Four thousand five hundred miles away, as the afternoon sun dipped into the sky above Pristina, Bill Clinton was joined in
the Oval Office by Sandy Berger, his national-security adviser. Berger’s message was stark; the last-ditch mission to Belgrade by Richard Holbrooke, who last fall had brokered the broken ceasefire between Milosevic and the Albanian Kosovars, had failed utterly. “We’re going to go, unless you say otherwise,” said Berger. Clinton replied tersely: “Let’s do it.” Berger went back to his office and called Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who relayed the presidential decision to the office in Brussels of Gen. Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander of NATO. Around two hours later, by which time night had fallen in Pristina, journalists gathered in the Grand Hotel heard five large explosions. Windows rattled, and to the west of the city, around the area of the Yugoslav Army barracks, orange and white flames pierced the night sky. Although nobody knew how it was going to end, the largest air war in Europe since 1945 had begun.
Forget Somalia and Haiti; forget North Korea; forget even Bosnia. “This,” said a senior American official, “is the most serious foreign-policy crisis the president has faced since he was inaugurated.” If Clinton ever doubted that before, he surely did not after Saturday, when an American F-117 stealth fighter went down west of Belgrade. Again, Berger delivered the news: around 3:15 that afternoon, he told the president that the plane and its single crewman were missing. At 9:35 Berger had good news–a combat search-and-rescue team, based at Tuzla, in Bosnia, had found the downed pilot, who had been hiding for seven hours, and got him safely out of Yugoslavia by helicopter. The pilot was reported to be in good condition.
Beyond the day-to-day drama, the war is a study in strategic paradoxes. Operation Allied Force was designed, in Clinton’s words, “to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians”–and yet as the attacks took place, Serb forces seemed to be redoubling their murderous atrocities. The bombing was meant to advance a peace accord that promised Kosovo real autonomy within Yugoslavia–an autonomy that the Serbs are not prepared to grant and that most Kosovars, who now demand independence, do not want. The intervention in Kosovo was supposed to help guarantee peace and prosperity in Europe–and yet most of the attackers were American, while European cities like the capitals of Greece and Macedonia saw demonstrations against the bombing. The planes in the attack included, on its first combat mission, the B-2 stealth bomber, the most expensive warplane ever built–which was being used in a war of medieval brutality, where appropriate technology sometimes means finding the right-size spoon with which to gouge out an enemy’s eyes. Allied Force was planned and implemented by NATO, an alliance solemnly dedicated to defensive actions against aggressive sovereign powers–and which now found itself on the offensive, ranged on one side of a civil war. Clinton’s decision was supposed, Berger said, to involve America’s national interests–and yet alienated Russia, the one nation with the real if rusting capacity to annihilate American cities. “I think this is quite a unique situation,” said Berger last week. It better be.
Give Clinton credit for this, at least: he knows that Kosovo is one of the most difficult and important challenges he has ever faced. The president has become convinced that the United States waited too long to intervene militarily in Bosnia, a perception that was strengthened when he read Holbrooke’s book on the Bosnia endgame. Clinton does not want to repeat the mistakes of the mid-1990s. On Saturday morning, as he heard reports about Serb atrocities in Kosovo, Clinton calmly told his advisers, “This isn’t a 30-second commercial. This is going to take a sustained effort.”
For now, Clinton has the support of most Americans; in the NEWSWEEK Poll, 53 percent said they supported the president’s decision, while 36 percent disapproved of it. At the end of his televised speech to the nation last week, Clinton let out a long exhale with the air of a man who had struggled through an ordeal. “I haven’t been sleeping much,” the president told House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt, when the two spoke by telephone just before Operation Allied Force began. By all accounts, Clinton has been involved, knowledgeable and focused over the last few weeks–but he is under no illusions. This is a war; in wars, young men get killed.
True, up until the downing of the F-117, a crude audit of the first few days of the war indicated nothing but triumph for the NATO forces. The cruise missiles fired from B-52 bombers and a U.S. Sixth Fleet battle group in the Adriatic slammed into targets in Kosovo and Serbia; bombs from F-15s, F-16s, Harriers and F/A-18s hit Yugoslav air-defense systems, fuel and ammunition dumps and military barracks. And when three Russian-built MiG-29s of the Yugoslav Air Force flew over the Bosnian border, they were detected by an American AWACS over Hungary. In a brief dogfight, a pair of F-15s, on routine patrol, shot down the two lead MiGs with a missile apiece. The third MiG turned tail; by Saturday Milosevic had lost five of his top-of-the-line fighters, and had only 10 left.
But Allied Force was no pushover for the NATO troops. The Yugoslav Air Force won high marks for its skill and bravery. Many in Washington, perplexed that the Yugoslavs seemed loath to use their extensive arsenal of surface-to-air missiles, worried that Milosevic was husbanding the missiles in Serbia’s copious forests. In Washington, the Pentagon acknowledged that it had received a cyberattack on its systems, which could have come from Yugoslavia or others opposed to the NATO assault. And those who want to get really worried noted that Belgrade had a fleet of five hard-to-detect diesel submarines in the Adriatic, where 2,000 U.S. Marines were afloat. To cap it all, by last weekend the weather over the Balkans had turned murky, making high-level bombing difficult. On Saturday, Clark authorized a second phase of operations, in which NATO forces will go in “low and slow,” attacking Serb artillery, tanks and forces in Kosovo. Inevitably, that shift in target will expose allied air crews to even greater danger.
If Clinton and other allied leaders were coming to terms with Kosovo’s tragic choices, so were the Kosovars themselves. In the winter months, as the ceasefire between Serbs and guerrilla forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army broke down, a T shirt became popular in the province. Its logo: NATO: just do it. It was hard to find an ethnic Albanian who didn’t believe that Tomahawks would end the war and Serbian domination in the province.
The Albanians got it wrong. By mid-March, it was clear that–unless Holbrooke worked a miracle–Milosevic was not going to endorse a peace deal that the Albanians had reluctantly accepted in talks at Rambouillet, France. While waiting for the Kosovars to sign the deal (which they did on March 18), Milosevic began to beef up his forces in the province. By the time the bombing started, Americans estimated that there were 18,000 Serb forces inside Kosovo, compared with just 4,500 a month ago. Worse, regular detachments of the Serb Army were being supplemented by paramilitaries, whose bloodthirsty tactics had been honed in the Bosnian war. Worse still, as the threat of bombing grew, almost everyone else left. The 1,400 expatriate observers of the OSCE pulled out on March 20; many journalists and representatives of humanitarian agencies followed suit. (Those journalists, including NEWSWEEK’s Juliette Terzieff, who stayed in Pristina until the bombing began, were forced to leave the next morning.) For the Kosovars, the flight of outsiders was an unmitigated disaster; even Serb paramilitaries think twice about killing someone if a Dutch doctor or an American journalist is watching. By contrast, all the spy satellites in the world won’t stop someone from slitting someone else’s throat.
Nor can satellites counthow many throats have been slit. By Saturday, the world’s press was full of alleged atrocities committed by Serb forces in Kosovo, including the use of Albanians as human shields in munitions factories and, most dramatically, the claim that 15,000 to 20,000 Albanians were being driven before tanks in a forced march. British Defense Secretary George Robertson described Milosevic as a “serial ethnic cleanser” whose forces were “bombarding villages to the point of obliteration,” while Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said, “There is reason to fear the worst.”
With Serb irregulars around, fearing the worst is sensible. Still, since last Thursday morning there have been few solid firsthand accounts from Kosovo. “To be honest, we know virtually nothing at all,” said Judith Kumin of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. Asked about the reports of a forced march, a well-informed OSCE source in Macedonia said: “We’ve heard those stories. I haven’t discounted them, but I have no reason to believe they’re true.”
Plainly, some real atrocities have taken place. Numerous sources report that last Thursday Bajram Kelmendi, an Albanian human-rights lawyer, was dragged from his home with his two sons; their bodies are said to have been discovered the next day at a gas station south of Pristina. Speaking by telephone from inside Kosovo, a senior member of the KLA’s general staff gave NEWSWEEK a long list of alleged atrocities: 115 men executed in Srbica; 200 in Podujevo, where most of the town was said to have been burned; 100 in Suva Reka. In Pristina, said the KLA source, Serbs were systematically killing well-known Albanian professionals and intellectuals. OSCE sources independently confirm that in Pristina, Serb forces looted and then torched a row of shops–Belgrade TV then showed the flames and attributed the fire to off-target NATO bombs.
This much is clear: the KLA, which a few weeks ago strutted arrogantly around Kosovo, has been unable to protect civilians. A hit-and-run band, most of whose operations had been in the countryside, it had claimed to have cadres hidden throughout urban areas. “They lied,” said one distraught Pristina resident, cowering in a basement while Serb paramilitaries roamed the streets. The consequence is that Kosovo is now awash with “internal” refugees, with perhaps 260,000 forced to flee their homes in the last year. In the first few days of the war, relatively few refugees crossed into neighboring countries, though many of those who did so had harrowing tales. On Thursday, according to the UNHCR, a large party from the village of Goden made it to Albania. Of the 174 refugees, 164 were women and children. They reported that Serb forces arrived in Goden during a funeral and later killed 20 men in the village schoolyard. By Saturday, the flow of refugees to Albania was picking up; about 2,700 crossed that day. There are officially around 12,000 refugees in Macedonia, though the true number may be more like 25,000. Milosevic would doubtless like to cleanse Kosovo of Albanians, but refugees have to travel down roads controlled by Serb forces and across borders that have reportedly been mined. Fleeing the carnage is a risky business.
And what, precisely, will Clinton risk? His calculations now are of two kinds. First, he has to balance his objectives in Kosovo against other American interests, like the preservation of NATO’s unity on the eve of its 50th anniversary. So far (and that’s an important qualifier), NATO looks solid. Though both the Greek and the Italian governments have called for a reopening of the political dialogue with Milosevic, in NATO’s councils neither has been overly obstructive. More important is the effect of Allied Force on America’s relations with Russia, a traditional ally of Serbia, even if all recent Russian governments have sooner or later come to regard Milosevic as an unreliable pain.
Moscow’s first reaction to NATO’s actions was dramatic. Informed while flying to Washington that Holbrooke’s mission had failed and hence that NATO would bomb, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov turned around and headed back to Moscow. After Allied Force started, Boris Yeltsin fumed that the attack was “an act of unjustified aggression,” while Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, visibly angry at a stormy press conference, said the operation was “an attempt by the U.S. to dominate the world militarily and economically.” On Thursday, crowds in Moscow pelted the American Embassy with pots of ink, beer bottles (full ones) and eggs, and at the headquarters of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party volunteers signed up for service in Serbia. Washington’s hope is that most of this is posturing. On Wednesday, Clinton had a spirited 45-minute conversation with Yeltsin, in which the Russian reiterated his opposition to the strikes. But both leaders, according to Washington sources, agreed that their overall relationship should not be held hostage to the NATO strikes.
If Clinton is truly serious about protecting the Kosovars and forcing Milosevic to back off, NATO air crews will have to sustain close-quarter air attacks. Even they may not stop the killing. Only ground troops in the Balkan hills are certain to do that, though Clinton has ruled out the use of any American ground forces in an offensive role. (Had Milosevic accepted the Rambouillet accord, 4,000 U.S. troops would have been part of a NATO peacekeeping force of 28,000 in Kosovo.)
For all these reasons, Clinton must now be praying that Allied Force has one of two desirable outcomes. The first would be for Milosevic to reverse course and sign up to Rambouillet; the second would be a coup by disaffected generals. There is no sign yet that Milosevic is ready to back down. As for replacing him, the mood in Belgrade this week was hardening in support of Milosevic, as liberal, pro-Western Serbs ran for cover. “Working for foreign journalists means committing suicide,” said one 26-year-old critic of Milosevic, while another added, “Everybody is afraid. The witch hunt has begun and nobody wants to be labeled a traitor.”
Out in the Adriatic Sea, meanwhile, other young men, manning American warships, go about their humdrum, deadly duty. In the Command Information Center of the USS Philippine Sea, full of monitors, glass maps and computers, Chief Petty Officer Stanley Keeve, 31, from Landover, Md., gives the order to “execute” the launch of a Tomahawk. “In the end,” says Keeve, “the big picture is that Europe is going to be safer for this.” But the end is nowhere in sight.
