Milosevic Should Not Escape Unpunished

While exasperated senior Western government officials busily float trial balloons about arranging a possible safe exit for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his family, the indicted leader continues to ratchet up his assault on the Serbian people. In recent weeks, the Belgrade regime has shuttered nearly all independent media outlets, arrested more than 1,000 student activists and begun pushing anti-terrorism and anti-assembly bills through the rubber-stamp Yugoslav parliament that will give Milosevic even more draconian powers to stamp out dissent.

In Montenegro, Serbia’s sister republic where the democratically elected president, Milo Djukanovic, enjoys Western support, Milosevic has imposed a punishing economic blockade, fortified his military command with trusted loyalists, created a 1,000-strong battalion composed of ruthless military police and vastly increased the number of army checkpoints. Two weeks ago, Serbian opposition leader Vuk Draskovic was wounded in his Montenegrin vacation home by automatic gunfire during what appeared to be the second organized attack on his life inside eight months; two weeks before that, Djukanovic’s key security advisor was shot dead in front of his home.

The recent spate of gangland-style killings has targeted cronies and rivals of Milosevic. Polls suggest Milosevic would lose in any fair election, and a number of his fellow indicted war criminals in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia have been arrested or turned over to the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Aides whisper that Milosevic is unusually anxious and irritable, and that his wife and full-fledged partner in crime, Mirjana “Mira” Markovic, views the spiraling violence as prefiguring a Belgrade reprise of the blood-drenched 1989 finale for Romania’s first couple, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. As if to stave off such a demise, Belgrade’s conjugal regime has exploited its virtual media monopoly to fabricate a surreal kingdom.

Early last month, Markovic’s Yugoslav United Left party nominated Milosevic for “the order of national hero.” The nomination was heartily seconded by the general staff of the Yugoslav army, which praised their “supreme commander’s heroic exploits” and wartime display of “military leadership that has rarely been found in modern world history.” The party has also condemned the unconventional opposition youth movement known as Resistance, or Otpor, which has captured the imagination of the demoralized Serbian public, as “a satanic terrorist organization” whose widely graffitied symbol, a clenched fist, “is a satanic sign which lacked only blood under the nails.”

Such hyperbole, with its invocation of the supernatural, coupled with the current crackdown, reveals a despot in extremis, squeezed by discontent, sanctions and the arrests of fellow indictees. Yet, despite these signs that the allies’ postwar policy may be succeeding, more and more foreign leaders, frustrated by Milosevic’s staying power, appear willing to contemplate alternatives.

Recent press reports suggest that not only would Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and former Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis prefer a kinder, gentler approach toward Milosevic, but that even the Clinton administration, which spearheaded the NATO air campaign and has consistently backed sanctions against Serbia, would find such a “solution” hard to refuse. European nations seem to be suffering from a combination of Balkans fatigue and the pragmatic desire to position themselves for lucrative contracts in a post-Milosevic Serbia. As for Washington, the administration’s desire to brandish a foreign policy success before the November presidential election may override its professed interest in bringing alleged war criminals to trial.

Administration figures deny that any such deal is being contemplated, but have not stated categorically that the U.S. will block efforts by other countries to provide Milosevic with a graceful exit. Indeed, Milosevic’s political survival a year after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s ostensible victory in Kosovo has induced the international community to relax its postwar policy. Ambassadors representing the Vatican, the Russian Federation, Argentina, Mexico and Australia have visited Belgrade in recent weeks, as have China’s parliamentary head and Greece’s former foreign minister. The European Union lifted its flight ban on the state-run Yugoslav airline, but has dawdled on implementing its new, “smarter” sanctions, which would ban EU trade with any firm or individual unable to prove complete independence of the Milosevic regime.

If a safe-haven strategy for Milosevic is pursued, it will have devastating consequences in Serbia, throughout the former Yugoslavia and on other, non-Balkan states ruled by alleged war criminals. It would mark a clear victory for impunity, the death of U.N. credibility and of any hope for the future of international justice.

Despite the apparent lack of leverage over the Belgrade regime, there remain at least a half-dozen measures that the allies can take to let Milosevic and the Serbian people know that there will be no slackening of international resolve.

* NATO countries should make it clear that there will be no deal. The U.N. tribunal has refused to grant Milosevic immunity, but that is not enough. With his extensive network of loyalists, Milosevic would remain capable of destabilizing the region even from the “safe” remove of a Belarus or Iraq. Only The Hague, Western leaders must insist, can be his safe haven.

* Allied nations should inform Milosevic that NATO will respond with overwhelming force to any violent attempt to unseat Montenegro’s reformist government.

* The U.S. and EU should compensate for Serbia’s news blackout by swiftly reinstating the wartime “ring around Serbia,” which enabled Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to broadcast across Serbia from neighboring countries.

* The EU should implement its new, more closely targeted sanctions and strengthen its monitoring and enforcement capabilities. Cutting off Milosevic’s hard-currency stream will, if handled skillfully, pull the plug on the regime.

* Western democracies should support non-nationalist opposition parties and movements such as Resistance, which are open to forming coalitions and devising a common platform that could turn local elections later this year into a referendum on Milosevic, Serbia’s economy and its pariah-nation status.

* The Clinton administration and other allied governments should continue to inveigh against the regime’s capricious seizure of independent media outlets, brutal intimidation of opposition parties and non-government organizations, and maltreatment and arrest of dissidents.

The Serbian people appear to be nearing their tolerance threshold for Milosevic and his policies. Given the extent of the decay of Serbian society after a decade under Milosevic, a peaceful transition to stable, democratic governance in Serbia is unlikely to happen overnight. It is worth recalling that every democratic transition in Eastern Europe has taken years of patient persistence on the part of engaged Western democracies. Allied impatience should not become an excuse for not staying the course this time.