Kosovo Typifies Serbian Leader’s Brinkmanship

The West may have watched with shock and alarm as Slobodan Milosevic unleashed anti-terrorist special forces on a deadly rampage through ethnic Albanian villages. But for the Serbian leader, the move was the kind of classic power play that has typified his 10-year reign.

Milosevic’s recent actions reflected a series of shrewd calculations aimed at strengthening his hand at home, even though international condemnation would be loud and quick in coming.

While no one knows for sure what the mercurial president of Yugoslavia is thinking, analysts here believe he estimated that the potential domestic gains--political support and the elimination of a violent threat--would outweigh Western protest. And he apparently figured that the latter would involve little more than a slap on the wrist.

Milosevic faces a deadline today imposed by major world powers to withdraw police troops from the tense and hostile Kosovo region of Serbia and enter talks with ethnic Albanians demanding independence for their southern province. The penalty if he refuses may well be a new round of international sanctions, including a freeze of Yugoslav assets abroad.

As of Wednesday, he was defiantly resisting those demands.

The world’s “pressure and interference” in Serbian internal affairs, Milosevic complained, will not lead to “peace, stability [or] equality.” He made the statement after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, one of a parade of senior foreign officials courting Milosevic this week in an attempt to persuade him to back down.

Recent history has seen Milosevic climb from one crisis to another, emerging sometimes weaker and more isolated, but always standing. He consistently pushes a crisis to the brink, only to back down at the last moment--and usually after paying a heavy price.

“Experience gives him the right to believe he can do what he does,” said Vladeta Jankovic, a University of Belgrade academic and opposition politician. “Each time he seems bent in a corner, finished, he reemerges.”

Ultimately, it will be the sorry state of Yugoslavia’s emaciated economy--and the ability of the West to bankrupt it further--that will force any compromise from Milosevic, Belgrade analysts say.

Under his oversight, the former Yugoslav federation fell to pieces in bloody warfare. Four of its six republics seceded, leaving Milosevic in charge of a shambles of a state, consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro, but with no credible domestic challenge to his power.

Serbs say that Kosovo, where state security forces are attempting to quell Albanian separatist guerrillas, is not expendable. The Albanian-majority province is the 13th century cradle of Serbian civilization and national and cultural identity--the Serbs’ Jerusalem.

For Milosevic, however, the significance of Kosovo has to do less with a mythical heritage than with raw politics.

His rise to power, first as Serbian and then as Yugoslav president, was based in part on promising Serbs in Kosovo that he would help them fight off Albanian “aggression.” The illusion that he had solved the “problem” stoked nationalism and shored up his regime.

When Milosevic launched a two-week assault on armed ethnic Albanian separatists at the end of February, the fractious Serbian political scene suddenly united in support. Milosevic’s Socialist Party no longer has a majority in parliament. Yet, in the wake of the crackdown, he was finally able to get a federal budget passed, and it appears that opposition parties will step aside after six months of discord and allow the formation of a new Socialist-led government.

Kosovo Albanians boycott national elections, and their names are routinely used on sham ballots that sway the results. Milosevic’s candidate for president of Serbia last fall would not have won without such faked votes from Kosovo, diplomats say.

“The worst thing about [the Kosovo violence] is that Milosevic now has broad public support, and the opposition is also supportive,” said Zarko Korac, a psychologist and opposition activist. “It’s like when the U.S. president announces the country is going to war. A Republican Senate, the House, the American public all rally around.”

Milosevic also appears confident that he can weather the international outcry. When Washington’s special envoy for the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, came to Belgrade in February and characterized Kosovo guerrillas as terrorists after they ambushed four Serbian police officers, Milosevic took his cue.

The statement was recycled incessantly on state television and radio with a long treatise on how any state in the world, from Norway to Alaska, is justified in applying force to combat terrorism.

The furious crackdown followed, with special police forces using attack helicopters, mortars and assault rifles to mow down suspected guerrillas in several Kosovo villages. To date, at least 77 Albanians, including children, have been killed. Ten of the victims were killed after their arrests, according to survivors. Thousands of people fled their rural homes, and a stifling police siege continues.

Gelbard said later that Milosevic’s distortion of his remarks into a “green light” was nonsense. He said he had clearly warned the Serbian leader against using repression.

Milosevic may also have expected that the operation would be more surgical than it was. But given the history of Serbian paramilitaries, who were responsible for much of the killing, torture and rape that characterized the 3 1/2-year war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the violence should not have been surprising. And Western capitals are not about to absolve Milosevic.

“You release a wild dog from its chain, the owner is responsible,” Jankovic said.

Washington and its European allies immediately voiced anger over the attacks and ordered new sanctions, including a limited arms embargo and denial of visas to senior Yugoslav officials. Yugoslavia is only beginning to recover from economic restrictions imposed in 1992--most of which have been lifted--to punish Belgrade for fomenting war in Bosnia and Croatia.

Most of the measures over Kosovo, however, will have little bite, and there is serious disagreement within the international community on what steps to take next.

Only blocking Belgrade’s ability to sell its assets will hurt Milosevic significantly, and Russia appears reluctant to allow that. Milosevic was able to finance elections last year and pay pensions to his voters only because he sold the state telephone company to Italy and Greece.

Belgrade sources say that Milosevic, before the crackdown in Kosovo, was aware he would have to negotiate with the province’s Albanians over their demands for rights and freedom--but that he determined to do so only after taking away their armed option.

Yet that short-term goal is likely to backfire. Belgrade’s repression will only further radicalize Albanian separatists and ultimately boost the Kosovo Liberation Army.

As Albanians radicalize, so do Serbian nationalists, who bluntly accuse the U.S. and most of Europe of secretly encouraging the Kosovo rebellion as a way to erase Serbs from the map. State television and newspapers these days are full of accounts of Albanian violence against Serbs through the ages. Expelling Kosovo’s nearly 2 million ethnic Albanians is the answer, say the nationalists.

Still, Milosevic has always managed to reinvent himself, evolving from what the West regarded as the “Butcher of the Balkans,” for his warmongering, to the Peacemaker, because of his self-interested cooperation on the Bosnian peace accords.

“It is now clear that Milosevic is a repeat offender,” Belgrade political commentator Stojan Cerovic wrote, “and an incorrigible repeat offender.”