Skip Navigation

News Home
Defence
Security
Public Safety
Law Enforcement
Transport
Sign up for Jane's News Briefs

Non-Subscriber Extract

Milosevic finds his bridges are burnt


Milosevic finds his bridges are burnt

The NATO air campaign over Yugoslavia was into its fourth week as JIR went to press, with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair among others identifying the removal of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic as the ultimate objective. Recently back from the Balkans, Zoran Kusovac reviews recent events and concludes that Milosevic's political calculations have finally let him down.

THE BEGINNING of NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia on 24 March marked the end of a long and tedious game of attempts to find a political solution to the problem of force. Since the violence escalated in the Spring of 1998, the international community had been declaring itself unwilling to let the Yugoslav Army (Vojska Jugoslavije ­ VJ) and the forces of the Serbian Interior Ministry (Ministarstvo Unutrasnjih Poslova ­ MUP) use their supremacy in manpower and hardware to enforce a 'solution' for Kosovo based on political creeds unacceptable to the West at the end of the 20th Century. The unleashed Serbian brutality, which caused hundreds of civilian deaths and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons among the ethnic Albanian Kosovar population, was slowed down twice by threats of NATO airstrikes. In October 1998 an ill-conceived and unimplementable deal -- in effect a one-sided 'cease-fire' which put 'compliance verifiers' from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe into Kosovo -- temporarily removed the imminent threat of allied action.
 
Enshrining the inevitable
The October threat was serious enough, and with some 2,000 unarmed Western personnel in Kosovo NATO quickly realised that a credible force was needed to provide some sort of protection. Consequently a 2,000-strong NATO force was placed in neighbouring Macedonia to extract the 'verifiers' in case of an emergency. Another corollary of the realisation that the Holbrooke-Milosevic deal was a bad one (and unlikely to provide a lasting settlement) was NATO's decision to keep the core of the aerial task force earmarked for strikes against Serbia and Montenegro. The threat of NATO action was renewed in January following an upsurge in the fighting, and it forced the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians to attend 'proximity talks' in Rambouillet and Paris in February and March.

Predictably, the talks failed, but they also produced a curious situation: the Albanian delegation, dominated by the Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Çlirimtare ë Kosovës ­ UCK/KLA) finally yielded to pressure and accepted the Kosovo Interim Agreement presented by the international community, placing the ball firmly in Milosevic's court. The proposed agreement itself was a curious concoction based on a mixture of legalistic prejudices, realpolitik objectives, idealistic goals and ignorance of Balkans' collective psychology -- in short a nightmare to implement, if it were ever to be agreed to.

The approach of the two local players to the negotiations reflected their own prejudices: the Serbian delegation gambled on their opposite numbers' political inexperience and let their prejudices of the ethnic Albanians' inferiority mislead them into what proved to be the wrong tactics: wait until the Albanians shoot themselves in the foot in the eyes of the international community. For all their inexperience the Kosovo Albanian delegation, led by 29-year-old KLA representative Hashim Thaqi, realised that within a year in the eyes of the USA they had grown from a terrorist group to a major partner in upholding European stability. They played the right card and, after a dramatic postponement to 'consult with the people', signed the deal despite its flaws.

This exposed Milosevic in all his weakness: he knew that to sign would mean effectively losing control of Kosovo forever -- at least in the sense of the absolute, unchecked power he is used to. To practically renounce control of Kosovo and accept a NATO presence there that could run into decades would put him in an unenviable situation on the domestic political scene, with the Serbs finally awakening to the grim realities of defeats that have followed every campaign they started since 1991: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Worse still, they might even think of challenging the authority of their erstwhile unquestioned leader as well as calling for democracy and a market economy, the budding success of which in Montenegro was already starting murmurs of discontent in Belgrade.

Milosevic, fully conscious of the seriousness of NATO's willingness to act, decided to staunchly refuse to co-operate and to face the attack. Future events will prove beyond doubt that his decision was based on two key factors: perfect knowledge of the Serb's irrational collective psychology; and an extraordinary misconception of the thinking of the international community.

The initial wave of attacks hit predictable targets: early warning radars, air defence sites, MiG-29 and MiG-21 bases and several VJ and MUP bases and headquarters, producing results that were probably expected and predicted even by Belgrade's military planners. Reactions within Serbia were also predictable: national defiance centred around Milosevic and the armed forces, eradicating all political dissent and annihilating all independent media and liberal thinkers. Fed by the signals received from his morally corrupt, incompetent and ever-dwindling diplomacy, Milosevic most probably gambled that the international reaction to an unprecedented attack against a sovereign country -- unsanctioned by the UN, of at least questionable standing before international law and contrary to the modern practice of international reactions -- would quickly force NATO to abandon the operation. Initial protests in European capitals were mostly genuine and significant and were apparently gaining momentum. Various liberal thinkers and political underdogs, from insignificant radical leftists to rabid nationalists, produced more noise than substance, but opinion polls were beginning to show results that could have proven unpleasant for NATO.

Milosevic's mistake
Then Milosevic committed what will prove to be his biggest and costliest strategic miscalculation ever: he decided to use the opportunity to expel as many ethnic Albanians from Kosovo as possible, believing that the benefit from Serbia would be two-fold. In this bizarre calculation the 'Albanian problem' of Kosovo would be solved in the long term by reducing them to a percentage that would neither pose a realistic challenge to Serb rule nor qualify them for any substantial participation in the future political status. The second benefit, Milosevic reckoned, would be the de-stabilisation of neighbouring Macedonia, Albania and the insubordinate republic of Montenegro through the massive influx of refugees, with inherent logistical, political and above

all ethnic problems caused by a sudden and drastic imbalance in the two Slavic states. All that, in this wishful thinking scenario, would put further and final pressure on NATO to stop bombing and establish the great manipulator Milosevic once again as a key political partner and an indispensable strategic guarantor of regional stability.

Milosevic, however, has been living in an authoritarian and reclusive setting far too long and his once commendable understanding of the West's ways this time failed him. He probably never dreamed that television pictures of hundreds of thousands of miserable and desolate refugees, particularly scenes of ethnic Albanians being herded onto overcrowded trains to be ethnically cleansed, would in the West strike familiar chords of deja-vu with Nazi Germany's past. Discontent in the West died down within a matter of hours, killed by the guilt of European collective consciousness which never crossed Milosevic's mind.

Relieved of the burden of liberal reactions NATO could now only damage itself, and it kept that damage to an acceptable degree. Despite occasional civilian deaths, most of which -- like the bombing of a railway bridge as a civilian train was crossing -- can be explained as incidents of war, and fewer cases of incompetence and blunder (the most notable being the bombing of a refugee convoy in Kosovo), NATO has been proving that its aerial campaign had a long-term strategy.

As JIR went to press on 21 April, Milosevic's strategic assets were decimated. The long list of key military targets destroyed includes the main coastal radars at Herceg-Novi and Kruc in Montenegro; air traffic controls, shelters and storage facilities at military airports in Batajnica, Golubovci, Ponikve, Ladjevci, Slatina, Nis and Sombor; electronic communications and secure data transmitters at Jastrebac, Tornik, Fruska Gora, Gucevo, Grmija, Kutlovac, Cigota, Crni vrh, Mokra gora and Bogutovac; the main SA-2 and SA-3 sites of Belgrade's air defences; half of the dozen or so Yugoslav Air Force (Jugoslovensko Ratno Vazduhoplovstvo ­ JRV) MiG-29s along with numerous MiG-21s and other aircraft. Much more indicative of NATO's strategic thinking are the targets which Yugoslav propaganda unsuccessfully tries to portray as civilian but which have an obvious dual use: all crude-oil refining capacities have been destroyed, as well as an estimated 75 per cent of oil reserves and numerous military storage facilities; major military and police headquarters and crucial defence technology installations have also been hit.

The Military Technical Institute and the Air Force Technical Institute at Zarkovo and the Security Institute in Belgrade, believed to be key facilities for co-ordination of all defence production and which housed most technical documentation, have been destroyed. Except for two basic chemical plants in Baric and Sabac, spared probably just for fear of producing ecological disasters, military production in Serbia has been annihilated. The list of factories which can no longer contribute to Serbia's war effort is long, covering everything from explosives factories to tank assembly facilities.

The only element of NATO's strategy which could be termed somewhat surprising was the decision not to wage the aerial campaign in clearly defined stages but instead hitting at defence assets, military production and strategic communications at the same time. Even as the VJ and MUP in Kosovo remain largely unscathed, their reinforcement and logistical resupply capabilities have been seriously depleted by the destruction of key bridges on the strategic railway lines (including the Belgrade-Bar line which could be used to send reinforcements to overthrow the liberal Montenegrin government) and numerous road bridges. With only one bridge on the Danube left standing and many other bridges targeted, Yugoslavia's defences are increasingly being cut into isolated pockets.
 
The slow burn
All these attacks are slowly but surely making their mark. Their psychological effects have not yet had time to settle in, but the economy is grinding to a standstill and supply of staple goods, so far kept relatively stable by draconian martial-law anti-contraband provisions, will soon start to suffer from lack of production and depletion of stored goods. Increased threats of ground action, with first hints at it not being limited to Kosovo and a possible second front opening in the north from Hungary, will hasten the spiralling decline of Milosevic's defences, in which the VJ's mobilisation potential and its hardware will become largely insignificant.

The final outcome cannot be doubted. For NATO, it is the question of keeping credible force levels and upgrading them to respond to changing needs as they arise. For Milosevic it is the question of how long the irrational refusal to stop further pulverisation of Serbia can be kept up. The message that the Serbs have lost will undoubtedly be delivered by a NATO tank. The only question remaining is where it will be delivered: in Pristina or Belgrade

Photograph: The destroyed railway bridge on the river Lim near Bistrica, 280km southwest of Belgrade. Destroyed by a NATO air strike on 15 April, this rail link could have been used by Serb forces intent on overthrowing the more liberal Montenegrin government: Belgrade's reluctant partner in the Federal Republic.
(P A News)

Zoran Kusovac
Zoran Kusovac is a South-Eastern Europe analyst and consultant who has covered the Balkan affairs for over 10 years. He has recently returned from Macedonia and Montenegro

End of non-subscriber extract