------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 07 May 1999 11:53:18 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: NOW COMES THE HARD PART: MAKING PEACE IN KOSOVO The Vancouver Sun Thursday, May 6, 1999 A Soldiers Story NOW COMES THE HARD PART: MAKING PEACE IN KOSOVO Ignoring military advice, NATO's political leaders proceeded with the air campaign; in doing so they accelerated and intensified the humanitarian crisis that continues unabated, oblivious to air strikes. By Lewis Mackenzie While the U.S. public's attention over the past few days has been focused on the release of their "POWs," whose main deprivations seem to have been the lack of TV and good old American hamburger, the media has neglected to report on an increased degree of optimism on the streets in Belgrade. As mentioned before, successful diplomacy is usually quiet diplomacy and not played out for public consumption on CNN, or CBC for that matter. The word on the street in Belgrade suggests that talks going on in Vienna are more substantial than is being reported and that a pause in the bombing is nigh. Naive wishful thinking? The end of the war will probably happen with a whimper not a bang (apologies to T.S. Eliot). When there is a cessation of hostilities, the challenge for the West begins with the five conditions demanded by NATO. Mind you, the alliance changes the wording of those conditions daily. For example: * "Withdrawal of all Yugoslav military and security" — the word "all" has quietly disappeared. * "A NATO-led force to implement any ceasefire" has evolved into "a multi-activated peace keeping force" — a much more practical condition in my opinion. The desire to grant autonomous status to Kosovo within the former Yugoslavia and the disarming of the Kosovo Liberation Army leaves only the "Immediate return of Kosovo Albanian refugees to their homes" to fill out the last of the five conditions laid down by NATO as the minimum criteria for peace. I'm quite sure that collectively NATO's five conditions will not bring peace to Kosovo. We were told by NATO that we had to bomb Yugoslavia to preclude a humanitarian disaster. Ignoring honest military advice, the political leadership of NATO decided to proceed (and I certainly endorse their right to do so even if it was a really bad decision) with the air campaign and in doing so accelerated and intensified the humanitarian display that continues unabated and oblivious to the air strikes. After the first NATO bomb fell, the Kosovo Albanians became the enemy in the eyes of the Serbs and the forceful deportation began. A significant number of the refugees will not want to go "home" for a number of reasons. They no longer trust Serb security forces and as long as the Serbs make up a percentage of the security apparatus in Kosovo, refugees will look elsewhere for quality of life. A significant number of relocated refugees will want to stay in their new homes. After all, for a large number of families having a son or daugh- ter work abroad was already a constant goal. Those who have lost everything and must rebuild will seriously question starting again in Kosovo. Those in Albania might stay in their mother country. Lastly, as the makeup of the Kosovo international security force is announced with its expected Slav Orthodox component, including Russia and Ukraine, the refugees will lose confidence that their safety will be guaranteed. We have yet to be told by our political leadership the full im- plications of deploying Canadian troops into Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission. Is the deployment not thought through and therefore unacceptable? If we are intentionally being kept in the dark, that too is un- worthy of a democratically elected government with a mandate to serve the interests of the Canadian people. When some baby born today in the Ottawa Civic Hospital be- comes a 20-year-old Canadian soldier on "peacekeeping" duty in Kosovo, we might well reflect on our eagerness to help the Eu- ropeans sort out yet another of their problems. Surely after 54 years they can deal with a crisis in a geographical area the size of Algonquin Park. Significantly the KLA will not disarm. Their stated "policy" is to resist any attempts to disarm them in spite of what some of their representatives agreed to in Rambouillet. Considering the West's record of "guaranteeing security" in northern Iraq and Vietnam you can't really blame them. The KLA's objective of fighting for nothing less than independence and ultimately union with Albania to create a Greater Albania should be a red flag for any western leader who thinks the Kosovo crisis ends once the bombing stops. The stated NATO desire to return Kosovo's pre-1989 au- tonomous status within the former Yugoslavia sounds more like something the Mad Hatter would suggest as each days passes. The thought that Kosovo Albanians would voluntarily return to live within such a political arrangement strikes me as absurd. _______________ Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, commanded UN troops during the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian civil war of 1992.
[PEN-L:6525] (Fwd) NOW COMES THE HARD PART: MAKING PEACE IN KOSOVO
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Fri, 7 May 1999 23:08:00 -0500