With War Won, Can NATO Win Peace in Balkans?

With its 11-week air war against Yugoslavia now history, NATO faces an even more daunting task: winning the uneasy peace that is about to descend upon the Balkans.

It is a peace laden with challenges in a part of the world where tranquillity has been an infrequent visitor over the centuries.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that it is only today that the real work begins,” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said at the close of a meeting here of foreign ministers from Russia and the world’s seven leading industrial nations, known as the Group of 8. “I agree with that.”

At the top of a list of difficulties is a simple reality: Despite NATO’s triumph, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, the region’s single biggest source of instability over the past decade, remains in power.

Few of those who know Milosevic believe that the thousands of bombs that NATO dropped on Yugoslavia managed to alter the Serbian leader’s propensity for mischief.

“The fat lady hasn’t sung yet,” warned John Chipman, director of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies. “There are still three to four very hard weeks to go through yet. It will be difficult for him to break the habit of not doing what he’s agreed to do.”

Chipman predicted that Milosevic will probably not hold to the 11-day deadline for a troop withdrawal from Kosovo that his generals agreed to at military talks completed Wednesday in Macedonia. Achieving Serbian cooperation in the massive task of de-mining Kosovo also will be extremely difficult, he added.

At another level, North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders also are clearly worried that, having effectively lost Kosovo, Milosevic could now turn on Serbia’s partner in Yugoslavia, Montenegro. The tiny republic’s democratically elected president, Milo Djukanovic, refused to either support Milosevic’s campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo or help defend him against NATO attacks.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Djukanovic for more than an hour Wednesday, praising him as a “shining example” of how a Balkan leader can lead his people toward democracy. She also warned Milosevic that NATO would react to any further attempts to destabilize Montenegro.

“Any escalation in pressure on Montenegro would escalate the situation with NATO,” she said.

Since NATO’s air campaign began March 24, the Yugoslav army has effectively put a chokehold on major roads leading into Montenegro as well as on the republic’s only major port, Bar.

An array of other daunting hurdles also faces alliance leaders in the near- and medium-term. Among them:

* They must cope with a massive humanitarian crisis that includes several hundred thousand displaced people inside Kosovo, 175,000 of whom may have no homes left.

“I think we are all waiting with some trepidation about what we actually find when we get into Kosovo,” Albright told a small group of reporters Thursday evening. She also admitted that there was growing concern among aid officials that many of the estimated 700,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees in neighboring Macedonia and Albania might rush for the Kosovo border, generating additional chaos and new dangers.

* They must clear dense minefields laid by Serbian security forces during the past 2 1/2 months, a development that threatens NATO’s primary short-term goal of getting as many of the refugees back to their homes as quickly as possible.

“It’s difficult to imagine people going back having their children tethered to their houses so they don’t go to the fields,” Albright said, admitting that it probably would not be possible to get all refugees back to their homes before cold weather settles into the area in October.

* They must contain a Kosovo Albanian guerrilla army infused with new strength and political dreams that include an independent Kosovo or a “Greater Albania”--both goals that would spell more turmoil for the region.

“They’ve become a political force and will continue to be one as long as they feel they haven’t achieved their goals,” Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou said of the Kosovo Liberation Army in the days before the war ended. “They are free of any higher authority and are going to be a constant source of instability in the region.”

* They must continue to blur the contours of a final status for Kosovo in a way that doesn’t destroy Kosovo Albanian dreams of independence, yet avoid any commitment to altering national borders, a development that would open a Pandora’s box of political demands.

Despite these challenges, Fischer and his colleagues spent most of their time Thursday looking beyond the near-term toward a more permanent solution to the Balkans’ ills.

They pledged to create a framework of what they called a “Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe”--an ambitious Marshall Plan-like assistance package aimed at rebuilding Kosovo and accelerating the development of the entire region in the hopes of ending its cycle of violence.

Fischer refused to put any monetary figure on the plan, saying only that a donors conference will be held soon. Development officials have estimated that it could take up to $30 billion over five years to repair the physical damage in Kosovo.

“It is time . . . to bust the ghosts of Balkans past and build a new reality for southeast Europe as an integral part of a continent whole and free,” Albright declared.

Marshall reported from Cologne and Dahlburg from Brussels.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Peacekeeping Plan

Under NATO’s Kosovo plan, the nations providing the largest contingents of peacekeepers will be stationed as indicated below: