INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

SATURDAY-SUNDAY, AUGUST 22-23, 1998

EDITORIALS/OPINION

It's Time to Recognize That Milosevic Is the Problem.

by Christopher Bennett

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina s - It's deja vu all over again: ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia, streams of refugees fleeing the fighting and a procession of diplomats beating a path to the door of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president and butcher of the Balkans.

More than seven years after the beginning of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, it seems that the international approach to the conflict has not changed one iota. No statesman is prepared to accept the political risk involved in tackling the root of the problem.

Instead, international envoys shuttle between their capitals and Belgrade, hoping that despite his record, despite the benefits he personally reaps from the fighting, indeed despite all logic, Mr. Milosevic will provide a solution.

Maybe 1998's crop of mediators missed the events of the past decade in the Balkans. If so, a brief recap of some of the highlights, including how Mr. Milosevic acquired his nickname, may be of some help.

Mr. Milosevic came to absolute power in Serbia in 1987. At the time, living standards there, as in the rest of Yugoslavia, were spiraling downward, prospects of recovery within the existing system were bleak and Mr. Milosevic promised a Serb renaissance. Moreover, in 1988 and 1989 he appeared to deliver as he forcibly extended Serbia's authority over Vojvodina, Montenegro and Kosovo.

Soon, however, Mr. Milosevic's promises began to ring hollow as the economy continued its downward course. In fact, he had succeeded only in imposing Serbian ethnic rule on some of the country's non-Serb populations.

It was not exactly a recipe for long-term stability, just the Milosevic approach to problem-solving - resolving one crisis by manufacturing another, inevitably greater, to divert attention from the first.

On March 9,1991, frustration within Serbia boiled over and Belgrade rose against Mr. Milosevic. Indeed, the first person to be killed by the Yugoslav Army in the year that full-scale hostilities broke out in the former Yugoslavia was not a Slovene, not a Croat, not a Bosnian Muslim but a Serb student caught among the anti-Milosevic protesters that day.

Within the month one Serb and one Croat had been killed in ethnic violence in Croatia, the inexorable descent into war had begun - and Mr. Milosevic was off the hook at home.

Wars in Slovenia, Croatia and then Bosnia successfully diverted attention from the shortcomings of Mr. Milosevic's rule in Serbia, but these were wars that Serbia and Serbs in general could only lose. Indeed, when the tide of battle turned and it became clear that further fighting could only harm his position, Mr. Milosevic changed tack to advocate peace.

But this was not before massive atrocities had been committed and more than 2 million people had been displaced. In December 1992, Mr. Milosevic was named a war criminal by U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.

For Mr. Milosevic, power and his own political survival are alpha and omega. Moreover, his survival has depended and continues to depend on conflict. A prolonged period of peace is too revealing a state of affairs, for it gives ordinary people the time to take stock and to work out the scale of their losses.

Not so long ago, in the winter of 1996-1997, Belgrade challenged Mr. Milosevic's rule with daily demonstrations. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets.

That's over. Now Serbs again stand united, this time in the struggle against "Albanian terrorism," with Mr. Milosevic at the head of yet another national crusade. It is just not in his interest to halt the war, not now, not while he is winning.

The tragedy is that many thousands more Albanians and Serbs will be forced to flee the fighting. Though both peoples have legitimate interests in Kosovo, prospects of a settlement that would reconcile those interests recede with each day and every additional casualty.

The tragedy does not end there. The war in Kosovo cannot be isolated, and Mr. Milosevic still has other crises to manufacture in the region.

As fighting escalates in Kosovo, neighboring Macedonia moves inexorably closer to the brink. The fragile consensus between that country's Albanians, who make up at least 23 percent of the population, and the Macedonian majority is now unraveling as Albanians empathize with their ethnic kin and Macedonians support the Serbian position.

Moreover, the stability of Albania, too, is under threat, with the north of the country increasingly beyond Tirana's control and former President Sali Berisha attempting to resurrect his career on the back of the Kosovo conflict.

Meanwhile, in Yugoslavia itself, Mr. Milosevic still has a Pandora's box of unresolved national questions to open whenever his needs so dictate questions on the predominantly Muslim Sandzak region, on Montenegro and on Vojvodina.

Unless the international community finally wakes up and recognizes that Mr. Milosevic himself is the problem and not the solution, it will be cleaning up after him for years.

(The writer is the director of the International Crisis Group's Balkans project and the author of "Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse." He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.)