[ALBSA-Info] Daily Telegraph 2

[aalibali at law.harvard.edu]

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)

                          February 09, 2000, Wednesday

Pg. 14



The Balkans - legacy of war: How the gamble on peace was lost A year
ago this week, talks on Kosovo were deadlocked. Tim Judah analyses the
miscalculations that plunged Europe into conflict

By Tim Judah

 THE American diplomat bundled me into a dingy Rambouillet cafe, slipped 10
francs to my 10-year-old son to play pinball and said: "If it comes to bombing, 
it's going to be heavy, not pinprick stuff, and I seriously doubt whether
Milosevic is still going to be there at the end of it!"

   At the time I did not recognise the symptoms. It was panic. Madeleine
Albright, the US Secretary of State, was flying in the next morning, the Kosovo 
 Albanians  were refusing to sign a peace deal that did not promise an
independence referendum in three years, and the Serbs were refusing to discuss a
Nato-led peace force for their southern province. Mrs Albright was facing major 
humiliation.

   The negotiations at the chateau outside Paris had been called in the wake of 
the massacre of 45  Albanian  civilians by Serb forces in Racak on 15 Jan 1999. 
Mrs Albright first heard about it on the news at 4.30am the next day when her
clock radio woke her up. Outraged, she called Sandy Berger, President Clinton's 
national security adviser and said: "Spring has come early to Kosovo." For weeks
she had been arguing that the conflict was spinning out of control and that what
was needed was diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force. The allies
agreed.

   The talks, which began on Feb 6, were co-chaired by Britain and France, but
the blueprint for peace presented to the Serbs and  Albanians  was the result of
months of shuttle diplomacy led by Chris Hill, the US special envoy, and
Wolfgang Petritsch for the EU. In effect, the document asked both sides to come 
to an historic compromise, at the very least for an interim period of three
years.

   The proposal was that Kosovo should become self-governing, virtually
independent even, but that in exchange it should remain within the borders of
Yugoslavia. Security for the Serbian minority within Kosovo would be guaranteed 
and the Nato-led force would make sure that Serbian forces withdrew and that
ethnic  Albanian  guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) would be
disarmed.

   The choice was stark. The Serbs were being told that if they failed to sign
they would be bombed and if the  Albanians  failed to sign, they would be left
to the tender mercies of Serbian troops and paramilitaries. On this basis, it
seemed fair to assume that, at the last minute, the negotiators would close the 
deal.

   On the eve of the conference, however, doubts began to emerge. A British
diplomat who had taken part in the talks in Dayton, Ohio which had ended the
Bosnian war in November 1995, made a chilling observation. "In Bosnia, everyone 
was ready, they were all exhausted . . . the problem here is that we are trying 
to get them to agree to a deal before the war has really started."

   Inside the chateau Hashim Thaci, the youthful  Albanian  guerrilla leader,
wandered the corridors talking incessantly on his mobile phone. The Serbian
delegates, most of whom were plucked from utter obscurity to which they
subsequently returned, sat up carousing late into the night because they had
nothing else to do. Using the Yugoslav Embassy in Paris as back-up, much of the 
work for their delegation was being done there or simply sent back to Belgrade. 
As the French had video cameras in the  Albanian  and Serbian conference rooms, 
with cables trailing to a lorry with blacked out windows outside, this may have 
been prudent.

   On the Serbian side, the question is whether Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic ever had any intention of striking a deal. The evidence suggests that 
he did not. Indeed it suggests that he was taking a calculated risk that the
talks would collapse because the  Albanians  would refuse to sign up to a deal
which did not explicitly promise them a referendum on independence after three
years and, even if they did, that Nato would not carry out its threat to bomb
Yugoslavia. So, he gambled and lost.

   With threats that the KLA would be added to Washington's list of terrorist
organisations and fearing a bloody and unchecked Serbian onslaught if they
refused to sign, the  Albanians  agreed to the Rambouillet document on Feb 23
when talks were adjourned but said they would only sign when they resumed in
Paris on March 15.

   Before he left Rambouillet, Ratko Markovic, the head of the Serbian
delegation, wrote to the international negotiators hailing "major progress" and 
agreeing to talk about an "international presence" in Kosovo to implement the
deal.

   When Markovic returned home he discovered that Milosevic had made his final
decision. Still not believing that the  Albanians  would sign in Paris, nor in
Nato's threat, Milosevic told his negotiators to put a red line through almost
everything that had been negotiated over the past few months. He was raising the
stakes.

   The Serbs and  Albanians  duly returned to Paris. In the cafe of the Kleber
conference centre, where the talks now resumed, the Yugoslavs sat laughing and
drinking. Then one of their junior diplomats ran in and said: "They are going to
sign!"

   They were horrified. The  Albanians  had trumped the Serbs, whose
intelligence services had failed to predict this move. Angry, and outmanoeuvred,
they shrieked at the negotiators. One witness saw the diplomats flee the Serb
room as Belgrade's envoys screamed: "Have you come to f us again?"

   Back home, Milosevic battened down the hatches. The regime claimed a new
document allowing Nato wide-ranging rights in Serbia proper had been introduced 
at the last moment. This was untrue as the delegates had been given the paper at
Rambouillet and instead of arguing about it there had ignored it. On March 22,
Milosevic sacked Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, his head of military intelligence who 
had warned him not to call Nato's bluff. "When I heard Dimitrijevic was sacked,"
says Braca Grubacic, one of Serbia's sharpest analysts, "I knew we were going
for war."

   At Nato headquarters, final preparations were made for a short sharp shock.
The bombing, which began on March 24, was expected to last three days. Having
lost the Rambouillet gamble, Milosevic raised the stakes again.

   If Nato was only anticipating a three-day campaign, he calculated that he
could easily withstand this. It was to last 78 days. When it was over Jamie
Shea, Nato's spokesman, reflected: "In football the winner is not the team that 
plays the best but the one that makes the least mistakes."

   Tim Judah is the author of Kosovo: War and Revenge, the first account of the 
Kosovo war. It will be published by Yale University Press on March 23.