The administration hopes for a U.N. Security Council resolution this week authorizing military enforcement of the often flouted flight ban. But a senior State Department official complains: “Our British friends are wimping again. So are the French-and it’s their goddamned resolution.” The British wanted a 30-day delay in enforcing the ban, which would allow them to equip their 2,400 peacekeeping troops in Bosnia with heavy weapons as protection against reprisals threatened by Serbs. That long a delay would take some pressure off Serbia. It also would “leave it to [Bill] Clinton to blow the first Serbian helicopter out of the sky,” said the Bush adviser, “and that would be terribly unfair.”
France wanted to limit the enforcement by allowing allied warplanes to shoot down only the specific Serbian violators of Bosnian airspace. The Pentagon said it needs authorization to take out support facilities in Serbia itself, including air bases, communications gear and fuel supplies. France also wanted to put the entire operation under U.N. command, an arrangement that the United States, which would supply the largest share of the military assets, simply would not accept.
Washington believes that quick and firm action is needed to avert a repressive move against Kosovo, a Serbian province whose population is 90 percent ethnic Albanian. Last week Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist who inspired the attacks on Bosnia, claimed a resounding electoral victory over Prime Minister Milan Panic, the Belgrade-born California millionaire who had campaigned on a peace platform. Election monitors from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) said the vote was “riddled with flaws and irregularities.” But far-right nationalists also did well in the election, suggesting that many Serbs endorse “ethnic cleansing.” One of the winners was Zeljko Raznatovic, leader of a Serbian paramilitary group in Kosovo.
NEWSWEEK has learned that, in hopes of heading off a crackdown on Kosovo, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger considered a trip to Belgrade to confront Milosevic, a former communist official he got to know well during his years as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia. An allied source quoted Eagleburger as saying he wanted to see Milosevic and “shake my fist in his face.” But the secretary scrubbed the trip after he and Bush decided that a high-profile visit would only harden Milosevic’s defiance.
Meanwhile, administration officials are keeping in touch with Clinton’s foreign-policy advisers, observing a careful distinction between “informing” them and “consulting” them. Clinton advocates enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia and supports other limited uses of force, especially from the air, to defend the former Yugoslav republic. Sources say Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, met quietly in Washington last week with Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia’s foreign minister.
Short of bombing Serbia’s infrastructure, the Bush administration sees no sure way to restrain Milosevic. A Serbian purge of Kosovo could draw other Balkan countries into a widening war. But nationalism is complicating the effort to find a solution at the United Nations. Hard-line nationalists in Moscow are demanding a tilt toward Serbia, a traditional Russian ally. It’s by no means clear that the Russians would veto military action against Serbia, but cooperating with Washington could cost embattled President Boris Yeltsin some scarce political capital. And a senior administration official worries that “If Russia’s foreign policy turns back, all bets are off. The U.N. and the CSCE, as instruments of peacemaking or peacekeeping in the post-cold-war era, are finished.” It hasn’t yet come to that, but the idea of a “new world order,” George Bush’s loftiest legacy, is fading fast.
