[AKI-News] Leaders with opposing views on Kosova's path

[AKI News]

Advocates for Kosova's Independence (AKI)
August, 2002 - Part I

==================================
  ** AKI Newsletter, Issue 11 **
==================================

Leaders with opposing views on Kosova's path

What biases and backgrounds do foreign policy experts and UN administrators
bring to the contentious problem of Kosova's status?

Carl Bildt, the UN special representative on the Balkans, and Michael
Steiner, the chief administrator of UNMIK, differed sharply in early August
on the all-important issue of resolving Kosova's final status and when that
should occur. At the same time, Javier Solana seemed to take a sidestep,
saying that Kosova would be resolved separately from his proposed
reorganization of Serbia/Montenegro.

To what extent do academic and cultural memories of Munich, 1938 and the
dismemberment of Czechoslavakia still have influence on Eastern European
foreign policy today? In 1999, The 19 member NATO committee was itself
deeply divided on intervening in Kosova. Steiner's Germany was reunited by
the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, a treaty that downplays the concept of
self-determination advanced by Wilson and the League of Nations and the end
of colonialism during 1950-1960.

Each foreign leader brings a bias into his considerations of how to resolve
conflict in Eastern Europe. Surely, though, the resolution of Kosova's final
status regarding self-determination should be decided by the people who live
there, after due consideration of outsiders. A solution imposed from the
outside, or no solution at all, is not what is meant by the UN Declaration's
inviolable right of "the will of the people."

The following article takes us a step back to see the Kosova conflict
through Czech eyes.

=======================================
	A R T I C L E S
=======================================
 
But the experience of the event known in the Czech lands as the Munich
treason is deeply engraved in the national memory, and it has undoubtedly
shaped the way in which the Czech public has understood the Kosovo crisis
and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Feature: Why Klaus opposed the Nato action

Eastern Europe After Kosovo--  Czech Attitudes Toward the War from the
Summer 1999
NYU Law Journal
     
MILAN ZNOJ

Milan Znoj is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Charles
University, Prague, and chair of the Department of Moral and Political
Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the
Czech Republic.

With some exceptions, the Czech political elite was taken aback when NATO
loosed its air strikes on Yugoslavia at the end of March. President Vaclav
Havel welcomed the attack, satisfied that NATO had finally gathered the
courage to take action against the evil pervading the Balkans. Without
hesitation, the leaders of the two smaller right-wing parties the liberal
Freedom Union (FU) and the Christian Democratic Union- People's Party
(CDUPP), each of which are favored by roughly 10 percent of the voters )also
supported the bombing. But other party leaders were more reluctant, or even
hostile. The Czech government, for obvious reasons, officially supported the
air strikes, though in practice its approach smacked of equivocation. The
government had approved the military intervention based only on
consultations between the prime minister, Milos Zeman, and the foreign
minister. Initial reactions revealed the government's regret that the
simmering conflict could not have been resolved diplomatically. The
Communists, who are in the opposition and are supported by 14 percent of the
population, expressed unanimous disappointment that the negotiations had
broken down and that a military option was being pursued. As is their custom
in such cases, they invoked various tenets of international law to support
their opposition to the bombing. NATO had violated Yugoslavia's sovereignty,
sidestepped the UN, and was, in their opinion, an aggressor with imperialist
ambitions.

The Communists' position surprised no one. The lightening bolt, rather, was
the unexpected attitude of the strongest right-wing liberal party, the Civic
Democratic Party (CDP), and especially that of its chairman, former prime
minister Vaclav Klaus. After a day of attacks against Yugoslavia, Klaus went
on record, stating that use of force could not produce a sound or long-term
solution. His forthright anti-NATO stance stunned not only President Havel,
the other liberal parties, and the influential liberal, right-wing media
but, to a certain degree, members of Klaus's own party as well. The Czech
RepublicÕs accession to NATO had been one of the linchpins of the CDP's
agenda. While the CDP, from time to time, has offered up some mild criticism
of the EU and its Brussels bureaucrats, it never leveled negative comments
against NATO, which it had always perceived as guaranteeing the Czech
RepublicÕs pro-Western orientation. Yet enthusiasm for joining the West did
not necessarily breed enthusiasm for NATO's military action in Yugoslavia.

Until fairly recently, CDP members and sup-porters were suggesting that
anybody opposing NATO and its eastward expansion belonged politically to the
East and was in effect a crypto-communist. But now, Klaus, the CDP chairman
himself, voiced his doubts about NATO's air strikes and thereby confused his
party's rank and file. Czechs even heard Miroslav Macek, a CDP vice
chairman, stating on television that, in addition to various other goals in
Yugoslavia, NATO needed to test its new airplanes. Even the Communists had
not gone this far.

Efforts were made to prevent these differences in opinion from damaging the
Czech Republic's image abroad. Foreign Minister Jan Kavan repeatedly denied
in public that there was any discrepancy between Havel's opinions and those
of the government, and he insisted on many occasions that the government
supported NATO and the military action. But heated discussion continued in
the domestic political arena, and, on various occasions, differences of
opinion, held in private, spilled into open public debates. Vaclav Klaus's
provocative claim that the mass expulsion of Kosovar Albanians started only
after NATO began its air strikes was met with disapproval and challenge.

Indeed, Klaus was attacked in the media and in parliament, and the FU even
contemplated seeking his resignation from the speakership of the lower
house. A similar clash occurred when it looked as if NATO would be
undertaking ground operations. Prime Minister Zeman preemptively announced
that Czech soldiers would not participate in a land invasion. In response,
President Havel accused him of betraying the alliance. Their ensuing verbal
duel ended with a meeting between the foreign minister, Kavan, and the
president. After the meeting, Havel remarked that, although he had explained
his point of view to the foreign minister, he doubted that his opinion would
be accepted. Similarly, a Czech- Greek peace initiative led to equally
heated debates. It was somehow characteristic of the political atmosphere
that the moment the Communists sought a parliamentary debate on the
initiative, it was blocked by the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSDP). The
CSDP was obviously happy to sweep the whole issue off the table.

Zeman's and Klaus's utterances about the crisis in Yugoslavia were
criticized by their parties' members and supporters, though on different
grounds. Some regional CDP groups criticized their leadership for failing to
support the bombings, while CSDP's leadership was criticized, on the
contrary, for supporting NATO's air strikes. According to Senator Petr
Smutny (CSDP), for instance, the Czech Republic had become a participant in
a collective aggression. The situation at the CSDP's congress in April was
especially delicate. The party leadership made every effort to mute all
discussion of the government's activities and of the air strikes in
Yugoslavia. Their efforts notwithstanding, a relatively large number of
delegates signed a letter protesting the bombings, but party leaders labeled
this a private initiative.How are we to understand these awkward
maneuverings on the Czech political scene? One explanation is that party
leaders were merely reflecting or mimicking public sentiment. As a matter of
fact, the public was even more hesitant to support NATO than were the
politicians. As the bombings continued, the proportion of those opposing the
operation increased from 40 to 54 percent, and supporters declined from 40
to 29 percent. The attack against Yugoslavia was openly supported only by FU
voters, and the number of those in agreement with the policy prevailed only
slightly in the case of CDP supporters, although even the number of
supporters in that party was decreasing. Adherents of the other parties, by
and large, were against the bombings. The Communists, of course, opposed
them unanimously. In the end, only 29 percent of the public regarded the air
strikes as justified. Proposed ground operations in Kosovo were supported by
one-third of the respondents surveyed, a figure that, by the end of the
campaign, had dwindled to 25 percent. Those who favored the air strikes also
supported ground operations, but even here disagreement appeared; only 69
percent of the air-strike supporters supported the ground-operations option,
while 31 percent were opposed.

Political leadership cannot ignore public opinion. But the confused
reactions of Czech politicians to NATO's actions cannot be explained by
populism alone. For instance, populism does not explain why Klaus and the
CDP leadership opposed the air strikes. Had they strongly supported NATO,
they would probably have brought their followers along. CDP members probably
would have ignored arguments invoking human rights in Kosovo, but they might
have been willing to listen to other arguments, such as the advantages of
siding with Western powers, the need to distance the Czech Republic from the
East and Russia, and especially the idea that Milosevic is basically a
crypto-communist. Klaus's opposition to the bombings was certainly not
motivated by a desire to ingratiate himself with his voters. Indeed, he came
close to being labeled a traitor by his usual right-wing supporters. He must
have had other reasons. One plausible interpretation is that Klaus is slowly
refashioning the CDPÕs image to resemble that of the earlier Czech National
Democratic Party. At the beginning of the century and during the First
Republic, this was a party of the dynamic Czech bourgeoisie, with a strong
national program. The libertarian ideology of the free market, obviously, is
no longer appealing, and thus the CDP must conjure up a new ideology that
knits support for free markets to the pursuit of a strong national state. If
CDP really follows this pathway, future negotiations on EU membership will
be truly interesting.

The strategies of politicians, however, do not fully explain why the Czech
public itself was divided in its views of the Kosovo crisis. Some deeper
factors must have been at work. It is not possible to analyze them here in
detail, but certain motives merit mention. One explanation begins with the
country's general attitude toward NATO. Czechs have always seen themselves
as Western, but what attracts them to the West, now, is its developed
economy, modern technology, and culture. Military achievements are the last
trait they would admire. Paradoxically, NATO membership was the first
milestone of Czech westernization, and it was no surprise that NATO
accession did not meet with mass approval. Only a narrow majority supported
NATO membership without reservations. But NATO membership could not be very
actively opposed, since open opposition was poorly regarded.

NATO's air strikes in Yugoslavia have drastically changed the terms of
debate. Those who opposed NATO membership can now voice their lack of
enthusiasm in acceptable terms, citing (for example) the violation of a
state's sovereignty and the suffering of innocent civilians. These themes
were all offered as sound arguments against NATO's intervention in
Yugoslavia. But a more basic aversion toward NATO, in the minds of many,
especially of the older generation, lurks behind the criticisms of the air
strikes voiced by many CSDP and Communist supporters.

This distrust of NATO does not result only from communist nostalgia or
ancient ideas of the Czech Republic's Pan-Slavic past, which were still
alive in 1918 when Czechoslovakia was established. Today, anti-NATO feelings
are primarily due to the Czechs recent ties to Yugoslavia. Not only did
Czechs frequently vacation there, but the road to the West most often led
through Yugoslavia. Not Pan-Slavism but concrete experience and feelings of
mutual understanding shaped public sentiment toward the air strikes.The
Czechs notorious skepticism toward big words was also at work. President
Havel often offered lofty moral arguments to support the bombing of
Yugoslavia. He became a prophet of a new Pax Americana. During the Gulf War,
the bombings of Iraq, and the war in Bosnia, he consistently supported
resolute military action to counter the various evils spreading throughout
these countries. The ethnic cleansing in Kosovo so troubled him that he not
only welcomed the strike against Yugoslavia but, to support it, used
rhetoric so florid that the public was dumbstruck. As a playwright, Havel
often analyzed the latent ambiguity of words. As a politician, he did not
hesitate to speak of an ethical war, to claim that, by virtue of air strikes
in Yugoslavia, human rights are placed above the legal system. In the end,
he regretted only that the military action had not started earlier.
Juxtaposed to this sort of rhetoric, statements by NATO generals about
collateral damage offered a bleak contrast. Suspicious by their very nature,
Czechs could hardly accept the innocence of high moral arguments used to
support a military machine, be it their own or NATO's, even if serving a
presumably just and humane cause. Czech discussions about the Kosovo war, in
other words, must be seen in conjunction with the president's declining
popularity.

Havel's thinking is frequently influenced by something historically known as
the Munich syndrome. On the one hand, the spirit of Munich refers to a
foolish effort to appease that turned out to be a tacit capitulation before
evil. (This, of course, originally meant surrendering to Hitler's demands
that Czech territory be incorporated in a greater Germany.) When Havel
promoted the spread of NATO's influence eastward, he warned of the dangers
of appeasement, denouncing the spirit of Munich manifest in some Western
politicians who were overly worried about offending Russia. When he called
for a radical move against Serbia in the Balkans, he used the same argument,
claiming that democracy could not bow to evil. Pavel Tigrid, the president's
ally, argued heatedly that those who had lived through Munich had no option
but to support the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, since they knew, first hand,
the price to be paid for appeasing a dictator.

But this analogy has its limits. Tigrid, for instance, forgot that the
Munich syndrome has another meaning. It also refers to and evokes the West's
betrayal of the Czechs, and its acquiescence to a dictator without a fight.
The Munich treaty was enforced by the West and accepted by the Czech
government: the Sudetenland was given away without a fight. Those who saw
the Kosovo crisis from this perspective tended to oppose the NATO bombings.
Kosovar Albanians are an ethnic minority that rebelled; they do not want to
continue living in the same state with the Serbs. So the West helped prepare
a peace treaty that was, in effect, territorial amputation by diktat. Under
the threat of war, Yugoslavia was confronted with losing part of its
territory to the Albanians.

All the parallels between Munich and Ram-bouillet are misleading. Still and
all, historical sentiments have political bite. Such reminiscences are
always present in the minds of Czechs, as was evident in the debate over
Kosovo. They tend to surface any time parallels are drawn between the forced
expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II and ethnic
cleansing in the Balkans, and when Milosevic is equated (as he sometimes is)
with Eduard Benes. Though Munich 1938 and Rambouillet 1999 are incomparable,
both stand for attempts to solve ethnic conflicts in Central Europe, and
both illustrate the confusion of democracies trying to manage deep and
unbridgeable conflicts.

Both in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and in Kosovo in the 1990s, crises began
as ethnic conflicts and then escalated into demands for national
sovereignty. But this is where the parallel ends. While it existed,
Czechoslovakia was a democratic state that strove for the peaceful
coexistence of its several constituent ethnic groups. In addition, the
Germans in Czechoslovakia had their minority rights anchored in the
Versailles Treaty. Shortly before the Munich treaty was signed, President
Benes accepted a form of German autonomy that bordered on state sovereignty.
Certainly he would not have hesitated to sign the sort of agreement that
Milosevic refused to sign in Rambouillet, not because he was a coward but
because he was a democrat and a politician of pro-Western orientation. This
is why Czechoslovakia, during and after the war, was on the side of the
Allies, and perhaps why the removal of Germans became a taken-for-granted
part of postwar democratic Europe.

International circumstances are radically different now. The Munich treaty
did not intend to solve an ethnic conflict in a peaceful way. From the very
beginning it was understood by Germany as a part of the process that would
eventually undo the settlements of World War I and lead to the rise of a New
Europe under German hegemony. This is why the Munich treaty was a betrayal
of democracy, and why it would have been just to oppose it (by which I am
not saying that military opposition to it would have been politically
sustainable or reasonable). Benes understood the treatys consequences rather
well, and thus he had more foresight than many other Western politicians. In
sum, the analogy between Munich and Kosovo crumbles at its foundation, as
does the parallel between Milosevic and Benes.



Milan Znoj is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Charles
University, Prague, and chair of the Department of Moral and Political
Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the
Czech Republic.


=======================================

###

Questions/Comments, email AKI-NEWS at aki at alb-net.com
AKI Website: www.alb-net.com/aki/