[PEN-L:6525] (Fwd) NOW COMES THE HARD PART: MAKING PEACE IN KOSOVO

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Date sent:              Fri, 07 May 1999 11:53:18 -0700
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From:                   Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:                NOW COMES THE HARD PART: MAKING PEACE IN KOSOVO

The Vancouver Sun                       Thursday, May 6, 1999

A Soldiers Story 

NOW COMES THE HARD PART: MAKING PEACE IN KOSOVO

        Ignoring military advice, NATO's political leaders proceeded 
        with the air campaign; in doing so they accelerated and intensified 
        the humanitarian crisis that continues unabated, oblivious to air       
strikes.

        By Lewis Mackenzie      

        While the U.S. public's attention over the past few days has 
been focused on the release of their "POWs," whose main 
deprivations seem to have been the lack of TV and good old 
American hamburger, the media has neglected to report on an 
increased degree of optimism on the streets in Belgrade.
        As mentioned before, successful diplomacy is usually quiet 
diplomacy and not played out for public consumption on CNN, or 
CBC for that matter.
        The word on the street in Belgrade suggests that talks going on 
in Vienna are more substantial than is being reported and that a 
pause in the bombing is nigh. Naive wishful thinking? The end of 
the war will probably happen with a whimper not a bang (apologies 
to T.S. Eliot).
        When there is a cessation of hostilities, the challenge for the 
West begins with the five conditions demanded by NATO.
        Mind you, the alliance changes the wording of those conditions 
daily. For example:

* "Withdrawal of all Yugoslav military and security" — the word 
"all" has quietly disappeared.

* "A NATO-led force to implement any ceasefire" has evolved into 
"a multi-activated peace keeping force" — a much more practical 
condition in my opinion.

        The desire to grant autonomous status to Kosovo within the 
former Yugoslavia and the disarming of the Kosovo Liberation 
Army leaves only the "Immediate return of Kosovo Albanian 
refugees to their homes" to fill out the last of the five conditions 
laid down by NATO as the minimum criteria for peace.
        I'm quite sure that collectively NATO's five conditions will not 
bring peace to Kosovo.
        We were told by NATO that we had to bomb Yugoslavia to 
preclude a humanitarian disaster. Ignoring honest military advice, 
the political leadership of NATO decided to proceed (and I 
certainly endorse their right to do so even if it was a really bad 
decision) with the air campaign and in doing so accelerated and 
intensified the humanitarian display that continues unabated and 
oblivious to the air strikes.
        After the first NATO bomb fell, the Kosovo Albanians became 
the enemy in the eyes of the Serbs and the forceful deportation 
began.
        A significant number of the refugees will not want to go "home" 
for a number of reasons. They no longer trust Serb security forces 
and as long as the Serbs make up a percentage of the security 
apparatus in Kosovo, refugees will look elsewhere for quality of 
life. A significant number of relocated refugees will want to stay in 
their new homes.
        After all, for a large number of families having a son or daugh-
ter work abroad was already a constant goal. Those who have lost 
everything and must rebuild will seriously question starting again in 
Kosovo. Those in Albania might stay in their mother country.
        Lastly, as the makeup of the Kosovo international security force 
is announced with its expected Slav Orthodox component, 
including Russia and Ukraine, the refugees will lose confidence that 
their safety will be guaranteed.
        We have yet to be told by our political leadership the full im-
plications of deploying Canadian troops into Kosovo on a 
peacekeeping mission.
        Is the deployment not thought through and therefore 
unacceptable?
        If we are intentionally being kept in the dark, that too is un-
worthy of a democratically elected government with a mandate to 
serve the interests of the Canadian people.
        When some baby born today in the Ottawa Civic Hospital be-
comes a 20-year-old Canadian soldier on "peacekeeping" duty in 
Kosovo, we might well reflect on our eagerness to help the Eu-
ropeans sort out yet another of their problems. Surely after 54 years 
they can deal with a crisis in a geographical area the size of 
Algonquin Park.
        Significantly the KLA will not disarm. Their stated "policy" is to 
resist any attempts to disarm them in spite of what some of their 
representatives agreed to in Rambouillet. Considering the West's 
record of "guaranteeing security" in northern Iraq and Vietnam you 
can't really blame them. The KLA's objective of fighting for nothing 
less than independence and ultimately union with Albania to create 
a Greater Albania should be a red flag for any western leader who 
thinks the Kosovo crisis ends once the bombing stops.
        The stated NATO desire to return Kosovo's pre-1989 au-
tonomous status within the former Yugoslavia sounds more like 
something the Mad Hatter would suggest as each days passes. The 
thought that Kosovo Albanians would voluntarily return to live 
within such a political arrangement strikes me as absurd. 

                                _______________

Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, commanded UN 
troops during the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian civil war of 
1992.