Serbs Gained Very Little in War Settlement

Here is what Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic gained by rejecting a peace deal three months ago and sustaining weeks of NATO bombardment: The United Nations will play a larger role in the interim administration of Kosovo.

Apart from that, the accords that ended the conflict seem to give Milosevic very little that was not in the proposal that he turned down following marathon talks at the Rambouillet chateau in France. And in several ways, Milosevic came away with less.

NATO’s bombing campaign provided Milosevic with cover to accelerate the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo, driving out about half of its ethnic Albanians and displacing most of the rest.

But now the Albanians are to be ushered back in by peacekeeping troops, and many of Kosovo’s minority Serbs, fearing revenge, may flee. If a homogenous Kosovo results, it will be ethnic Albanians, not Serbs, who populate it.

The peace agreement does not answer whether Kosovo eventually will become independent as most ethnic Albanians want, remain a province of Serbia, or continue indefinitely under international supervision. The answer will probably depend on many factors, including how many displaced ethnic Albanians are able or willing to return home.

The Rambouillet plan contained a detailed constitution for an autonomous Kosovo, with the residents enjoying a broad measure of self-rule but Yugoslavia retaining sovereignty. Although Milosevic rejected the overall agreement, his representatives said they could accept the constitution. The ethnic Albanians accepted the entire plan.

U.S. officials say they believe that the political sections of Rambouillet, matters on which the agreement to end the bombing is silent, will eventually be implemented. But there is no guarantee.

The Rambouillet agreement ran more than 80 pages. The accord ending the bombing campaign is far less specific.

Milosevic has claimed in public that the enhanced U.N. role in Kosovo’s administration was worth the pain caused by the NATO bombs.

“The Group of 8 and the U.N. are guaranteeing our sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Milosevic said. “Questions on possible independence for Kosovo raised before the aggression were closed with the Belgrade treaty.”

Militarily, there is not much difference. The agreement that ended the bombing calls for a U.N.-authorized peacekeeping force, under the command of a British general and with U.S. and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops making up most of the 48,000-strong force. The Rambouillet plan called for a strictly NATO force.

But there is a substantial difference on the civilian side. Rambouillet called for the Kosovo verification mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to supervise the installation of a new civilian government for the province. The mission, an unarmed monitoring force that was deployed in Kosovo before the start of the bombing, is headed by U.S. diplomat William Walker.

Under the agreement now in effect, the civilian administrator will be appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His choice has not been announced.

“The U.N. is back in a major way in peacekeeping in the Balkans,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. National Security Council official. He said the U.N. operation in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina had been ineffective. In Kosovo, he said, “it could be a problem, but it need not be.”

Milosevic clearly prefers U.N. sponsorship because Russia, his sometime ally, has a veto in the 15-member Security Council. But so do fellow permanent members United States, Britain and France. In the end, big-power politics may prove as important to the Kosovo operation as what happens on the ground.

The powers of the U.N. civil administration in Kosovo are more extensive than those that would have been given to the OSCE by the Rambouillet plan, said Daalder, who is now on the staff of the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

“The international community will run the place,” he said. “This is a true international protectorate with extraordinary powers given to the international community.”

One other obvious difference between Rambouillet and this agreement is a clear defeat for Milosevic.

The Rambouillet plan would have allowed Yugoslavia to keep 5,000 troops in Kosovo and on its border for the first year, going down to a permanent garrison of 2,500 after that. Now, all Yugoslav army, police and paramilitary troops must be withdrawn. A few hundred will be allowed to return, primarily to guard Serbian monuments.

Rambouillet called for a three-year interim administration, after which the final status of Kosovo would be determined by an international conference that would consider a number of factors, including the will of the Kosovo population. The current accords contain no such provision.

Some critics have said that NATO gave in to Yugoslavia by canceling a referendum on Kosovo independence, but the referendum included in the Rambouillet plan was not binding.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said last week that the final deal was “a worse situation for the Serbs than they could have had by signing the Rambouillet agreements.”

But some peace groups say it was NATO that intentionally extended the conflict by inserting in the Rambouillet plan provisions that Yugoslavia clearly could not accept. These groups say that Milosevic might have agreed to end the war sooner if he had been offered the terms he finally accepted.

Stephen Zunes, chairman of the Peace and Justice Studies program at the University of San Francisco, said the sticking point was a provision that would have given the NATO peacekeepers free access to any part of Yugoslavia. He said even Milosevic’s domestic opponents didn’t like that.

A State Department official said that provision was inserted to ensure the resupply of the NATO troops, but there was never a plan to put peacekeepers anywhere but in Kosovo. The official said the provision was dropped in the final agreement because of concern that it might have been misinterpreted.

The Serbian side at Rambouillet never mentioned the provision, rejecting the proposal primarily because it called for international troops in Kosovo.