[PEN-L:6257] "We've got to make the Balkans safe from Serbia"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Washington Post

December 19, 1995, Tuesday, Final Edition

U.S. Builds Arc of Alliances to Contain Serbia's Power

BYLINE: John Pomfret, Washington Post Foreign Service

DATELINE: Belgrade

In an effort to ensure that war does not return to the Balkans during or
after a year-long peacekeeping mission by U.S. and NATO troops, the United
States has adopted one of the principal measures it used to stabilize
Europe after World War II: Cold War-style containment.

Just as Washington built alliances, including NATO, to prevent Soviet
communism and influence from spreading in the 1950s and '60s, it is now
quietly forging military bonds with every country that borders on
Yugoslavia, the Serbian-led state that triggered the last four years of war
and remains the region's most threatening military power.

Hungary, Romania, Macedonia and Albania are all participants in NATO's
Partnership for Peace, the U.S.-designed program for joint training and
other military ties. All four, as well as Croatia, have signed bilateral
defense documents with Washington. Croatia's army is helped by American
advisers; Bosnia has been promised arms and training, either by U.S. forces
or through third parties.

American soldiers and spies could be spotted all over the Balkans in recent
months. CIA agents and Army personnel were at an air base in northern
Albania, south of Serbia, launching pilotless spy planes. A detachment of
650 U.S. soldiers is spending its third winter shivering in the mountains
of northern Macedonia, east of Serbia, in a peacekeeping mission.

North of Serbia, in southern Hungary, U.S. military teams are patching
together two huge logistics depots for the Bosnian operation atop the
foundations of former missile sites of the defunct, Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.

While Serbia is the focus of the new arc of containment, U.S. officials
stress that other states, including Croatia, with its vastly improved army,
or Albania, with its nascent territorial ambitions, could also bear the
brunt of U.S. economic and military pressure if they threaten their
neighbors.

The evolving network of ties reflects a continuing escalation of U.S.
involvement in the Balkans. When war began between Croatia and rebel Serbs
in its territory in 1991, the United States refused to become involved,
arguing that no American interest was at stake. After 1992, when war began
in Bosnia among Serbs, Croats and the Muslim-led government, the Clinton
administration tried to use airpower to support a failing U.N. peacekeeping
mission but otherwise remained on the sidelines.

Now, after stepping in to broker the Dayton agreement that has halted the
war, the United States is sending 32,000 troops to the region to conduct
and support a peacekeeping mission, including 20,000 to Bosnia. While
debate continues in Washington over whether the deployment of the force
serves U.S. interests, it has dramatically raised the stakes in the
Balkans. The outcome of the mission, and of the evolving U.S. security
initiatives elsewhere in the region, could now set the pattern for U.S.
relations with both Europe and Russia in the post-Cold War world, senior
officials say.

"The U.S. role in Europe and NATO's future and our bilateral relationships
with all the major countries in Europe are all going to be determined by
Bosnia," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state who
led the U.S. negotiating team at Dayton. The peace mission, he argues, has
replaced plans for the expansion of NATO to include former Soviet Bloc
countries, or initiatives to promote democracy and capitalism in Russia, as
the key determinant of what U.S. relations with Europe and Russia will be
like after the Cold War.

If the U.S. forces see the year-long mission through despite casualties and
hardships, and the peace holds, the United States will again confirm itself
as the key guarantor of security in Europe and the foremost defense partner
of Britain, France, Germany and other European countries. That development
would end a period of uncertainty after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
in which those states explored -- in part through their own failed mission
in Bosnia -- whether they could take responsibility for keeping the peace
in the continent without American help.

Success in Bosnia could also stabilize relations with Russia, a sometime
supporter of the Serbs that has gingerly entered into a new kind of
military partnership with NATO by agreeing to deploy forces in Bosnia under
the command of a U.S. general.

The consequences of failure could be equally momentous. If war resumes in
the Balkans and U.S. troops retreat in disorder, the NATO alliance -- the
foundation of U.S. and West European security since 1945 -- could unravel
amid mutual recriminations among Washington, Paris and Bonn, as it nearly
did at the low point of the Bosnian war. An alienated Russia could retreat
behind a new Iron Curtain. Some experts even fear a new, fortified
East-West frontier could spring up along the old continental fault line
between Roman Catholic Croatia, a traditional province of the West, and
Orthodox Serbia, a former possession of the Ottoman Empire and a historical
ally of Russia.

"We did not choose this as the test case" of the new security order in
Europe, Holbrooke said of the Bosnian peace accord in a recent meeting with
Washington Post editors and reporters. "But as so often happens in history,
the worst case is the key test. . . . Nobody wanted it to happen, but that
is the hand history has dealt."

Western powers have meddled in the Balkans for centuries in often futile
efforts to bring peace to lands lying on the frontiers of two great empires
-- the Ottoman from the Middle East and the Austro-Hungarian from central
Europe. In 1878, European powers blocked Russian expansion into the region
and started a process that would lead to the long-term destabilization of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Under that deal, Bosnia was actually ruled by both
empires; the Austro-Hungarians administered it but Vienna recognized
Ottoman suzerainty. That arrangement finds a mirror image in the Dayton
plan, which divides Bosnia into two parts: one a Croat-Muslim federation
with strong ties to Zagreb, the other a Serb entity closely linked to
Belgrade.

While Moscow's influence in the region remains an implicit concern of U.S.
policymakers, the main focus of the containment policy now is Belgrade.

The arc of U.S. defense agreements stretches from Macedonia and Albania, on
Yugoslavia's southern flank, to Croatia, Hungary and Romania to its west,
north and northeast.

Albania, a country once described as the North Korea of Europe, has run
headlong into the embrace of the U.S. Defense Department since 1991, when
it became the last of the East European countries to abandon communism. Now
the U.S. military uses its airfields, practices on its beaches and trains
in its mountains. "They act like an ally," said one U.S. officer, pointing
out that Albania was not paid for hosting the spy plane operation, " --
only better."

Macedonia, the smallest of the newly independent republics of Yugoslavia,
has been host to a small detachment of U.S. peacekeeping troops since 1993.
The troops were sent under U.N. auspices because of fears that the country,
squeezed in among Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania and Bulgaria, might invite
aggression from Serbia or elsewhere. In October, a car bomb almost killed
its well-respected 78-year-old president, Kiro Gligorov. His first foreign
visitor after the attempt was U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry --
on Thanksgiving Day.

U.S. defense ties with Croatia and Romania have grown despite concerns
about their human rights records and commitments to political and economic
reform -- mainly because Romania, with 25 million people, is the biggest
country in the region and Croatia is the only one with an army capable of
challenging the Serbs.

Defense ties with Croatia, suspended this summer after Croatian troops
expelled 150,000 Serbs from Croatia in a huge offensive, have resumed even
though U.S. diplomats had said Croatia's human rights violations during
that attack would make immediate resumption impossible. Romania, meanwhile,
has signed an agreement with Bell Helicopter Textron to begin producing
AH-1F Cobra attack helicopters for the Romanian armed forces between 1999
and 2005.

One way or another, the Pentagon appears likely to assist in training the
mostly Muslim Bosnian army. The Clinton administration has promised
congressional leaders that training and arms supplies would be provided to
the Muslims, though administration officials still hope to work through
third parties. West Point and the U.S. Air Force Academy are accepting
applications from Bosnian officers this year. Other defense ties are
expected to increase as well.

Another aspect of this policy is the U.S. and European support of a project
to build a new Balkan highway atop an ancient Roman road, the Via Egnatia,
from the port city of Durres in Albania to Istanbul. That move would break
Serbia's monopoly on transportation links to the Middle East. Work is
slated to begin in February on the first part of a $ 50 million project
funded by the European Union to improve the road from Albania to Macedonia.

A senior U.S. administration official confirmed that containment was an
option but stressed that it depends on Serb behavior.

"We've got to make the Balkans safe from Serbia," he said, but quickly
followed that the Balkans should also be made safe for Serbia if it meets
U.S. conditions for its reintegration into the West.

Among those conditions will be "deep cuts" in Serbia's arms arsenal similar
to the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement between NATO and Warsaw Pact
nations. An arms reduction conference began outside Bonn yesterday.

"We've got to reduce the real and potential threat they [the Serbs] pose to
their neighbors. Their arsenal is huge," the U.S. official said.

Another condition is good behavior by the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, a
province of Serbia where 90 percent of the population is ethnically
Albanian. Stability in Kosovo is key to the region because next to the
Serbs' 12 million people, the 9 million Albanians, scattered throughout
four countries, comprise the second biggest ethnic group.

While Washington has begun to fashion an arc of containment around Serbia,
as yet it has given no firm security guarantees to any of the countries
taking part. Some leaders in the region have begun to wonder if they can
really count on the United States to defend them against a resurgent Serbia
or an expansionist Croatia.

"We are all beginning to wonder when Washington will start giving us
security guarantees," said Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Horn.

U.S. ideas for arms reduction have gotten little support from the Yugoslav
army, still the biggest in the region. Before the war began, it was the
fourth largest standing army in Europe, with a successful weapons
manufacturing industry. Today it still is considered more powerful than the
Croatian army, although estimates of its hardware are shaky at best.

Radovan Radinovic, a retired major general in the Yugoslav army and an
influential writer on military affairs, thinks the U.S. plan to cut
Belgrade's weapon cache is "dishonest."

"The arc of containment around us and this arms control pressure are not
friendly acts," he said.

Radinovic backs the idea of creating a pan-Balkan organization -- echoing
calls that stretch as far back as the 19th century. He and other Serbs
support Greek politicians who suggested last month the formulation of a
Balkan League, consisting of Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and some of
the former Yugoslav republics. The shadow foreign minister of Greece's
opposition, Ghiorgos Romaios, emphasized that Athens aims "to avert the
infiltration of foreign powers which could try to destabilize the status
quo in the Balkans," a comment aimed at Turkey and even the United States.

U.S. officials oppose this type of grouping because it would be dominated
by Serbian-led Yugoslavia and Greece, the strongest powers in the region.
Instead, they want to see a region free of one dominant power.

Predrag Simic, the director of Belgrade's influential Institute for
Strategic Studies, believes that the only way to create a stable security
regime in the Balkans is to quickly integrate all the countries as much as
possible into Western structures, such as the European Union, NATO and
Partnership for Peace.

"Yugoslavia should be given a clear agenda of what it needs to do to
reintegrate into Europe," he said.

Like many in the region, Simic looks at the influence that Russia has
sporadically tried to exert on Yugoslavia as a sign that Moscow wants to
use the Balkan crisis as a back door into Europe following the collapse of
the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. He viewed Russia's reappearance on the Balkan
scene in February 1994, when NATO issued its first ultimatum to Serb forces
in Bosnia, as "motivated by Moscow's fear of being shut out of Europe."
Russia objected to the ultimatum and eventually deployed peacekeeping
troops in Serb-held areas to help defuse the crisis.

U.S. policymakers believe the new Bosnian peace mission could play a key
role in forging a new relationship in Europe between the West and Russia.
Until now, the two sides have cooperated sporadically but have been sharply
at odds over plans to expand the NATO alliance to include former Warsaw
Pact members such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The Clinton
administration has tried to proceed with the expansion of NATO -- a step
that would extend a U.S. military defense guarantee to countries on
Russia's border -- while offering to build a new cooperative relationship
between the alliance and Moscow.

So far, the Russian government has cautiously agreed to steps toward
military cooperation while strongly rejecting the idea of NATO expansion.
But if the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia succeeds, with Russian troops
operating in partnership with NATO, Moscow's resistance to the initiative
might diminish. At the same time, a failure of the mission, or heavy
casualties among U.S. forces, might doom the expansion plan, which
eventually must be approved by a U.S. Senate already reluctant to support
new military entanglements abroad.

Simic and others argue that the only way to pull Yugoslavia away from
Moscow is to incorporate it into Europe.

"I think we have two choices," he said. "Either you integrate Yugoslavia
into Europe or we'll have a quasi-Cold War."

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Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)