Defeated Milosevic Won’t Count Losses

Having lost a disastrous war to keep NATO forces out of Kosovo, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is staking his political survival on efforts to keep the province’s Serbian minority from fleeing in panic and to claw his way back into favor with the West.

As his troops began withdrawing in defeat from a place Serbs call their cultural heartland and as the Western alliance halted its bombing, Milosevic made an Orwellian appearance on national television Thursday to declare his war effort “a great achievement.”

His explanation for picking this fight--one that cost an estimated 1,500 civilian lives, drove hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in a bloody purge and wrecked Yugoslavia’s economy--went like this:

Before the bombing, the West was demanding a deal that would have given Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority a large measure of self-rule and a chance to take a nonbinding vote on independence from Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, within three years. The peace pact he accepted does not mention such a vote.

“We never gave up Kosovo,” Milosevic proclaimed in his only televised speech on the conflict, seeking to head off a bitter debate over who lost the province. “The political process can involve only the autonomy of Kosovo, nothing else. . . . Today our sovereignty is guaranteed.”

And what of the 48,000 NATO forces beginning to roll into Kosovo as homecoming escorts for the ethnic Albanians he expelled en masse? Didn’t the Yugoslav leader swear that foreign boots would never tread there?

“The forces that come to Kosovo will serve peace, regardless of which countries they come from,” Milosevic said in a conciliatory signal to his enemies. The important thing for Yugoslavia, he explained at length, is that the NATO-led peacekeeping force has a formal U.N. mandate--a face-saving stamp of international legitimacy in Serbian eyes.

Presenting Defeats as Victories

Even as many Serbs welcomed the peace with champagne, car horns, noisy midnight rallies and tracer bullets fired skyward, it was hard to find anyone in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, who saw these concessions as anything but a cover for Serbia’s humiliation after 11 weeks of pointless sacrifice in an unequal fight.

“It’s the same scenario we have seen before,” said Zoran Todorovic, a 45-year-old pharmacist. “Milosevic always presents his defeats as victories.”

Milosevic rose to power in 1987, first as the leader of Serbia and later the Yugoslav federation, by stirring ethnic hatred over Kosovo. His strategy led to three wars that tore the federation apart, starting with Slovenia’s independence, then Croatia’s and Bosnia-Herzegovina’s. The violence came home to Serbia last year when ethnic Albanian guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army tried to win independence by force.

Because those previous wars uprooted minority Serbs by the hundreds of thousands, it is easy to imagine a mass exodus of Serbs from Kosovo as Milosevic’s troops leave and the persecuted ethnic Albanians come home. Serbs made up one-tenth of Kosovo’s prewar population of 2 million.

Fearing that such an exodus would destabilize Serbia and threaten his hold on power, Milosevic and his advisors are trying to persuade Kosovo’s Serbs to trust the foreign peacekeepers and stay put.

“There are no reasons for them to do what the ethnic Albanian separatists have long wished for--to create an ethnically cleansed Kosovo,” said Ivica Dadic, a member of Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia.

Serbian state television has broadcast two days of such appeals by members of the ruling coalition. Thursday, it aired interviews with two Serbian farmers sowing their fields in Kosovo and saying peace would help yield a better harvest.

“President Milosevic and the leadership of Yugoslavia have one priority, and this is to provide absolute security for all citizens of Kosovo,” Deputy Foreign Minister Nebojsa Vujovic told reporters after talks between North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Yugoslav military commanders that paved the way for the bombing halt.

Vujovic said his side succeeded in getting a “tightly synchronized” entry of peacekeepers and exit of Yugoslav forces to avoid a “security vacuum” and protect Serbian civilians from the KLA. “They will feel safe,” he said. “They will have absolute maximum protection.”

Serbs Shift Rhetoric, Welcome Peacekeepers

With the security of their people in mind, Serbian officials have quickly shifted their rhetoric and welcomed the peacekeepers. “We will be the best friends of those forces,” Vujovic said. “We will do our utmost to create the best political environment to make their job easier.”

The shift is part of a strategy here to rehabilitate Milosevic in the West by portraying him as a statesman essential to stability in the Balkans--or as Vujovic put it, “the key to changing the language of force to the language of peace.”

Western leaders have swallowed their distaste for the Yugoslav leader’s politics of division and supported Milosevic before, when he agreed to back the 1995 peace accords in Bosnia. The unspoken threat from Belgrade now is that a wounded, isolated Milosevic would feel freer to stir up fratricidal trouble in Montenegro, Serbia’s smaller sister republic; in the heavily Hungarian-populated Serbian province of Vojvodina; or in the predominantly Muslim Sandjak region of Serbia.

The Yugoslav leader’s speech Thursday was mostly a pep talk to focus Serbs inward on the hard task of rebuilding. He is letting others speak for him to the outside world.

“Milosevic leads the moderate wing of Serbian politics,” Bogoljub Karic, a Yugoslav Cabinet minister and wealthy businessman who is lobbying for postwar aid from the West, told reporters recently. Faced with extremists who wanted to keep resisting NATO, he added, Milosevic made “a courageous decision” to stop the war.

After Kosovo, however, Milosevic is a hard sell as a peace partner. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has indicted him on charges of murder, mass deportation and other offenses against the ethnic Albanians. President Clinton and European leaders have said that no part of Serbia except Kosovo will be eligible for reconstruction aid as long as Milosevic is in power.

Political commentators here wonder whether Milosevic can survive politically without a Western bailout. The agreement with NATO has already strained his ruling coalition, with the extreme nationalist Radical Party threatening Thursday to pull out and go into opposition, ending Milosevic’s parliamentary majority.