War and peace revisited

Tim Judah's 1997 The Serbs: History, Myth & the Destruction of Yugoslavia was a standard reference book for journalists covering last year's war in Yugoslavia. His new book is being published to coincide with the first anniversary of the start of NATO's 78-day bombardment, and his gloomy but well-reasoned assessment of the West's muddled intervention and the Serbs' and Albanians' inability to break free of their history makes me think I may carry his latest tome to another Balkan war.

One of the most intriguing ideas buried in the new book is that the US inadvertently - or deliberately - triggered the Yugoslav war by presenting the Serbs with an agreement they could not accept at Rambouillet. Because Appendix B gave NATO troops "together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, free and unrestricted passage throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . . ." the Yugoslav negotiating team at Rambouillet refused even to discuss the military annex to the agreement which the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, demanded they sign.

Slobodan Milosevic believed Appendix B meant the NATO occupation of all of Serbia - not just Kosovo - and the likelihood that US Marines would burst through his door in the middle of the night. The West thought Milosevic was just being his usual bloody-minded self when he refused to allow his delegation to sign in Paris. That he believed his own survival to be at stake is ascribed to what Judah calls "the `cock-up' theory of history" - some over-zealous NATO officers drawing up a needlessly ambitious military wish list. Yet Judah later cites Chris Hill, the US Ambassador to Macedonia who led the US delegation to Rambouillet, as saying that Milosevic wanted to avoid the military annex because "he felt that the true intention of the force was to eliminate him."

Appendix B represents either great stupidity or great cynicism on the part of Mrs Albright. If Milosevic's arrest and prosecution were not an ulterior motive, why did she not drop the provision which made it impossible for the Serbs to sign the agreement? And if Milosevic was the real target, was it really necessary to destroy much of Serbia and Kosovo and kill thousands of people only to fail in that goal? For despite the bombing of his presidential villa and the International War Crime Tribunal's indictment, Milosevic remains in power. The Ahtisaari-Chernomyrdin agreement that finally ended the bombardment on June 10th did not give NATO free access to all of Yugoslavia; the US in the end abandoned the very demand that prevented a pre-war agreement.

Despite Milosevic's atrocious record in Croatia and Bosnia, the West failed to foresee his response to the bombardment - the mass expulsion of Kosovo Albanians. "At no time . . . did any of the diplomats he met ever understand that threats against hundreds of thousands of Kosovars, either implied or direct, were actually meant to be taken at face value," Judah writes. The German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer later said he regretted not having taken Milosevic seriously in early March 1999 when Milosevic told him that Serb forces could empty Kosovo "within a week".

Yet it was perhaps the war's cruellest irony that NATO needed the Albanian refugees. NATO's intervention, Judah writes, "was as much to do with gunboat diplomacy as anything else". Western public opinion would have turned against the bombardment, had it not been for the wrenching scenes of refugees pouring over the borders. "The question would have been asked, `How can we bomb a small country - whatever we think of its government - because it refuses to sign an agreement about the future of part of its territory?'."

In contrast with widespread idealisation of the Kosovo Liberation Army in the West during the war, Judah acknowledges Kosovo Albanian involvement in the international drugs trade and notes the Marxist dogmatism of some of the KLA's founders - who demanded not just an independent Kosovo but a Greater Albania from Macedonia to Montenegro. He records KLA meetings with CIA and MI6 agents from the early 1990s. In the months leading up to the war, the scale of Serb atrocities against Albanians was greater, but the KLA also kidnapped and murdered, not only Serbs but Albanian "collaborators" as well.

Since the war ended, the guerillas have been involved in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Serb civilians. "With little law and order people blamed the KLA for having brought crime in its wake and were frightened of former KLA men or people who claimed to be KLA men appropriating flats and shops and businesses at gunpoint," Judah writes. Although UN Security Council Resolution 1244 required the KLA to disarm, it has simply stashed most of its weapons across the border in Albania and regrouped as the KPC (Kosovo Defensive Troops), which Judah rightly calls "the KLA in mothballs".

By interviewing some of the protagonists after the war, the author obtained behind the scenes details that journalists would have loved to have known at the time - how Mrs Albright plotted to keep the veteran Balkan negotiator Richard Holbrooke out of the region during the 1998 KLA rebellion; how she panicked when the Albanian delegation would not sign at Rambouillet, revising her opinion of the KLA leader Hashim Thaci from "wonderful" to "odious". It is chilling to learn that NATO believed 350 civilians would be killed in the bombing of Milosevic's party headquarters - but nonetheless bombed the building. (In the event, the Serbs evacuated the tower and no one died.)

Judah provides insights into diplomatic manoeuvring, but mentions only in passing NATO's attack on a passenger train at Grdelica, the bombing of the Albanian refugee convoy on the road to Djakovica and British and American use of depleted uranium munitions. The results of the war are pitiful, he concludes: an impoverished Serbia, still under dictatorship; an anarchical, aid-dependent Kosovo demanding the independence which the West cannot or will not give them. Of Milosevic and NATO he writes, "They all just got it wrong". One expects a man like Milosevic to "get it wrong". But aren't our own, democratically elected representatives supposed to do better?

Lara Marlowe covered the 1999 Yugoslav war for The Irish Times.