THE PROVIDENCE (RHODE ISLAND) JOURNAL
OPINION
Matthew Stevenson: Bombing down to Belgrade -- An unholy alliance with
Serb gangsters
04/04/2003
GENEVA
THE LAST TIME American bombers were sent over the horizon to rain
democracy on a reluctant constituency was in the spring of 1999, when
the NATO alliance engaged the hearts and minds of the Serbian
government.
The regime to be changed was that of Slobodan Milosevic. For 78 days,
NATO -- but mostly American bombers -- attacked military and civilian
targets throughout Serbia and Montenegro. The ultimatum dispatched with
the heavy ordnance was that the Milosevic government should stop
"cleansing" ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo region. It was further
implied that the Serbs might consider adopting a more democratic form of
government.
The bombings killed almost as many Serbs as the number of Americans who
later died in the World Trade Center. But such a death toll failed to
deliver the expected fortunes of war. The fighting ended with Serbs',
not Albanians', being "cleansed" from Kosovo, and the Milosevic
government remaining in power -- only to fall a year later when the
strongman lost an election and left office. It was one of his elected
successors, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was shot and killed last
month in Belgrade.
During the week before Djindjic's March 12 assassination, I traveled
extensively in the former Yugoslavia, now called the State Union of
Serbia and Montenegro. Ostensibly I was taking the temperature of the
investment climate, but wherever I went, instead of discussing returns
on equity or price-earnings ratios, all anyone wanted to do was show me
the effects of the NATO bombings. What should have been a financial road
show turned into an after-action bomb-damage assessment.
I had landed in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, on which Serbs,
Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks and Macedonians all stake claims. Formerly
a Yugoslav republic, Macedonia severed its ties with Belgrade in 1991,
and has thus far avoided the civil wars that have engulfed the other
republics. The Balkans, however, were the Mideast of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries -- with most of the wars fought for control of
Macedonia.
With a driver, I left Macedonia heading north, passing an oil refinery
now owned by Greek interests and a pasture proclaiming the "Skopje Free
Economic Zone" -- which was free of warehouses and factories, not to
mention economic activity. (Remember those promises to "rebuild" the
Balkans?) We took a succession of back roads from the Serbian border to
Nish, thus skirting the frontier with Kosovo, where the day before a
Serbian policeman had been killed in an ambush near the main highway.
Nish is a provincial Yugoslav city where I had lived in the summer of
1976, after graduating from college. I remembered statues of Marshal
Tito, the Partisan monuments, the train station and swimming in the
river -- but nothing of military significance.
Now, thanks to NATO, allied cluster bombs had torn into the city market,
killing 30 people and wounding 120. A Tomahawk cruise missile had also
destroyed the cigarette plant -- presumably to persuade the local
citizenry to kick the Milosevic habit, if not the nicotine one.
North of Nish, in the valley of the Morava River, I was shown where NATO
bombers had caught a train in the open, killing 14 passengers. The bombs
might have been on target, but the logic behind the targeting suggested
a lack of precision.
In between my meetings in Belgrade, I was given a Cook's tour of
bombed-out buildings. Friends drove me past the skeletal remains of
Milosevic's mansion, the television tower, the headquarters of the army,
the police and the communist party, and even the doomed Chinese
embassy -- which American war planners said had been hit by mistake,
although many bombs in Belgrade seemed to find specific offices in
specific elevator banks. Other errant missiles had fallen on a hospital,
and cluster bombs had killed more civilians, but the buildings that were
hit in Belgrade were precisely those that had buttressed the rule of a
communist warhorse. (Milosevic had been rumored to have a Chinese
connection.)
Because the city has no money with which to tear down the ruins, the
charred sites stand as hollow monuments to the American romance with air
power -- the same that focused the crosshairs on Dresden, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
In current parlance, the objective of the air war had been to
"decapitate" a government devouring its own citizenry. After bombs tore
into Belgrade's power station, the city went 15 days without
electricity. Its connections along the Danube were lost for several
years after bombers destroyed the bridges at Novi Sad -- as distant from
Kosovo as London is from Paris.
From a military standpoint, many Serbs whom I met told me that the NATO
bombing had destroyed only 14 Yugoslav army tanks; the other tanks
claimed as hits had been made of papier maach�. Regardless: The purpose
of the attacks on cities and innocent civilians had been to terrorize
the population into quick submission -- an article of faith that the
Pentagon seemingly shares with Osama bin Laden. Why else were
uranium-tipped shells sown in the beaches of Montenegro?
Nor were the laser-guided armaments able to make much progress on the
thorny diplomatic question of Kosovo. According to the American press
spokesmen, the bombing of Belgrade had been to force the Milosevic
government to abandon its reign of terror in Kosovo. But the air
campaign detached Kosovo from the Yugoslav federation and purged the
region of its Serbian minority.
Today, Kosovo is a nether world, an Albanian nation in search of a
state -- not Serbian or Albanian or independent -- at the mercy of
international aid: a forgotten ward of good intentions.
Nevertheless, Kosovo has the power to rearrange European geopolitics. If
it were to join with Albania, the Albanian populations of Macedonia and
Greece might also seek confederation with Albania -- which would then
find itself in military conflict with Greece, Serbia-Montenegro
(Belgrade), Macedonia and Bulgaria.
Yet a forced reunification of Kosovo with Serbia -- of which Kosovo had
been an autonomous region -- would revive the Balkan wars, even if
Milosevic remained under lock and key in The Hague.
Serbia's future depends on its access to Europe; yet to meet European
Union standards, the country needs $33 billion in new investments. For
the last 10 years, its exports, largely mining and agricultural, have
been shunned around the world.
Where there is a demand for Serbian exports is in the trade for
political prisoners: such as Milosevic, whose presence in the Hague, on
trial at the International Criminal Tribunal, reassures an anxious
America that it did the right thing in bombing Belgrade.
Alas, the market for show trials may have undone Serbia's fledging
democracy, nascent since October 2000, when Zoran Djindjic and Vojislav
Kostunica assumed power in Belgrade. Friends of mine who knew the late
prime minister spoke of Djindjic's fluent German and English, his
determination to move Serbia into the European Union, and his unwavering
opposition to Serbian nationalism.
Djindjic had come to power courtesy of the oddest of bed fellows: the
U.S. government and local gangsters, who flourished in the 1990s because
American sanctions had put legitimate business to the wall.
In the beginning, both the United States and the gangsters thought that
their interests would best be served with a new government in Serbia,
and both agreed to sacrifice Milosevic on the altar of war guilt in The
Hague. But more recently, this coalition found itself with conflicting
agendas. The gangsters thought that support for Djindjic would exempt
them from a summons to the International Criminal Tribunal, but the U.S.
made further aid to Serbia conditional on Serbia's serving up more
suspects that court.
Steven Erlanger, a perceptive reporter on the Balkans, wrote recently in
The New York Times: "In some ways, many Serbs say, the West squeezed
Djindjic to death in a too-tight embrace of specific demands for war
criminals, and tied the delivery of desperately needed foreign aid to
those conditions."
On my last day in Belgrade, last month, I took a long walk across the
city. In late winter the sidewalks were edged with snow, and many of the
dilapidated cars emitted a vapor trail of exhaust and soot. I found the
hotel where I'd stayed with my parents in 1970, the new central bank
(perhaps worth more than the currency), the window where in 1903 the
king had been "defenestrated," and Orthodox churches alongside the ruins
of the NATO bombings.
A week later, after reading about Djindjic's assassination, I reckoned
that I had passed the spot where he had been fated to die. It was on a
main boulevard, near the American Embassy. As if directed by the muses
of Greek tragedy, his killers had waited for him in the shadows of a
bombed building -- one that had been destroyed so that Serbia could have
a democratic future.
Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, is the
author of Letters of Transit: Essays on Travel, History, Politics and
Family Life Abroad (www.lettersoftransit.com). He lives in Switzerland.
