The Written Word
for May 2, 1999

The situation in the Balkans gets worse. Oh, I know, the United States and Britain – who are the movers and shakers in Nato – think President Milosevic is being bombed to the bargaining table and in a limited sense he. Just as the North Viet Namese were bombed to the table in 1972. But there is more to the analogy than that for Milosevic will come to that table as the Vietnamese did – fully in control of his country.

This is the huge miscalculation. Slobodan Milosevic was, before the fuss started, arguably the most unpopular man is Yugoslavia. A thorough going communist, he was slowly but steadily leading his country back to the bad old days and he was hated. But then came Nato thinking that his unpopularity would increase if he was bombed a little. Learning nothing from Viet Nam or the Gulf Wars, huge airpower was unleashed and, surprise! it had just the reverse effect than that intended. Serbians rallied behind their unpopular president and showed the grit that bombed civilians have traditionally shown.

Yes, Milosevic will come to the bargaining table but only after he has all but cleansed, until Nato firepower, the entire Kosovo Albanian population. What he wanted to do slowly and steadily Milosevic has been able to do quickly thanks to the stupidity of Nato.

There will be ground troops for Kosovo now and while they might not have to fight their way in – they might have to too – they will scarcely be welcome. They will return some Kosovars to their homes under a shaky truce but certainly by no means all. There will be fighting and the fighting will take place in the same country where partisans in World War II held down 600,000 German Wehrmacht thus in no small measure contributing to the Russians effort to beat the Nazis.

The war will go one and on. There will likely be a partition but those on the Kosovo side will be poor as church mice. Pressures will continue on Macedonia and Albania, two of the poorest countries in the Western world. The United States will not be able to extricate itself and, yes, there will be body bags.

The Balkans has been a hot box for 500 years. It’s where three religions, two alphabets and God only knows how many ethnic groups meet. Worse, they are not all conveniently separated by boundaries but are mixed together just as a child mixes plasticine.

President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have not done their history and geography lessons well. They might also have been wise to read Joel Chandler’s story about Bre’er Rabbit and the tar baby where they would have learned that sometimes you can get stuck to something and be unable to extricate yourself.