Stambolic, to the wind...

...He traveled there in April 1987 and proclaimed: "No one will be allowed to beat you...

...advocates statehood for nations that even President Woodrow Wilson deemed unworthy...

...During the Bosnian peace shuttle, he managed to find time to marry Kati Marton, the ex-Mrs...

...During the intervening centuries, many Serbs fled Kosovo to escape enslavement, while the Turks sent in more and more Islamicized Albanians, who engaged in massive persecutions of Serbs, which today would be called genocide...

...ours was to end the war" — and confesses modestly that when he arrived on location "there was no more energy left in the international system...

...ignored warnings of his old friends...not to recognize first Croatia...and later Bosnia"), and 500 years of Ottoman cruelty are summarized in exquisitely diplomatic terms: "Turkey had once shared a common history with Bosnia...

...With us," Tito is quoted in Milovan Djilas's Wartime, "this will be more of an administrative division, instead of fixed borders, as with the bourgeoisie...

...It was in the defense of a minority that Milosevic came to power...

...At least Lincoln waited in the telegraph office for news of casualties...

...To peace...

...NOT-O-GREATE7 SERBIA One of my hosts that week in Belgrade came by the Metropol the first evening...

...Holbrooke's gift to his prince is to dress such realpolitik in the guise of humanitarian rescue...

...Certainly the Clinton administration is not alone in reviling Yugoslavia or its masters, the Serbs...

...At Dayton, to get peace, his break with the Bosnian Serbs made the crucial difference...

...What would we get out of war with Serbia...

...commanders, General Sir Michael Rose, writes in Fighting for Peace, "Without such a commitment [to put U.S...

...had only six observers there...

...THE RADETZHY MARCH OF FOLLY For reasons not clearly explained, while fighting a remote-control war against Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan, the U.S...

...Standing on the steps of a drab socialist hotel, I watched waves of angry young men, most dressed in black, Most of the people I met earned less than $150 per month and worked two jobs...

...In the wreckage of Yugoslavia, the Clinton administration wants to showcase a foreign policy in which Wilsonian ideals of self-determination are defended with Richard Nixon's B-52 bombers, even if war with Russia is risked for the vague principles of irredentism...

...And Lord Owen confirms that the Iranian weapons pipeline ran via Croatia into Bosnia...

...We drank tea in the restaurant, an empty cavern of tables with white linen, where the only other customers smoked cigarettes in a distant corner (perhaps, I mused, in the midst of an arms deal...

...To lay waste to the faltering Yugoslav ideal, the U.S...

...When I asked the reason for the butchery in Bosnia or the current conflict in Kosovo, the answer was not Milosevic or the expansion of Greater Serbia, but a more familiar cause of war: "Borders...

...There's much more comfort at 30,000 feet than there is at six...

...Just as Bosnian Muslims feared Serb domination in a Yugoslav federation without Croatia and Slovenia, so did the 1.4 million Serbs in Bosnia fear persecution under a Muslim government that had severed its ties to Belgrade...

...Knowing that Washington has more minefields than the hills around Sarajevo, Holbrooke heaps praise on his colleagues in the Clinton administration, not to mention such foes as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle...

...FAAROSEVIC: HAMLET OF THE BALKANS The American embargo makes doing business in Belgrade almost impossible, so I spent much of my week meeting friends of friends, and when I got home it struck me how many I met had, at some point, known the Yugoslav president...

...Although he has a record of ruthlessness, he usually compromises in the end — qualities that the Americans now seek to exploit...

...The Croatian offensive was valuable to the negotiating process...

...resolution or a congressional declaration of war, preferring its own policies of ultimata...

...With its many Orthodox monasteries and the Field of Blackbirds, where Serbia lost its independence to the Ottomans in 1389, Kosovo is Serbia's spiritual heartland...

...Then he withdrew his forces, leaving the enclave defenseless...

...Of his habit of trading regions of Yugoslavia for more time in office, one friend said: "He would stay on as the mayor of the Free City of Belgrade, if Yugoslavia is reduced to that...

...then resumes his vacation in Wyoming...

...they made his current government sound like a junta...

...Belgrade is absent a cult of his personality—I never saw his portrait anywhere — and people do not look over their shoulders before denouncing him in public...

...Clearly Holbrooke's ambitions are to be secretary of state, perhaps in a forthcoming Gore administration...

...In 1993, for example, the U.S...

...Both Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo see themselves as step-children in a promised land...

...Throughout the book Holbrooke blames extreme Serb nationalism for the ills of the Balkans...

...Yet chasing the white whale of influence, Holbrooke saves most of his sail for the president...

...General Rose was one of the few willing to speak out on "the danger for the USA in pursuing a foreign policy in Bosnia shaped by the propaganda machine of a clever, ruthless government...

...He remembers the president's birthday, shows him around Berlin, sends him Cliffordesque back-channel memos, and describes the First Couple enjoying a tender waltz at a White House ball...

...Kosovo has less claim to independence than Wales...

...As I was told in Belgrade: "We have the churches, and they have the people...

...They were set up in 1993, by the French general Philippe Morrillon, as sanctuaries...

...As the Serbs regained Kosovo in 1913, Albania was carved from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, not for reasons of human rights but so that Austria-Hungary could check Serbia's progress before it reached the sea...

...embassy in Budapest...

...tilts in any direction so long as it opposes the government of Slobodan Milosevic, "the man who, in our view, bore the heaviest respon25 sibility for the war...

...Oiti 27 The U.S...

...Western powers crossed the Rubicon into the Yugoslav civil wars when Germany and then the U.S...

...in practice he is a poker player who can never remember if a flush beats three-of-a-kind...

...To be sure, the Muslims often fell between two ruthless, warring parties—Serbs and Croats—and suffered numerous atrocities, much as innocent Kosovars are now being marched forcibly into Albania...

...Yet half of the Albanian population lay outside the 1913 borders —not just in Kosovo, but throughout the southern Balkans—an injustice the U.S...

...and NATO to bomb the Serbs...

...But to make good on its policies of irredentism, the U.S., rather than just play a make-believe game of honest broker, has dispatched NATO war planes and trade sanctions, not to mention Iranian weapons on a scale of which Oliver North could only dream...

...It was a dramatic gamble by President Tudjman—and it paid off...

...A number of people I talked with described the Yugoslav president as someone who uses the public face of tyranny to mask Hamlet-like indecision...

...HOLECHE GOES TO WAR The Clinton administration likes to claim that it plays the role of honest broker in the Balkan wars, but what is clear from Holbrooke's account is the extent to which the U.S...

...chose war over peace plans that had not been drafted in Washington...

...I stayed on a farm near Pristina, a dusty provincial city, where horse carts jostled lurching trucks on the city's main streets...

...To reverse the effects of Serb ethnic cleansing, the U.S...

...How many Americans are willing to die for Kosovo's autonomy...

...3. Call on the U.N...

...In the rush to condemn Serbia, he asked, who really cared that Croatia or the Kosovar Albanians had done Hitler's bidding...

...Milosevic has made a habit of trading territory for more time in office...

...ALLIES OF CONVENIENCE: IV BOSNIAN MINUTEMEN As it suited American interests to dress the Muslim Bosnian government in the cocked hats of Minutemen, few accounts have ever addressed its conduct in the war...

...2. Retreat into the enclave amid scenes of appalling suffering...

...But he does mention Washington's indifference to Iranians and mujahideen who were present in Bosnia after 1993...

...Since the early 1990's, the United States has supported independence for Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, more recently, autonomy for Kosovo and greater independence for Montenegro...

...Certainly no aspect of the war excites more despair than the fate of the so-called safe areas...

...WILL KOSOVO'S FATE BE THAT OF SREBRENICA...

...pushed the recognition of Croatia and later Bosnia-Herzegovina as independent states...

...at the U.N., he was also a special envoy for the State Department in Kosovo and a vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, an investment bank that, despite Holbrooke's connections and savvy, still dropped more than a billion in Russian bonds...

...But by dismembering Yugoslavia, the U.S...

...Nor did the U.N...

...But as one of the U.N...

...Some two million ethnic Albanians live in Kosovo as opposed to 200,000 Serbs, who like Afrikaners cling to ancestral lands against a rising demographic tide (after World War II the populations were equal...

...In recent times, while the Clinton nominee-in-waiting to represent the U.S...

...Can anything but folly, to use Barbara Tuchman's catchword, explain why America is fighting a war to create a Greater Albania...

...The economy today survives on the soft credit of Russian natural gas...

...Few voices have questioned the logic of American policies dedicated to the disintegration of Yugoslavia...

...And the republic of Serbia itself was saddled with large Hungarian and Albanian minorities...

...now thinks it can remedy with Allied bombers...

...Holbrooke is breathless in his enthusiasm for Croat-Muslim offensives: "In early-August, the Croatians launched a major offensive to retake the Krajina...

...Does anyone in the Clinton administration remember this fateful toast...

...But foreign policy by story-board demands a prime-time strongman —a Balkan Saddam —to explain why America has brought the Blitz to the skies of Yugoslavia...

...Men who might someday write his letters of recommendation—Warren Christopher, Strobe Talbott, Anthony Lake, and Al Gore—rate encomia that read like the lives of the saints...

...And what would we gain, for heaven's sake...

...What other people prompt easy association with ethnic cleansing, sniper fire into Sarajevo, the oppression of the Kosovar Albanians, the massacres outside Srebrenica, or the specter of "Greater Serbia," which evokes both Lebensraum and czarist dreams of a Slavic empire...

...When Bosnian Serbs attacked the city and later massacred some thousands of male Muslims, they came with a vengeance as old as the Iliad...

...When Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves independent in 1991, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army skirmished briefly in Slovenia, but quickly withdrew, as there were few Serbs in Slovenia...

...His brinkmanship seems that of a strongman defiant of Western ideals...

...With the U.N...

...As one of my friends put it: "He would stay on as the mayor of the Free City of Belgrade, if Yugoslavia is reduced to that...

...Toward that end his account of the Bosnian negotiations read like the longest résumé cover letter in history...

...As my father, a combat veteran, wrote to me recently: "With our current distaste for using the bayonet, it looks as though bombs will be the weapons of choice...

...His tactics are violent and primeval (although little different from Sher-man's march to the sea) as, in his mind anyway, he fights to preserve an imperfect union...

...He carefully remembers all of his bon mots — "The Serb view of history was their problem, I told Roberts later...

...The American Spectator • May 1999 ist expansion, wielded the tools of genocide, and dispatched warlords to the rolling valleys of Bosnia which a few years before had seen only tour groups...

...24 May 1999 The American Spectator Yet a constitutional change under Tito in 1974 granted the province autonomy (similar to what is sought today), which allowed the Albanian majority to persecute the Serbs, whose complaints in the mid-198o's drew Milosevic's attention...

...As Lord David Owen writes in Balkan Odyssey: "There is a ruthlessness and a pursuit of power for its own sake about Milosevic that underpins the pragmatism that otherwise seems so neatly to characterize Milosevic's political personality...

...could freely advocate bombing Serb positions...

...In one of the book's most dramatic scenes, Clinton orders an air attack against the Serbs and tells Holbrooke, in perfect Hollywood diction, "to hit them hard...

...In World War I, one-fifth of Serbia's population died fighting the Austrians and Germans...

...Give us bombs for peace," is Holbrooke's plea to the Washington brass, foreshadowing the administration's later romance with air power...

...I have no brief to defend Milosevic, a man of Balkan expedience...

...has championed the rights of Muslims in the Balkans...

...To guarantee such a country under such a mbret [i.e., the Albanian leader] meant to conjure it out of a plumed hat...

...allocate the troops necessary to protect the six enclaves...

...Few in Washington have asked whether it makes sense for the U.S...

...As British historian Miranda Vickers warns: "Before this could become a reality the Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and possibly Greeks, would need to renegotiate their borders with Albania...

...German interests in the Balkans are trivialized ("Genscher...

...To End a War opens with an attack on Rebecca West, the author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), for her "openly pro-Serb attitudes," as if she were huddled in Pale writing speeches for Radovan Karadzic...

...Most described Milosevic as pragmatic, but none respected his leadership...

...Throughout his narrative Holbrooke is repeatedly calling for air strikes, like one of the Bundy brothers during the early years in Vietnam...

...This could be the cause of catastrophic conflict throughout the Balkans...

...Tito (who was born in Croatia but whose mysterious ethnicity was redefined as often as party principles) revived the Yugoslav ideal after World War II...

...The President succeeded brilliantly," is a typical compliment when Clinton has the good sense to endorse Holbrooke's advice...

...Without American peacekeeping troops on the ground, the U.S...

...Some plum trees and goat pastures full of droppings, and a bunch of rebellious killers...

...at Hiroshima, he targets civilians as instruments of war...

...The attack, which bore hallmarks of American military or perhaps CIA planning, did not retake land but drove 150,000 Serbs from towns they had settled in the eighteenth century...

...would come to believe in these borders as if they were the Maginot Line...

...He recalls with fondness his former employers, including Clark Clifford, W. Averell Harriman, and Jimmy Carter...

...deployed the range of diplomacy, deception, and violence familiar to great powers...

...Holbrooke refers to them as "Serb-occupiers...

...The Serb presence in Croatia made that republic's independence more problematic, especially when the government of Franjo Tudjman adopted a new legal system that denied the Serbs the rights of a national minority...

...In recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina, the West validated borders that even Tito knew were fictional, sketched not to define nationalities but to enhance the control of the Party...

...Holbrooke offers no hint that the American government might have helped Croatia overrun the Krajina...

...The borders he drew around the nationalities had a goal of redistributing the Serbs over four republics: Substantial Serb minorities were gerrymandered into Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia...

...The objective of the undeclared war in Kosovo is that ethnic Albanians, also mostly Muslim, might have home rule, something they would never have if they joined Albania's impoverished anarchy...

...And what is clear from a visit to Belgrade or a reading of Bosnian memoirs is the extent to which his demonization fits the requirements of American policies rather than a careful review of his record...

...and the European Community unable to stop the slaughter in Bosnia, Holbrooke orchestrated the shuttle diplomacy that ended with the 1995 Dayton peace accords...

...A poster near the elevator hinted at a floor show of women accented with feathers, and it was easy to imagine Tito's new class celebrating here on New Year's Eve...

...Repeatedly, the U.S...

...Most press accounts and Pentagon briefings that describe the fighting between the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian military police imply that the Serbs are in Kosovo only as an army of occupation...

...sank the Vance-Owen peace plan, which would have given the Muslims 33 percent of Bosnia, because it suited the domestic agenda to encourage the Muslims to hold out for better terms...

...In reading the war dispatches from Kosovo, I am reminded of the summer after I graduated from college, when I spent time traveling in Kosovo...

...The country is said to have fought and lost wars of nationalMATTHEW STEVENSON manages a Swiss bank and lives in Geneva...

...T T E STEVE S erican inter111111111111111111111111=11111111111111111=1 During the war with the Nazis, 1.7 million Yugoslays died, many at the hands of their own countrymen...

...What greater success has this administration known than the peace Holbrooke brokered at Dayton, or the image of Madeleine Albright reading Milosevic the riot act over Kosovo...

...Even Tito's widow lives without a state pension...

...a nd its allies excused atrocities that, committed by the Serbs, would have prompted airstrikes...

...In both cases Serbia, or later Yugoslavia, sided with the Allies for which the reward, my host observed, was now economic isolation and the threat of air strikes...

...In Bosnia and Kosovo, Milosevic's temporizing squandered many advantages...

...Or that it was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914, who was raising his glass...

...When the Serbs attacked Gorazde in 1994, the U.N...

...In most press accounts, not to mention the pronunciamentos of Madeleine Albright, Yugoslavia is a reminder of Europe's encounters with fascism...

...But when Communism defaulted both on its debts and ideology in the 1980's, Serbs realized that the dissolution of Yugoslavia would leave many beyond its boundaries: fuel for the fires of Greater Serbia...

...Little did the Marshal know that the U.S...

...But would it support secession in Russia, which has the same patchwork of national aspirations as the former Yugoslavia...

...Alexander Dragnich, a former U.S . diplomat in Belgrade who has written several books about Kosovo, better understands the Serb exodus: "The holy ground of Kosovo was not regained until the Balkan Wars of 1912...

...In reality they were also used by each side in the fighting as safe havens—almost like Trojan horses...

...In the late afternoon we walked the Field of Blackbirds, also a shibboleth of Serb memory...

...While the European Community introduces a single currency to blur its overlapping ethnic passions, the U.S...

...Unapologetic, Holbrooke writes: "I told Tudjman that current Croatian behavior might be viewed as a milder form of ethnic cleansing...

...At Srebrenica, equally vulnerable, the Muslim commander, Nasser Oric, used the city's civilians to mask attacks on nearby Serb positions...

...Milosevic wraps himself in the cloak of Greater Serbia not out of nationalist conviction but to survive in office...

...As references he lists Joe Klein, Bob Dole, Jacques Chirac, Sam Nunn, and Mike Wallace (many more available upon request...

...But in launching Tomahawk missiles against his military sweeps in Kosovo, the NATO alliance has endorsed the principle that the future map of Europe should conform to its linguistic and religious contours, a Holy Roman Empire held together by American stealth bombers...

...We'd lose the lives of young men and we'd spend money better used elsewhere...

...The economy survives on the soft credit of Russian natural gas...

...at Dayton the Muslims ended up with 21 percent of Bosnia...

...As with most Belgrade conversations, this one drifted to a remembrance of wars past...

...23 Heedless of Am ests, and with vague talk of self-determination and humanitarianism, Bill Clinton has launched a bloody struggle against Slobodan Milosevica war in which all claims are dubious and, pace Richard Holbrooke, no side is innocent...

...On my first visit to Pristina I got mixed up in a student demonstration...

...The Yugoslav army, in the guise of local police, was then cracking down on Kosovar irredentists, and in Washington the drummer boys of war were suggesting that Belgrade might listen more carefully to Albanian declarations of independence if a few laser-guided bombs came down Slobodan Milosevic's chimney...

...Most people I met earned less than $150 a month and worked two jobs...

...Among his accomplishments are simultaneous positions at State and on Wall Street—making him one of the few investment bankers who can come to a closing with cruise missiles...

...Like the U.S...

...Wallowing in inflation, his central bank once printed a billion-dinar note, which lost most of its value before the ink dried on the last zero...

...Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 1 n the weeks that preceded President Clinton's decision to wag the Yugoslav dog, I made a trip through the federation's two republics, Serbia and Montenegro, wondering if American politics might reduce itself (not to mention the Balkans) to pulp fiction...

...It is a day I recall with words from Rebecca West: "Kosovo speaks only of its defeats...

...to fight its battles, a strategy that today is not lost on the Kosovo Liberation Army...

...But as a journey through the whaling grounds of Washington politics, Holbrooke's account compares favorably to Moby Dick...

...In Kosovo, the administration bypassed either a U.N...

...Since returning from Yugoslavia, I have read a number of accounts of the Bosnian war and peace, including To End a War, in which former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke stakes out the claim to the one great foreign policy success of the Clinton administration...

...Holbrooke is a man of many talents, not to mention jobs...

...In the 1996 elections President Clinton could speak of peace in our time...

...The American Spectator • May 1999 Against the aerial onslaught, Milosevic clings to Kosovo for what might be called geosentimental reasons...

...What federation is more deserving of devolution than that which sacked its own city, Vukovar, as if it were Troy...

...Holbrooke praises Croat-Muslim offensives that drove Serbs front centuries-old settlements...

...We're a banana republic," I was told, "without bananas...

...Long live restraint...

...He financed the war with printed money, stripped banks of their deposits to raise cash, and reduced Yugoslavia's considerable history of international trade to that of a smuggler's den...

...We're a banana republic," I was told, "without bananas...

...26 May 1999 • The American Spectator protest the lack of Albanian language in courses at the local university...

...What is lost on the war dogs in Washington is that Greater Albania comes at great peril...

...Peter Jennings, at the U.S...

...In his book, he tells of one encounter with a Bosnian officer: "His underlying strategy was familiar to me, as it was the one followed elsewhere by the Bosnian Army: 1. Attack on all fronts...

...Having run Belgrade's largest bank, Milosevic should have known an asset from a liability, yet he led his nation into bankruptcy...

...and its allies excused atrocities that, had they been committed by the Serbs, would have prompted calls for air strikes...

...to align itself with the goals of the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose soldiers in most sovereign nations would be deemed terrorists or invaders...

...The lines around Bosnia, for example, took in lands with historical claims from both Croatia and Serbia...

...Some Damn Thing in the Balkans 22 May 1999 The American Spectator Until it became an international controversy, Albania had been a terra incognita—a remote labyrinthine confusion of ragged chiefdoms...

...Admittedly, his was a Serb view of history...

...He barely opposed Slovenian secession, carved up Bosnia in a deal with Tudjman, sold the Krajina Serbs down the river, gave up Sarajevo, and embraced the Dayton accords in exchange for an end to the economic sanctions...