Kosovo menu -FISK/Cost of Peace/End of War?
MichaelP
War in The Balkans - Serb shrine foretells the awful destiny to come
By ROBERT FISK in Gracanica, Kosovo
In the visitors' book of the 14th-century monastery of Gracanica yesterday
morning a Serb called Blagujevic wrote these words: "Dear Jesus Christ and
Lord of all Kosovo Serbs - help the Serbs to endure this justified
struggle and to save their state of Kosovo-Metohija - and punish all the
enemies who want to destroy your people. Amen."
A Nato jet flew through the firmament high above us as we read
Blagujevic's prayer. There was a whisper and a low drum-roll of sound that
buried itself amid the high walls and candle-blackened frescos of Saint
Sava and his father at Gracanica. At the door, four Yugoslav soldiers had
arrived, one of them with two crosses dangling on his chest alongside his
steel military identification disc. They lay their Kalashnikov assault
rifles on top of each other by the ancient stone door and walked silently
into the church to pray for their families.
So many prayers there are now as Kosovo's day of reckoning grows nearer.
An hour before, beside the Casablanca discotheque and the monument to the
eternal unity of Serbs and Kosovo Albanians - Tito's little joke from the
1960s - God was asked by Archbishop Artemje of Decane to protect Kosovo's
Serbs in the coming days of darkness. The 600 Serb men, women and children
- unemployed factory workers, soldiers with their rifles on their backs,
girlfriends and wives and old men who once loved Tito - crossed themselves
beneath the dreary sun. The ministry of interior had banned this rally,
they were told, so they were meeting "in the shrine of God, under the holy
sky".
And what Archbishop Artemje in his long black robe told them was this: "We
will show our true patriotism for our holy places. Don't be frightened.
Don't leave your holy place empty. A wrong historical step cannot be
corrected. Whatever happens to us, we must stay in our homes, our
villages, in our cities."
Moma Trajkovic, who founded the Serbian Resistance Movement in 1989 in
support of President Slobodan Milosevic - though not any more, dear
reader, not any more - delivered a message that was directed at Nato and
the Belgrade government as well as God.
"We are sending a message to those who want to take revenge - that revenge
is not the answer," he shouted.
"Peace cannot be achieved by revenge but only in a shared life. We are not
for a war or for conflict but we will not be slaughtered on our doorsteps
like lambs. This is what we ask of those who make decisions about this
area - to come between those who would slaughter each other. Brothers and
sisters, we intend before the whole world to stay. Remaining in Kosovo is
our only chance.
"Unfortunately, those who brought us here will not allow us to fight. We
want to organise ourselves and to stay, no matter what the price, to stay
in our homes. If we leave Kosovo-Metohija, we shall never return, ever."
To decode this message, God will have understood the lambs as a reference
to Muslim sacrifice, and the bit about "those who make decisions" as an
appeal to Mr Milosevic and General Sir Michael Jackson of the still
virginal "K-For". No hint, of course, as to why the returning Albanian
refugees might want to take revenge or do any lamb-like slaughtering. A
"shared life" was not exactly on offer last month. Or even last week.
So it was a relief - once they had completed their prayers - to talk to
Ljuba and his three soldier comrades from Toplica in the little cafe
opposite the gateway at Gracanica. They could not have known we were
coming - I only decided on the trip to the monastery a few minutes earlier
- and it was we who chose to talk to them. These were frontline soldiers
under bombing, the voice of those whom Nato - whom we - are still trying
to kill in Kosovo.
We ordered coffee and the men sat down nervously although not without some
eagerness to talk. Ljuba was the first to launch into the attack. "Nato
are not fighting in uniform," he said. "They are at war against our sacred
places, our factories, our bridges, our kindergartens, our hospitals ...
The Nato soldiers don't have the guts to look us in the eyes. They are
cowards. We just pray to God that they come and put their boots on our
soil."
Ljuba was still praying for the ground war that Nato plans to avoid. A
bombing war was not what he wanted. "It's tough for everybody," Ljuba's
colleague Srdjan said. "No parent can say, 'It's OK - my son is in the
war.' But they know we have to preserve this." And he pointed towards the
monastery. "My father told me before I left for the war, 'Don't be a
coward.' I said to him, 'Don't worry - I won't shame my family'." Then
Srdjan paused for a moment. "I came here to arrange to be baptised this
week," he said. "Everyone would like to be baptised in such a holy place."
Ljuba - the most talkative of the four and the most thoughtful - wanted to
explain their presence. "We went to pray for our families' health and to
pray that the Nato bombers leave them alone. The last thing I told my wife
was, 'Take care of our son.' He is eight-and-a-half years old. His name is
Stefan. She was crying. Just a little."
It was a war against Orthodox Christianity, Srdjan complained. The Serbs
were hated because they believed in forgiveness. So of course, I mentioned
the unmentionable: Albanians. And out it poured. "They had everything -
more than any minority anywhere in the world," Ljuba announced. "But they
cannot build their state on Serbian soil. Would you allow Irish people to
build their state in Britain?"
And the story followed its familiar course. The Albanian villages had not
been "cleansed" but were already deserted when Nato attacked, the fires
untended because of Nato bombs. But were there not - I used the usual
paraphrase - some "uncontrolled elements" among the Serbs? "Yes, against
the terrorists, yes," Ljuba suddenly replied. "Against those who were
shooting at us, yes. But I love my wife and children, I couldn't hurt a
woman and child. Now the UCK (KLA) fire at us from their own columns of
refugees in order to provoke us. But normal men cannot shoot at women and
children."
These words of Ljuba must stand against the record of death squads and
executions and dispossession that the women and children - whom no "normal
man" could shoot - have spoken of after crossing Kosovo's borders. It was
therefore a double relief when Captain Nebojsa arrived, a realist from
Yugoslavia's Third Army and the only officer in the little cafe.
"I was in the Croatian war," he said. "This is much worse because of the
bombing. In Croatia, it was man-to-man. Our army now is preparing for a
withdrawal if the agreement is signed. The civilians will go with us. They
have started leaving already. Those who decide to stay, I don't know what
will happen to them. They are confused. They talk to me. They say if all
the army withdraws, they will withdraw too. As for the KLA, there is no
chance they will respect the agreement because they have no chain of
command and are fighting each other for power. All along the roads now
there are (KLA) ambushes - just in this last period, since the start of
negotiations."
The soldiers know what this means. They know what has happened here. And
they read a message in the monastery of Gracanica.
For Kosovo's day of reckoning has been visible on the frescos for
centuries. Take a look at the faces of Saint Sava and his father, Stefan,
of King Milutin and his tragic child- bride, Simonida. Every Serb is shown
the Arabic script that desecrates the holy vestments.
And the painted eyes of Sava and Stefan and Milutin and Simonida which,
centuries ago, under Muslim rule, were gouged out with knives.
=================================
INDEPENDENT (London) June 10
HAMISH MCCRAE - The high price of peace
'Having knocked the place down, the West will have to try to put it
together again'
War is supposed to give a boost to the world economy - whatever it may do
for the poor human beings who find themselves involved in it. Of course, a
war has to be paid for somehow, but the popular wisdom is that war and its
aftermath tend to boost economic activity.
But is it really so? Can the war in the Balkans really be good news for
the European economy? Common sense cries that it cannot be, and common
sense is right. Not only does any additional activity have to be paid for
by someone somewhere - which means fewer resources available for other
things - but, for a large part of our continent, the war is already an
economic disaster. Non-combatant countries, such as Greece, are already
suffering from a fall in holiday bookings, while for Croatia and Slovenia
the damage is very serious.
And then there will be the cost of the peace, for peace, too, is
expensive. Having knocked the place down, the West will have to try to put
it together again. We have to try to cope with the refugees. We shall have
to rebuild the confidence not just of people of the republics of the
former Yugoslavia, but throughout the region.
How expensive is expensive? What do we actually know about the magnitude
of the costs, and how they are likely to be shared? Some numbers, pulled
together by the investment bank PaineWebber, are a good starting-point. It
has added up the official estimates of the costs of the present operation
and, on the basis of its calculations, it would cost about $30bn a
year to keep 60,000 troops in Kosovo, without allowing for external
support. Some of that money would have been spent anyway, for regular
troops have to be paid and equipped. But to that $30bn figure must also be
added humanitarian assistance, grants for reconstruction, debt write-offs
and so on. So far, total aid pledged is only about $1.2bn, but the final
figure will be vastly larger.
Let's say, just to put a range on this, that the cost will be something
like $60bn in year one, falling gradually in years two, three and four.
How does that compare with the known cost of other conflicts and other
estimates of this one? We have some figures for the direct cost of the
Gulf war - Operation Desert Storm - for the International Institute for
Strategic Studies has done an audit. The amount is $102bn . That,
interestingly, happens to be the same as the $100bn cost put forward by
the World Bank's chief economist Joseph Stiglitz for this enterprise. The
European Commission, perhaps recognising that the EU will end up footing
most of the bill, has been coming up with much lower figures - about $30bn
- though even that sounds like an enormous amount
But - and this is perhaps the most astounding thing of all - these
numbers, even the biggest ones, are in fact very small in terms of the
financial capacity of the governments of the Nato nations. The total
revenues of the governments of Nato last year were $6,592bn .
Our own Government's revenues were $545bn. Let's suppose that
Britain ends up paying for one-tenth of the Kosovo venture, and suppose
that means that our share comes to $6bn in the first year; it is just 1
per cent of our Government's revenues.
So - to put the point harshly - the direct military cost, plus the cost of
such rehabilitation as is possible in the time available, will hardly be
noticeable to Western governments. War may be expensive, but the financial
resources of the Nato nations are so enormous that they can sign the
cheques and hardly even notice it.
But the direct costs are likely to be vastly less important than the
indirect ones. Consider, for a start, the impact on the euro, for this war
has become the first external shock to hit the new currency. One of the
reasons why the euro has been so weak is the Kosovo effect. It is not the
most important reason, for that is the contrast between the sluggish
Germany and Italian economies and the booming US one, but at the margin it
adds to the euro's woes.
Worse, it puts a strain on relations between the largest and the
third-largest eurozone economies, Germany and Italy. The Italian economy
is going to suffer some damage as a result of a war so close to its
shores, but there is no monetary response that it can make. It cannot cut
interest rates; it cannot ease credit for Italian companies. One of the
key jobs of a central bank is to act as a back-stop against a loss of
confidence in the economy - look at the way in which Alan Greenspan acted
as the anchor holding together the confidence of the US banking system
through last summer's bout of financial collywobbles. The Banca d'Italia
has long been a greater source of stability in Italy than the successive
governments. Now it cannot act.
You could say that such an asymmetrical shock was always likely to occur,
and that is one of the costs of having a currency controlled at a European
level rather than a national one. That is true. But the fact that such a
shock should have come so quickly is damaging to the euro, and the costs
of that may turn out to be very big indeed.
Next, consider the strains that there will be over the next few years
between the EU and the non-EU European nations. Enlargement of the EU to
include countries such as Hungary may well be delayed by the continued
rumblings on Hungary's border. As for the impact on Russia, the West can
only cross its fingers and hope that any damage can be contained. If the
humiliation of Russia holds up the integration of the Russian economy with
that of the rest of Europe, the entire continent loses what could
potentially be its fastest-expanding zone. (An odd thought, that Russia
might be an economic bonus to Europe? Not at all. During the first decade
of this century it was the fastest-growing European economy, and the core
resources that enabled it to be so remain just as economically relevant
today.)
There are many other, equally intangible effects: the impact on tourism,
disruption to air and surface transport, lost export business and so on.
But the thing that concerns me most is perhaps the most intangible of all.
It is that the experience of Kosovo will undermine the already fragile
level of consumer confidence in Western Europe.
The danger can be swiftly sketched. At some stage within the coming months
the long US boom will ease off. This year it will have continued for
longer than any other expansion since the end of the Second World War.
When that happens, what region of the world will take over the baton of
growth? Japan cannot do so. The economies of the developing world are too
small. It has to be Europe.
But if European papers are full of stories of its troops bogged down in a
rough "peacekeeping" operation, this will hardly be the climate to
encourage people to zip out and buy new BMWs. If long-term interest rates
are higher because the governments are seen to have taken on a long-term
defence commitment, then economic activity will be duly depressed, even if
the costs themselves are wholly manageable. Europe will be worried, and a
worried region cannot be an engine of world growth.
Maybe that is unduly pessimistic. But confidence is a strange thing. The
Kosovo war and whatever follows do not need to become a European Vietnam
to have a profoundly depressing impact on consumer confidence. Most
European nations are unaccustomed to seeing their troops operating in
hostile or semi-hostile conditions - Britain is unusual in this regard -
and we do not know how they will respond. Paying for the hardware of war,
and for the reconstruction thereafter, may be the least of Europe's
burdens.
==================================
INDEPENDENT (London) June 10
Historic deal brings peace to the Balkans
By Marcus Tanner
THE war in Kosovo finally moved to a close last night after Serbia's top
generals signed a military agreement with the Nato commander General Sir
Michael Jackson on their immediate withdrawal from the province.
After five days of tortuous talks in a big tent on the Macedonian border,
General Jackson emerged to declare that the relentless pounding of Serbia
by Nato's air armada would cease when it was verified that the 40,000 Serb
troops were heading out. Surveillance aircraft are to monitor the skies
over Kosovo this morning to establish with reconnaissance photography that
the pull-out is under way.
General Jackson said: "Once it has been confirmed to the secretary-general
of Nato that the Yugoslav forces have complied with the initial withdrawal
required of its forces from Kosovo, then he will direct suspension of the
air strikes. If subsequently the withdrawal timetable is breached, the
agreement requires the air operation to resume."
But last night there were reports from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, that
Serb paramilitaries were running amok, threatening to kill ethnic
Albanians before they leave.
The Security Council met to debate a draft resolution on Kosovo, giving
its blessing to the agreement and to the Nato force gathering on Kosovo's
borders.
If all goes according to plan, the next 24 hours will see a series of
synchronised developments ending the war. Once the Yugoslav army
withdrawal is verified, Nato's political arm, the North Atlantic Council,
will end the air war. As early as this morning the UN Security Council
will then approve the resolution authorising the 50,000-strong peace
implementation force, known as K-For, to go into Kosovo. It will also
approve the establishment of a massive UN- controlled civilian mission,
which will be responsible for running the devastated province. "It will be
a UN operation on the civilian side, a military operation with Nato at its
core and blessed by a Security Council resolution," said Shashi Tharoor,
spokesman for Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general. "The war was a Nato war,
the peace will be a United Nations peace."
The breakthrough came after the Yugoslav army delegation, which had left
the talks for consultations with Belgrade, turned around in mid-journey
and returned to the talks with General Jackson. The unexpected settlement
followed an agreement on amendments to the military accord, making it more
palatable to the Yugoslav side. Nato dropped a sentence that provided for
a 24-hour delay between the Yugoslav pull-out and arrival of
peace-keepers.
That was a key sticking point for the Yugoslavs. They feared the Kosovo
Liberation Army would exploit the delay to rush their troops and weapons
into the province and wreak havoc on retreating Serbian forces.
After that point was settled, Belgrade told the Yugoslav ambassador in New
York to approve the agreement. That in turn lifted the threat of a
Security Council veto from China, angry at the air campaign and still
furious over Nato's bombing of its Belgrade embassy.
The generals' deal came after four days of seemingly fruitless talks at
Kumanovo, on Kosovo's border.
At the end of the meetings, General Jackson said: "The document represents
the hope of a better future in which we can rebuild Kosovo for all its
citizens, regardless of their ethnic background. Very soon I shall deploy
K-For in Kosovo to even-handedly implement this agreement."
On behalf of the Yugoslav army, General Svetozar Marjanovic proclaimed a
moral victory for the Serbs and said the international community now had a
duty to rebuild Yugoslavia. Tony Blair said: "This important and obviously
welcome development means that Nato's demands have been met." In an
emergency statement to the Commons, the Defence Secretary, George
Robertson, said that British troops would be among the first to go into
Kosovo.
President Bill Clinton said Nato will "watch carefully" to make sure the
forces leave Kosovo peacefully according to the agreed timetable. Mr
Clinton said the agreement "is another important step toward achieving our
objectives in Kosovo". Mindful of Serbian fears of reprisals, he said: "We
have made clear to the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army that we
expect them not to hinder the Serb withdrawal."
In Belgrade, thousands of people took to the streets honking car horns and
shouting "thank God it's over."
However, massive problems remain unresolved, not least the role that
Russian troops will play in the Nato-led peace force and angry Albanians
seeking revenge against Serbian neighbours who turned against them.
The Main Points
1 - The immediate withdrawal of all 40,000 Yugoslav army troops and police
and armed civilians from Kosovo, to be verified by Nato.
2 - Suspension of Nato's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia,
subject to Serbia's compliance with the military agreement.
3 - Nato-led 50,000 troops in the peace implementation force (K-For) to
enter Kosovo.
4 - No 24-hour delay between departure of Serbian forces and arrival of
K-For troops, to ensure safety of withdrawing Serbs.
5 - The demilitarisation by K-For of the Kosovo Liberation Army
No mention of Nato in the Security Council resolution to enable Serbia to
save face.
==================
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