KK-Fourm,
en analyse fra UPI, jfr også siste fra IPA på
http://www.accuracy.org/new.htm
************************
Analysis: Fall of Milosevic filled with irony
Thursday, 5 October 2000 20:53 (ET)
Analysis: Fall of Milosevic filled with irony
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 (UPI)-- Publicly, the U.S. government is celebrating
the fall of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as a great triumph. And it
looks certain to give Vice President Al Gore a welcome boost as a timely
foreign policy achievement during the U.S. presidential election campaign.
But the fall of Milosevic is filled with ironies and new problems for the
U.S. government. And privately, many senior U.S. officials have for years
regarded the possible victory of Vojislav Kostunica, the man who toppled
Milosevic, as a cause for despair rather than rejoicing.
A year ago, a U.S. official for a quasi-governmental organization working
in Belgrade told UPI, on condition of anonymity:
"From our point of view, Kostunica's victory would be the worst possible
outcome. He would be determined to hold on to the territories seized by
Milosevic. But unlike Milosevic, he would enjoy strong popular support for
perhaps several years in power. It could be very difficult for us."
Indeed, Kostunica's rise has proven to be far from welcome to the Clinton
administration, especially to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.
The U.S. government poured millions of dollars into the Yugoslav
opposition to Milosevic over the past five years.
Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European
Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement Thursday,
"Since Milosevic made it impossible for the opposition to have any kind of
access to internal funding, they had to turn to outside sources."
However, this allowed Milosevic to portray the fractious, divided
opposition to the Serbian people as tools of the United States, who would
allow the nation to be dismembered and left at the mercy of its ancient
enemies if they took power.
However, this tactic did not work against Kostunica. He was the one
prominent figure who did not accept any U.S. money.
"I know .. Vojislav Kostunica. He's a constitutional lawyer, a Serbian
patriot, a democrat. ... He's untainted by dealings with either the
Milosevic regime or the Clinton administration," Hayden said.
To the puzzlement and then chagrin of U.S. officials, this only served to
make him the one credible alternative to Milosevic in the eyes of the
Serbian people.
Albright has spearheaded the efforts to make an example of Milosevic by
having him handed over to the International Court of Justice in The Hague,
capital of the Netherlands, and tried there as a war criminal.
But Kostunica implacably opposed having Milosevic or any other prominent
Serb tried as a war criminal, no matter how terrible was their conduct
during the last nine years of conflict in the fragmented former communist
federal state.
He also regularly denounced the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year as
"criminal." This also gave him a popularity credibility all the U.S.-backed
opposition figures who did not criticize the bombing lacked.
Stephen Zunes, associate professor of politics at the University of San
Francisco, said Thursday in a statement, "Change in Eastern Europe has come
not from the armed force of NATO but from large-scale nonviolent action of
the subjugated peoples themselves. .. If anything, NATO's bombing last year
may have set back the growing anti-Milosevic movement."
Marjorie Cohn, associate professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law
in San Diego, Calif., agreed that Kostunica's strong stance against the
bombing had contributed greatly to his credibility and popularity in Serbia
as a leader who would try and defend them from being subjugated by the NATO
alliance, led by the United States.
She told Washington's Institute for Public Accuracy on Thursday, "Many
people in Yugoslavia oppose Milosevic but they also despise NATO, which
subjected them to a ruthless 11-week bombing campaign (in 1999). .. The long
term question is who will run Yugoslavia once Milosevic is ousted --
Kostunica or NATO?"
Kostunica also flatly opposed granting Kosovo province, with its more than
90 percent Albanian Muslim majority, any independence from Orthodox
Christian Serbia.
In many respects, Kostunica's triumph presents the Clinton administration
-- and its successor, whether Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W
Bush -- with a far trickier problem than Milosevic did.
U.S. leaders, Republican and Democrat alike, were used to attacking
Milosevic as if not a Hitler, then at least a Saddam Hussein figure.
They made clear they hoped that a pro-American opposition candidate would
eventually succeed him and agree to U.S.-mediated solutions to Bosnia and
Kosovo.
But Kostunica is not pro-American. He is as virulent a critic of recent
U.S. policies as Milosevic himself. And he has said he is determined to not
to give an inch on the Kosovo issue.
Yet he had nothing to do with Serbian ethnic cleansing activities in
Kosovo or any previous acts of aggression, mass murder or ethnic cleansing
in the 1991-95 Bosnia conflict.
He even opposed the operation of the International Court of Justice in The
Hague that U.S. officials now believe is essential to serve as a deterrent
to any future European leaders who might contemplate such massive state
crimes.
From Washington's point of view, a Kostunica victory leaves Serbia under
the control of a tough, implacable nationalist for another political cycle
and many more years to come.
It would derail U.S. hopes of negotiating a broad settlement to Yugoslav
issues on Washington's terms. And it would even remove whatever optimism
remained before that Milosevic was the only obstacle to the desired U.S.
outcome because he was standing in the way of the democratic aspirations of
his own people.
From the Clinton administration's point of view, the trouble with
Kostunica is precisely that he does appear to accurately express the
democratic aspirations of the Serbian people.
The only trouble is that they are not the aspirations that the Clinton
administration would like them to be.
--Copyright 2000 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
Fra: http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=125254
***************************
Knut Rognes
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Oct 06 2000 - 10:50:22 MET DST