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NATO’s New Job Inspires Doubts

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

As foreign soldiers stream into this small nation for NATO’s third Balkan mission in less than a decade, rising resentment and violence are fueling concerns that the operation’s limited mandate could expand despite assurances from alliance officials that this deployment will be different.

The 30-day mission is aimed primarily at disarming ethnic Albanian rebels who voluntarily hand over their guns in exchange for amnesty. But there are already signs that NATO involvement could deepen amid a cease-fire that is shaken almost daily by bomb blasts and scattered gunfire.

On Tuesday, British NATO soldiers led a convoy of ethnic Macedonians back to the rural village of Lesok, where residents were forced from their homes a month ago by the guerrillas. As rebels watched from the hills above, the troops escorted the villagers to a service at the bomb-shattered local church.

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The NATO escort, according to Western diplomats, fell under the category of “confidence-building.” Similarly broad phrases have been used by Western policymakers to justify a far bigger role for NATO-led troops in previous missions in the Balkans.

History looms large as the Macedonian mission begins: The 1995 Dayton, Ohio, accords ending Bosnia-Herzegovina’s brutal ethnic war called for a pullout of NATO troops after a year. Six years later, there are still about 21,000 NATO troops on the ground.

In Kosovo--a mostly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic--Serbian troops who had waged a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” retreated in the summer of 1999, but nearly 40,000 NATO troops are still keeping the peace.

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In both places, but especially in Kosovo, peacekeepers say they’re sure that violence would resume if they left.

The prospect of renewed violence after a NATO pullout also hangs over the operation in Macedonia, where the rebels, who say they have been fighting for more rights for the sizable ethnic Albanian minority, took up arms nearly seven months ago.

“To go in and come out quickly is certainly desirable, but history tells us that it’s difficult to accomplish these operations in a short period of time,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. “In fact, they are rarely accomplished in a short period of time.”

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Many ethnic Macedonians resent NATO’s presence because they believe that the alliance has sided with ethnic Albanians, and some are ready to resort to violence. On the mission’s first day, a British soldier was killed by a group of angry youths who heaved an object at his vehicle in an ethnic Macedonian and Gypsy neighborhood.

Ethnic Albanians fear that the anger will be directed toward them the moment NATO troops leave. And the guerrillas say they will immediately take up arms again if there is any provocation from ethnic Macedonians.

Privately, U.S. military officials have already begun to indicate that the 30-day time frame is just an estimate.

U.S. policymakers also sound as if they are preparing for the possibility of a longer mission.

“If it takes longer, it takes longer,” said Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, during a quick visit to Skopje, the Macedonian capital, last week.

Former Army Col. Kenneth Allard, who served in Bosnia after the peace accords and is now a senior associate at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it will be all but impossible to have an impact in the short period NATO has allotted.

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“You can do just enough to fail,” he said. “Sure, you can go in, check all the boxes, collect the weapons, declare victory and leave . . . but I can’t see a worse approach to peacekeeping than that. You don’t go in with that kind of a time frame and expect to accomplish anything.”

President Bush has been leery of further involvement by U.S. troops in the Balkans and suggested during his campaign that perhaps they should pull out altogether. Although that idea seems to have faded, the United States is playing strictly a support role in the Macedonia mission, and no new troops were deployed to help NATO forces.

The conflict in Macedonia so far is much less deadly than the one in Kosovo was, but it has at its heart similar ethnic divisions. Although ethnic Albanians are in the Macedonian government, their language does not have official status and they have largely been excluded from the country’s police force and military.

Police abuse has been a major issue for the Albanian community, and European observers say it is one of the most serious civil rights problems in the country.

Under pressure from Western diplomats, who feared a destabilizing civil war, the four political parties in the government--two ethnic Macedonian and two ethnic Albanian--signed a peace agreement Aug. 13. If it is implemented by parliament, the accord will raise the legal status of the Albanian language and add many more ethnic Albanians to the police force.

Parallel to the deal is an agreement that NATO troops will disarm the guerrillas at the same time lawmakers are considering the reforms outlined in the peace pact. A precondition for the disarmament was a durable cease-fire, which NATO says is now in force even though there are reports from rural villagers of nightly gunfire.

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NATO officials hope that by focusing on disarmament, they will avoid the open-ended missions of the past.

“This is not a peacekeeping mission. It is not an intervention force. It will not separate fighting parties,” said Maj. Gen. Gunnar Lange of Denmark, who has responsibility for the mission, known as “Essential Harvest.”

The difficulty for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is that the operation’s limited mandate fails to fit the mission’s goal: creating a climate of trust so that the accord will be enacted and implemented by the Macedonian government.

And even NATO officials admit that weapons collection has little meaning in a region where guns are far easier to buy than computers. The larger task of giving people a reason to lay down their arms will take longer than the 30 days that the alliance ministers have allotted.

Furthermore, the operation hinges on nothing going wrong. Any hitch could endanger the 30-day time frame. If cease-fire violations continue, they will seriously damage any goodwill among both the Macedonian security forces and the rebels.

Similarly, if both sides rush to retake their strategic positions as soon as NATO leaves, the mission could hardly be deemed a success, security experts say.

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“Without the international community on the ground preventing a civil war, the Macedonian government will collapse,” said William Hopkinson, an associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a British think tank.

“If they start shooting at each other again, the Albanian parties would find it difficult to remain in the government, and if [NATO troops] withdraw, the Macedonian government would find it impossible to assure security throughout Macedonia,” Hopkinson said.

NATO officials are aware of the likely instability when their troops withdraw and are working to get a large team of unarmed international monitors on the ground to help stabilize the country when the troops depart.

Such teams have also been involved in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Bosnia, they were able to do nothing to stop the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian soldiers and paramilitary members, and in Kosovo, their presence has been backed up by armed NATO troops. The landscape of Macedonia is less volatile, but it’s difficult to tell whether they would be any more successful here.

There are signs of trouble for NATO’s credibility. The Macedonian government estimates that the rebels have more than 60,000 weapons. NATO officials initially floated numbers closer to 3,000, and the rebels themselves suggested that 2,000 might be realistic.

The number settled on to be collected was 3,300. But having raised the public’s worries about huge rebel stockpiles, Macedonian officials have sown the seeds of doubt about the collection effort.

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NATO officials respond by saying it’s a mistake to get too focused on the number.

“I haven’t met anyone who thinks it’s a bad idea to collect thousands of weapons from armed extremists,” said Daniel Speckhard, the NATO deputy assistant secretary for political affairs.

When NATO undertook a similar weapons-collection effort in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army, which included some of the same guerrilla fighters who have been helping the rebels in Macedonia, turned in their old arms but kept many of their newer ones.

“They dug up every single weapon that had been buried in the ground since World War II,” said James Lyon of the International Crisis Group, which tracks policy in the Balkans and in developing countries. “They brought in rifles with rusted butts. It was a joke.”

NATO military officers say that so far they have seen both old and new weapons handed in.

But as NATO officials themselves say, the weapons are not enough.

“Macedonians have to be realistic,” said Speckhard. “The success will not come immediately or overnight.”

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