[ALBSA-Info] {QIKSH «ALBEUROPA»} NEWS: Kosovo Politician Doubts Bush Would Be Isolationist (Reuters, November 21, 2000)

[Wolfgang Plarre]

http://news.excite.com/news/r/001121/12/politics-yugoslavia-bush-dc

Kosovo Politician Doubts Bush Would Be Isolationist

Updated 12:56 PM ET November 21, 2000

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Kosovo politician Veton Surroi said on Tuesday he
doubted a U.S. administration led by Texas Gov. George W. Bush would
withdraw from the Balkans.
     But a Bush administration might not share the enthusiasm of the
outgoing administration of President Clinton for intervention in
southeastern Europe.
     Surroi, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
in Washington, said such radical changes in U.S. policy usually took
decades.
     Bush's senior national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told The
New York Times in an interview last month that under a Bush
administration, the United States would no longer participate in
peacekeeping in the Balkans.
     The Bush campaign later assured NATO that he would not withdraw
U.S. peacekeeping forces unilaterally.
     Surroi, an independent politician and publisher who took part in
the Rambouillet negotiations before the Kosovo war last year, said: "To
get to a point of isolationism in U.S. behavior in the Balkans it will
take very much (time).
     "I don't think, from what I know of some of the people in the
Republican advisory group ... I don't think there is a willingness to
make these abrupt changes in foreign policy.
     "What may probably happen, if there is a Bush administration, is a
continuation, maybe not with fervor or with the same passion," he added.
     Two weeks after the U.S. presidential elections on Nov. 7, the
campaigns of Bush and Vice-President Al Gore are wrangling over the
crucial counting of votes in the state of Florida, which holds the key
to victory in the Electoral College.
     Surroi said that a U.S. withdrawal from peacekeeping forces in
Bosnia and Kosovo was less about the Balkans than about the credibility
of the North Atlantic alliance, which successive U.S. administrations
have seen as a key element in U.S. national security.
     Surroi said he was skeptical about the extent of change in Serbia
since the electoral defeat of president Slobodan Milosevic, the man who
tried to suppress ethnic Albanian nationalism in the province of Kosovo.
     He said that the new president, Vojislav Kostunica, continued to
depend on the military and security personnel who helped keep Milosevic
in power -- such as army chief of staff Nebojsa Pavkovic and state
security chief Rade Markovic.
     "Milosevic's departure has shown the possibility for Serbs to make
changes, but the changes have not been made," he said.
     "Serbia will have to go through a very painful experience of, not
only economic transformation, but something that is much harder and
harsher and that is de-Nazification," he added.


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