As the Register went to press, NATO had ended its bombing campaign and Serbs had begun pulling out of Kosovo when new troubling developments arose: Serb soldiers burning homes in their wake, and Russian troops becoming involved in altercations with NATO forces.

In this second of two articles, the Register continues its look at how the conflict reached a crisis point, and where it could go from here.

Last week: The danger signs pointing to the current conflagration in the Balkans were present from early in the 1990s.

This week: International diplomacy focused on the conflict — with disastrous results.

Earlier in this decade it appeared that a bloody conflict in Bosnia could be avoided by letting the three sides involved negotiate their own settlement under the auspices of a special commission of the European Community.

Analysis Second of two parts

On Feb. 23, 1992, in Lisbon, Portugal, the three Bosnian leaders — Alija Izetbegovic for the Bosnian Muslims, Radovan Karadzic for the Bosnian Serbs, and Mate Boban for the Bosnian Croats — agreed to a confederation divided into three ethnic regions: the Swiss cantonization of Bosnia. However, returning to Sarajevo, Izetbegovic told U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann that he did not like the agreement.

Zimmermann was quoted as saying, “I told him, if he didn't like it, why sign it?” Izetbegovic then publicly renounced the Lisbon agreement. (In a Sept. 30, 1993, letter to The New York Times, Zimmermann disputes this account.)

On March 16, the three sides signed a new agreement in Rambouillet, France, to divide Bosnia into “three constituent units,” but, once again, Izetbegovic backed out. According to a high-ranking State Department official, quoted in The New York Times, “The U.S. policy was to encourage Izetbegovic to break with the partition plan.”

In March, Karadzic predicted “a civil war between ethnic groups and religions with hundreds of thousands dead and hundreds of towns destroyed. After such a war, we should have completely the same situation: three BosniaHerzegovinas, which we have right now.” By early April, 12 European Community members and the United States granted recognition of Bosnian independence. As predicted, full-scale civil war erupted.

What can account for the role of Western diplomacy on this issue? Ambassador Zimmermann said, “Our view was that we might be able to head off a Serbian power grab by internationalizing the problem.

“Our hope was the Serbs would hold off if it was clear Bosnia had the recognition of Western countries. It turned out we were wrong.”

Instead, the Western powers fired the starting gun for what was an unnecessary war. One of the most basic principles of foreign policy is to keep local problems local, not to internationalize them.

Rule No. 1

If any part of the world speaks to the danger of internationalizing local problems, it is the Balkans. Zimmermann now concedes that “the Lisbon agreement wasn't bad at all.” The Bosnian Muslims must surely agree with him, since they suffered the worst casualties and human rights abuses, and have never since been offered as good an agreement.

Unfortunately, Karadzic's predictions have come true in terms of causalities and the scale of destruction. The only thing he did not foresee was that he would become an indicted war criminal. He was correct, however, that Bosnia would be right back where it started, with three Bosnia-Herzegovinas.

The Kosovo case is also a struggle over sovereignty and nationality. Kosovo is universally recognized, except by many Kosovar Albanians, to be part of Serbia.

The Yugoslav federal government, not Slobodan Milosevic, revoked Albanian autonomy in 1989, after a 14-year period of autonomy granted by then President Josef Tito. Milosevic had made his political reputation in an earlier visit to the region, when he told the Kosovar Serbs that no one would beat them any more.

Ethnic Cleansing

The term, if not the practice, of “ethnic cleansing” was formulated in 1983 by a Kosovar Serb parliamentarian to describe the treatment of Kosovar Serbs by Kosovar Albanians. The Serbs had been cleansed from Kosovo during World War II, and were not allowed to return by Tito. The sizable Serb minority was then eclipsed by the Albanian birthrate. Also, the Kosovar Albanians made it sufficiently uncomfortable for the Serbs that an estimated 130,000 left the region between 1966 and 1989, including 50,000 during the period of autonomy.

One might call it ethnic cleansing in slow motion.

Nonetheless, the Serbs were worse than foolish not to work with Ibrahim Rugova and other moderate Albanians who espoused nonviolent means for their political goals. The Kosovo Liberation Army, with origins in both the fascist and communist pasts, began a series of provocations in the last several years, that included weekly assassinations of Serb postmen and policemen, as well as of moderate Kosovar Albanians.

Serb forces obligingly retaliated with the expected viciousness. When the atrocities reached sufficient proportions, the West was ready with the Hitler analogy to explain events. Through the loss of a relatively small number of people (less than 3,000 in the preceding several years), the Kosovo Liberation Army was able to obtain in its service the finest air force in the world. NATO has been fighting on the side of the Kosovo Liberation Army in its civil war against the Serbs. The fact that NATO thinks it is fighting for democracy in Kosovo is in no way likely to change the consequences of the outcome. The sorry lesson awaiting the West is that Greater Albanian nationalism is not morally superior to Serbian nationalism.

NATO committed an extraordinary blunder in the Rambouillet accords by insisting Serbia agree to de facto independence for Kosovo. No Serb leader could have accepted such terms. By resisting them, Milosevic gained far broader Serbian support than he had ever before enjoyed.

Faced with what appeared to be the inevitable loss of part of his country with the Kosovar Albanians in it, Milosevic came upon the brutal expedient of keeping Kosovo without its people, or at least of driving them out until he could destroy their insurgency. While his behavior is inexcusable, it was folly for NATO to drive him, or any Serb leader, into this position.

Also, Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo would have been impossible with the presence of the 1,400 observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who were withdrawn so NATO could begin its bombing campaign.

NATO's ‘Victory?’

The bombing campaign created the conditions it was meant to prevent. Without a hint of irony, NATO then announced its war objective of returning to their homes hundreds of thousands of refugees who could not have been driven out in the first place had NATO's actions not created the opportunity for their expulsion.

Russian mediation has now brought about a resolution in Kosovo short of the NATO Rambouillet objectives that would have been obtainable before the slaughter began. In other words, another unnecessary war. The Rambouillet requirement that the Yugoslavian government objected to most vehemently — a three-year transition period leading to a referendum on independence in Kosovo — has been dropped, leaving Yugoslavia's sovereignty over Kosovo intact, despite a grant of local autonomy.

The other measure ceded by NATO concerns the composition of the international force overseeing the return of the refugees and the U.N. authorization of that force. Despite these gains, Yugoslavia can hardly be said to have “won” the war since its infrastructure has been largely destroyed. But is this victory for NATO?

NATO's “victory” means either one of two undesirable outcomes: a NATO military protectorate in Kosovo for the next several decades or, absent the political will to maintain a protectorate, the acceptance of an independent Kosovo Liberation Army-controlled Kosovo, whose existence will fire the region toward a Greater Albania that will destabilize Macedonia, Greece, Albania and Montenegro.

Who will be Hitler then?

The peaceful devolution of Yugoslavia was probably the only practical goal for Western policy after 1990. The West consistently mismanaged the disintegration of that state by taking sides in the struggles over sovereignty, and then blamed the results of its own bungling on “Serbian aggression.” At the very least, the West helped to create the conditions and opportunities for that aggression by inciting it, instead of seeking realistic political solutions to the problems. The West missed its opportunity for a comprehensive settlement in the former Yugoslavia. It had better do some hard thinking — outside the analogies it has chosen to understand the very complex problems of the region — before it does more damage, with consequences far outside the Balkans.

Robert Reilly, a former special assistant to President Reagan, writes from Washington, D.C.