My only concern is that when everyone loses interest in this region in 20 years that the enmity will still be there, and we're just gearing up for another war, which is the history of the province in any case. Serbia will definitely have a longer memory than Ahtasaari. This needs to be addressed. I think also that were it not for the Kosovo War, which I think was the fault of the US, this problem would have been much much easier to solve.
Don't look for consistency from the international community. It's more about self-interest.
Quote; I can't help but think that this is all payback for war in Bosnia. Let's face it, that's what this is ALL about. --- I agree. It's revenge.
Of course, the America Bush represents has created arguably far more death of innocents and long-lasting damage in a volatile part of the world than Milosevic ever could have dreamed of.
In any case, Milosevic was no wilting flower. I'm sure his imagination contained more than the 80,000 or so he succeeded in killing.
He is definitely up in Bush and Saddam Hussein's league.
And now, Kosovo is a prime entrepot for transhipping illicit drugs, prostitution and illegal economic migrants from Southwestern and Central Asia into the EU all the while Nato and the UN are ultimately responsible for it's "protectorate". A protectorate which largley involves de facto protection of organized crime on behalf of the international community, and to the direct detriment of the EU. No wonder Ahtisaari wants to wash his hands of this.
Moral of the story to Europeans everywhere: Beware of Americans (whether they call themselves "center-left" and play saxophone, or whether they are more transparently fascist like the present regime in Washington) bearing gifts.
It's no secret, for instance, that the Greeks, and this includes the Greek popular sentiment as well, sided with the Serbs. Greek irregulars were reported to have participated in Bosnia massacres, and flip over to Greek attitudes on "FYROM" (what a laugh that name) and Kosovo, and you'll see it would have been very hard for the EU to have a united front in this story, regardless of the facts (which, it turns out, were as dispensible in Western capitals as in those of the balkans), even if the core of the EU were as one.
Add to this the deep divisiveness of Germany's unilateral decision to prematurely recognize Croatia and Slovenia's independance - at loggerheads with France, the UK and George HW Bush's US- and thereby guarantee a bloodbath. When Germany recognized Tudjman's Croatia, and this beyond the historical precedence dating from WW2, it guaranteed that every Yugoslav Republic, in violent fashion, would also become independent.
Why necessarily violent? Look at the ethnic map (the sort of map, I might add, the Germans innovated themselves) of the area, and read the press accounts of the ethnic fervor at the time in the region. Hell, even little ol' me saw it first hand, witnessing more than one fight at the kiosk between folks buying Croatian-language papers and those buying Serb-language papers.
Kohl has a lot of blood in his hands. But this might not worry him much given all the money he tucked away as well.
"Understandably" then, the EU was hardly in a position to lead on this. Which is just the way one might well imagine a US government to like things. Keeps Europe weak, and accentuates their inability to build an independent and coherent foreign policy backed by a credible and independant military force (which only France today, really, has).
And if shepherded correctly, the resulting mess can be assured to be a gift that keeps on giving instability and rancor to Europeans for generations to follow.
Which is exactly what Kosovo is now.
As for Greece, there are stories that a handful of irregulars made it into Yugo, but so did Poles and Czechs on the Croatian side, Al-Qaeda in Bosnia, etc. And though sentiment in Greece was definitely against Kosovo, this wasn't the case in Bosnia, while all along the US and NATO were using Greek territory to execute the expeditions into Kosovo. They were coming up through Salonika.
I wrote about Greece and Macedonia somewhere else in this thread, but I believe in general, the Greeks took the same approach they always do. Anti-US in public opinion during the Kosovo campaign, while the gov't fell in line and did everything that NATO and the US asked.
The first Bush admin may have got it right on Croatia initially (though its motivations are at best unclear on the matter) but when it came to Bosnia, the Americans were positively a destabilizing force.
The EU, seeing the possibility of war in Croatia spreading further, perhaps engulfing the whole of Yugoslavia, and also seeing that after Kohl mistakenly recognized Croatia and Slovenia, Bosnia and Macedonia would likely soon follow, brokered a key deal. The Bosniaques, as well as the Bosnian Serbs and Croatians, all agreed to a hard federal deal, three fully autonomous regions with a nominal seat of state at Sarajevo.
I remember hearing this plan (Lisbon accords) as creating something along the lines of Switzerland, and it is true, this part of the world looks fairly similar to the alpine federal republic (though true also the women are prettier in Bosnia than in Switzerland).
Guess which country got Alija Izetbegovic to back out of the deal and push for more - a lot more?
You guessed it. The US.
And we all know the results - disasterous for Izetbegovic's community in particular, and Bosnia (and all of Yugoslavia really) in general.
But not disasterous to the US really. A cheap way to get one of those trifectas another US president was fond of talking about: maintain instability on the doorstep to Europe, score points with an Islamic world whose oil was not indispensable, and look like you were pushing forth those "great" Wilsonian ideals of "freedom" and "self-determiniation," ideals of course best put into action a continent or two away.
So it is a bit cheeky to assert that the US did its best to avoid bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia, its noble intentions to recognize no one misunderstood.
I think Americans, and in particular, the American left, would do well to look beyond the rhetoric of their various governments and politicos and stop assuming that its intentions are pure, even regarding a Europe whose political weakness is in American strategic interests. And this was true when Clinton was president every bit as much as when either Bush was in there.
The only thing which has changed is that the increasing weakness of the American position has made its universalist rhetoric all the more threadbare, transparent, Brezhnevian.
Seriously, Clinton wasn't even in office until 1993. Those accords were signed in early 1992.
It was Izitbegovic's rejection of Lisbon which ultimately started the war in Bosnia. And it was ambassador Zimmerman who directly got that to happen, getting the Islamic radical and fascist Izitbegovic to torpedo Lisbon by withdrawing support the latter had initially extended. Americans are quite comfortable working with right-wing autocrats, and they found one in Sarajevo.
Of course, this wasn't the only mess Clinton inherited from the previous administration, much as the US president in 2009 will inherit messes. Messes are what America is good at creating, and given the hollowing out of America's productive capacity, it may now be its biggest export.
But it would be a mistake to say Clinton's foreign policy did any better or cleaned up any of these messes his predecessor had left for him. And, in Kosovo, he added arguably an even bigger mess, one the UN and the EU will be stuck with for some time to come.
You're kidding, right? Bosnia is much, much better. I'd say that Kosovo is too (economic basket case where the ten percent minority is being screwed by the ninety percent majority beats the reverse). And if you're going to call the Izetbegovic a fascist and religious radical, then you should do the same for all the leaders -Serb, Croat or Bosniak. Do you think we shouldn't have dealt with any of them? America didn't create this mess anymore than Germany or France did. Eventually they cleaned it up.
Your comments on the motivations behind US Yugo policy in the nineties are also completely off base. I had a reasonably close view as I was working at a DC foreign policy think tank in the mid nineties. The main reason for the hostility towards Serbia was outrage over its war crimes, not any sort of Machiavellian realpolitik. It was the advocates of the latter in fact who wanted the US to not play any role in the post Yugo wars.
Bosnia may be much much better today, but this doesn't necessarily mean anything; I certainly wouldn't expect a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument from you on the subject, if anything, Clinton's great achievement is that he happened to be in power when the carnage finally ran its course. And the fact of the matter is that there is relative peace there thanks in no small part due to peacekeepers, with the Dayton accords not being all that dissimilar to the Lisbon accords which the US had done so much to undermine.
I am curious your take on what US motivations were, given you worked in a DC think-tank at the time, when the first Bush administration helped nix that accord. At the time, the Serbs had not engaged in any war crimes in Bosnia yet, and what was happening in Croatia at the time was quite ambiguous, and a two-way street, so this context of outrage at Serbian atrocities you give is somewhat misplaced. Those atrocities did take place, but the US had already acted to help start the hostilities by then.
Nothing ironic about it. Past Nazi sympathes are trumped by being the leader of the group which was the greatest victim and which committed the least atrocities. Before operation Storm on the other hand the Serbs were the perpetrators of by far the greatest number of war crimes and victims of the least. And if we're talking about past sympathies Tudjman was an anti-fascist Partisan during WWII.
In any case how far do you want to take the 'past sympathies' argument. You're French, right? As is well known Mitterrand had fascist sympathies in his youth, less well known is the fact that Chirac had OAS ones. A large percentage of left wing leaders in Europe were radical left sympathizers at some time - depending on their age and taste Stalin or Mao or Trotsky. Who do you prefer - Jospin the ex-Trotskyist or Tony Blair? Does Chirac's viciously colonialist early views make him as noxious as Bush in the present context? The anti-war left tends to prize Senator Byrd and hate Senator Lieberman. The former was a KKK organizer and later a diehard supporter of Jim Crow in his early Senate career, the latter was a Freedom Rider.
I was in college during the early nineties, my think tank time was in the mid nineties, so no special insight on the Bush I admin. However, by my time in DC the main force pushing against support for the Bosnians, and advocating a hands off policy were the Bush I alums and the right wing of the Republican congressional party along with some of the old guard Dem establishment e.g. Christopher and some old guard leftists. On the other side was a very mixed bag of people - younger left-liberals, most hawkish dems, and a handful of Repubs (particularly Dole). Lots of moral outrage going on, Rwanda added fuel to the fire among many in the left-liberal group who saw it as an outrageous moral disaster and worried that Bosnia would be a more slow motion version.
At the time, there was a cease-fire in the war for the Croatian seccession, a war where hindsight shows us there were really no clear good guys, whatever we might have thought at the time. It was in fact the cease-fire which largely held, up to the point when Milosevic gave up the Krajina serbs.
So if Lisbon had held, arguably the war would have not occured in Bosnia. And what's more, the Krajina campaign in '95, also a terrible bloodshed, would also not have happened. (And in fact the Dayton accords are not terribly dissimilar to the EU-brokered Lisbon accords from 1995 although far less favorable the former to Bosniaques.)
Really then the central question comes down to why the US Ambassador to Yugoslavia at the time did his very best to get the Bosniaque leader to pull out of the accord. This is the key element of what was to follow, and American policy objectives very much pivoted on this.
What follows is largely irrelevant in fact, much of it pure end-game, with lots of innocent lives lost in the process.
No arguments from me about either Mitterand or Chirac, certainly not the latter, though it is really hard to measure any person in Europe on the basis of what they might have more or less passively done during the war. This being said, very few Nazi officers, or as is the case with Izitbegovic, people who actively recruited others to work with the Nazis, got very far without having their reputations besmirched, and rightfully so. So we see a Bousquet or a Waldheim suffer for their past. Not so Izitbegovic, and I hope I can be excused for wondering why this is the case.
As for having been on the left sympathizers of Trotsky or others, I certainly have a bit more sympathy for these than for fascist sympathizers - quite simply, I know what side I'm on. (And so does Tony Blair - and it's not my side.)
Besmirched when? Postwar West Germany was riddled with ex-Nazis. The second most powerful man under Adenauer was the guy who wrote the Nuremberg Laws. One of Adenauer's ministers wasn't only a Nazi but a major war criminal and ex participant in the Beer Hall putsch, many others were ex party members. The German army was created by ex Wehrmacht officers with the guy who directed anti-partisan operations in Eastern Europe playing a major role. In France most senior civil servants backed Vichy, and not just out of opportunism. Few were purged after the war (basically only those who hadn't switched sides) French historians avoided that unpleasant fact before the eighties - in fact the government and most historians sought to suppress it e.g. the reaction to Paxton's groundbreaking study that came out in the early seventies or Ophuls' Le Chagrin et la pitie.
Ex-sympathizers of totalitarian leftism may be on my side now, but current ones aren't. I think we went over this re: Pinochet and Castro - given that I view those two as equivalent you can imagine what I think of liking Mao. As I've explained in the past I have more sympathy for Communists sixty or eighty years ago than I do for fascists of that time. I don't for any espoused any variant of communism in the past few decades. For me democracy and political freedom trump economic justice. Blair limits his violent revolutionary dreams to foreign countries, communists want that plus the same at home, so in the abstract Blair's a lesser evil, though able to do far more harm in reality due to his greater power.
Tudjman' past is multi-colored, and it includes an Ustashe stint. The partisan side came later.
But also think that America's boogeyman status in Europe and the world is often too easy an excuse for Europeans. Actually, especially for Europeans since so often American and European interests overlap, and when that happens you hear nary a peep from the continent. Iraq is different, the US and the UK decided to go it alone, mainly. And certainly, the arrows of blame travel over water. But even in Iraq, you have to recognize that certain countries in Europe had massive interests in trade and infrastructure build out, including deals in currency denomination.
Maybe I'm just cynical.
