To End the Kosovo Slaughter, Target the Source

By George Melloan
The Wall Street Journal, 16 June 1998

Slobodan Milosevic, the most murderous European politician since the era of Hitler and
Stalin, is
in Moscow today seeking comfort from Boris Yeltsin. The Yugoslav president will promise to
behave better if Boris will intercede yet again with the Western powers. He wants the Russian
president to deflect a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ultimatum demanding an end to his
latest predations, this time in Serbia’s Kosovo province.

The allies seem serious. Remarkably united in comparison to past dithering over the Balkans,
they
made four demands last Thursday: Milosevic must cease military action; withdraw his troops from
Kosovo; allow international monitors to enter the province; and begin peace talks with leaders of
the Albanian majority there. In a mild show of force, NATO conducted an air exercise near
Kosovo’s borders yesterday morning. Russia played its expected first-act role when its defense
minister objected to the exercises on grounds that Moscow had not been consulted in advance.

This is the toughest line NATO has taken against the Belgrade thug since 1995. But don’t bet
that
the Serbian merchant of death and deception won’t come out on top. He has so far. As president
of Serbia, he was primarily responsible for engulfing the former Yugoslav states in a four-year
war that cost the lives of nearly 300,000 souls, made 3 million homeless and gave us that
charming expression, “ethnic cleansing.” Ethnic cleansing is what “Slobo” is currently about in
Kosovo. The province of 2 million people is 90% Albanian and the Albanians are being punished
for finally rising up against the harsh Serbian police-state rule that Milosevic imposed on them
more than eight years ago. Towns and villages are being razed by Serb shelling.

The mere fact that Slobo is still around to do more killing is a mark of his political skills. He
manipulated the Bosnian war from a distance, leaving the dirty work to the likes of Bosnian Serb
“president” Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, both of whom have
been indicted in absentia by the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Even they could
not rival Slobo’s most notorious killer, Zeljko Raznatovic (better known as “Arkan”) who roamed
the war zone slaughtering Muslim and Croat women and children in the name of ethnic cleansing.

When the Serbs had most of the Bosnian territory they wanted and were in danger of
suffering
reverses at the hands of the Croats and Bosnian Muslims, Slobo was ready for peace. He earned
the gratitude of Bill Clinton by delivering to him the Dayton Accord, which ended the fighting in
Bosnia. Slobo thus became, in Mr. Clinton’s mind, indispensable for preserving peace.

But that cynical calculation has backfired. Slobo assumed that his newfound favor in
Washington
gave him carte blanche to settle with the Kosovo Albanians, who were growing increasingly
restive under Serbian rule. Hence, his new campaign of terror, which is racking up a new string of
civilian deaths and sending thousands of Kosovars fleeing into neighboring Albania. He is
compounding the felony by planting land mines along the border to stop the refugees and prevent
reinforcement of the Kosovo resistance movement, called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

Ethnic Albanians have inhabited Kosovo for centuries, but the Serbs also have a claim dating
back
to the defeat of their Tsar Lazar by the Turks on the field of Kosovo in June of 1389. After World
War II, President Tito of Yugoslavia had the good sense to give Kosovo a high degree of
autonomy as a province of Serbia.

But Slobo destroyed that autonomy in 1989. After a fiery Serbian nationalist speech on the
ancient battlefield, he threw out Albanian officials, school principals and the like and installed
Serbs to run the province. More recently he has imported Serbs displaced by the fighting in
Bosnia and Croatia to occupy Kosovar land in an effort to shift the population balance toward
Serbia. Neither the refugees nor the Kosovars have been happy about that. It was this and other
ham-fisted actions that gave rise to the KLA, which now claims to control about 40% of the
province. The Serbian army, however, controls the major towns, or at least those it hasn’t
destroyed in its scorched-earth policy.

It was this campaign that prompted last week’s NATO declaration. If Slobo operates true to
form, he will make limited concessions. If Bill Clinton operates true to form, as in Iraq for
example, he will take the heat off in return rather than risking some serious action. The source of
the Balkan problems of the last decade, Slobodan Milosevic, will remain in place to cause still
more trouble down the road.

In a past era of more forceful leadership in the West, Milosevic would long ago have been
tabbed
as a war criminal and treated as such. The war crimes tribunal in the Hague was expressly created
for people like him, but so far it has nailed none of the top felons in the Balkan tragedy.

It is argued by the usual “what-can-we-do?” crowd that if Milosevic should fall, the next
Serbian
leader would be even worse. There can be no doubt that some of the leading players in Serbian
politics in recent years have been unattractive characters. Some, such as Vojislav Seselj of the
Serbian Radical Party, are insanely nationalist.

But the Serbian people, judging from recent minimal election turnouts, are getting
increasingly fed
up with all these clowns, including Slobo. After demonstrations against him two years ago, he had
to muster all his devious tricks to hold onto power, for one thing transferring his power base from
the Serbian to the Yugoslav presidency, which co-exist. Milo Djukanovic, elected president of
Montenegro last November despite Slobo’s opposition, is another enemy, which is of some
moment since Montenegro is the only other remaining state of the Yugoslav federation.
Yugoslavia and Serbia may soon be synonyms.

If last week signals Washington’s disillusionment with the fruits of its soft line toward
Milosevic,
that’s progress. For one thing, it might suggest that someone finally is thinking less about
immediate political risks and more about punishing one of the great villains of our time. The more
such men are allowed to get by with murder, the more there are likely to be.