The tribunal had no battalions at its command, no bombers, not even a few bounty hunters to snatch Milosevic from his stronghold in Belgrade. He faced no visible threat from opponents at home; if anything, the charges made him stronger by arousing the defiance of his people. No one expected to see Milosevic, 57, hanging from a lamppost, much less wearing handcuffs in The Hague. But despite its mostly symbolic nature, the indictment took the war to a turning point, suddenly intensifying the pressure on Milosevic.
The first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes, he officially became a pariah, more isolated than ever. Warrants were served that made him a wanted man in every member state of the United Nations. His homeland became his bunker. He was trapped there under increasingly heavy siege, not just by the tribunal’s lawyers, but by the armed forces arrayed against him. Last week NATO formally agreed to deploy 50,000 troops on Kosovo’s borders–ostensibly for eventual peacekeeping duty but potentially as a spearhead for an invasion force. And this week, in what promises to be clear weather, the allies intend to hit Milosevic with the heaviest air raids of the war.
Before prosecutor Louise Arbour hurled her thunderbolt, some Serbs had the impression that Milosevic was getting ready for a negotiated settlement to the war over Kosovo. The indictment made it much more difficult for him to pose as a peacemaker–or even to negotiate with the Western allies. The formal charges also reduced the possibility of letting Milosevic off the hook, if that’s what any allied leader is tempted to do. “It makes it harder for NATO to do a shabby deal, doesn’t it?” observed a British official.
Time is running out for any kind of negotiated solution. NATO officials on both sides of the Atlantic said diplomacy will have to produce a result by about June 18, when a summit begins for the seven leading democracies plus Russia. “The G-8 summit is more or less the outer limit for the diplomatic track,” says a senior NATO diplomat. If diplomacy doesn’t work, sources say, the alliance will concentrate on a military solution.
Gen. Wesley Clark, the American who commands NATO forces, now has close to 1,200 combat aircraft on hand, more than three times the number he started with 10 weeks ago. After a NATO meeting in Brussels, Clark was quoted as saying he plans “round-the-clock, omnidirectional, all-out” bombing strikes. NATO will try to virtually shut down Belgrade and other cities, hitting power, water, telephones, computers and transport. Other allied warplanes will pound Serb forces in Kosovo. All that will bring Milosevic to his knees–or not. “Either way, our options clarify,” says a NATO official.
One possibility is the use of ground troops. Clark has already briefed the Pentagon on three “forced-entry options.” The first would be a quick attack by about 60,000 airmobile troops and light infantry. The second would use about 90,000 troops, more heavily armed, and the third would entail an all-out armored assault by about 200,000 soldiers. So far, Bill Clinton hasn’t come close to deciding in favor of a land war, and it’s probably too late to pull off the heaviest offensive before winter. But military planners say there’s still barely enough time for the other two options.
The allies don’t know how Milosevic will react to the increasing pressure. The Yugoslav leader confides in almost no one except his wife, Mirjana Markovic, a hard- liner at least as fanatical as himself. One senior U.S. official worries that if diplomacy fails, Milosevic could possibly become “the ultimate Adolf in a bunker, destroying as many Albanians as possible, absolutely uninterested in the fate of the Serbs.” This source says the analogy to Hitler’s final days “is on everyone’s mind–the Albanians as Jews, the Serbs as Germans. Everyone’s mindful of the fact that [both of Milosevic’s] parents committed suicide.”
If he is arrested and convicted, Milosevic would face what he might regard as a fate worse than death: a life sentence in a Dutch prison. The war-crimes tribunal accused him and his aides of responsibility for the illegal deportation of 740,000 Kosovar Albanians and the murder of 340 people, the number of cases documented so far. The other indictees were Vlajko Stojiljkovic, the Interior minister; Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Army chief of staff; Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, and Milan Milutinovic, the president of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main component. Some U.S. officials had hoped that Milutinovic could be a stand-in negotiator for Milosevic, as he was at the abortive Rambouillet peace talks earlier this year.
“Everybody knew Milosevic would be indicted sooner or later, although we didn’t control the timing,” said a senior U.S. official. Arbour’s charges were based mainly on eyewitness accounts from the refugees who have poured into Albania and Macedonia. Sources said the United States handed over a relatively small amount of in-telligence material, including overhead photographs of apparent mass graves and ethnic-cleansing operations in progress. The British provided more sensitive material, including intercepted communications, some of which directly implicates Milosevic in war crimes, NATO officials said.
If milosevic is under increasing pressure, so are ordinary Yugoslavs. The bravado they displayed at the start of the war has faded away. There are no patriotic crowds demonstrating on bridges; now, on clear nights suitable for bombing, motorists race fearfully across. The defiant rock concerts in downtown Belgrade no longer draw big crowds. The loss of electricity and the lack of running water have become routine, and most people no longer have jobs to go to.
Last week, the hot rumor in the capital was that Milosevic had suffered a heart attack or stroke. But when he met with a former Greek prime minister, Milosevic appeared to be in good health. He is not popular, but most Serbs regard him as one of their own. “We will kill him,” says a pensioner in Novi Belgrade, “but when we want to, not when they want us to.” The war-crimes charges were a new cause for despair in Belgrade, because they seemed to complicate and delay the peace process. “Who will sign?” asked one of the few European diplomats left in town.
Milosevic and his supporters have taken refuge in a kind of Serbian-nationalist twilight zone, where their peculiar reasoning makes perfect sense. Goran Matic, a government minister without portfolio, claims that all those refugees on Western television are actually 20,000 paid actors who move around to create the illusion of mass deportations. The exodus from Kosovo is blamed on NATO’s bombing, not Serbia’s ethnic cleansing. The “real” reason Serbia is under attack, some loyalists maintain, is that Washington sees Kosovo as the key to Serbia and Serbia as the key to controlling Europe. Milosevic did not comment publicly on his indictment, but true believers insist it is all part of the Western plot.
At least Milosevic still seems willing to talk. He was visited last week by the Russian envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who called again for a bombing halt. Earlier, Chernomyrdin warned on the op-ed page of The Washington Post that if the bombing didn’t stop, he would advise President Boris Yeltsin “to suspend Russian participation in the negotiating process” and to back away from cooperation with Washington. Chernomyrdin got some support from another op-ed writer, Jimmy Carter in The New York Times. The former president accused Washington of taking “punitive action against the entire nation” of Yugoslavia. But despite Chernomyrdin’s exertions, Russia didn’t seem to have much influence on Yugoslavia.
The United States continued to insist that it would not deal directly with a war criminal. “We’re not talking to Milosevic, except in one language: bombing,” said a senior official. To get a settlement, NATO will have to bargain with Milosevic indirectly–if not through Chernomyrdin, then through someone else, such as Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, the European Union’s chosen mediator. “This is very much a work in progress,” Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of State, said at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “The question is, what is the Yugoslav leadership prepared to accept?”
Belgrade still hadn’t budged on the tough issues. Milosevic insists that Yugoslavia must be allowed to keep sizable forces in Kosovo and that foreign peacekeepers must be commanded by the United Nations and composed mostly of non-NATO troops. And he won’t allow the return of all displaced Kosovars–only the relative few whose identity papers weren’t confiscated by Serb forces. So far, neither the indictments nor the peace talks promise a quick end to the suffering of Yugoslavia’s people, whether they are civilians waiting for the bombs each night in Belgrade or refugees still searching for food, shelter and a way out of Kosovo. And Milosevic hunkers down in the homeland that has become his bunker, looking for his own way out.
