The New York Time

Sunday, October 25, 1998

UNSTACKING MILOSEVIC'S DECK

by Jane Perlez

Belgrade, Serbia - Serbia's strongman, knows the palybook well. His first big performance was in Bosnia; his second has just been completed in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The plot goes like this: As a divided West looks the other way, create a crisis. Pursue your ends a little too harshly by destroying a few too many villages, permitting one too many massacres. Finally you catch Washington's attention. Then in a grand gesture grant some concessions - like allowing monitors on the ground in Kosovo and NATO surveillance planes above.

The climax: You are elevated to the position of indispensable keeper of the peace; America and NATO officials come to consult and sometimes to scold. It all serves to pump you up in the eyes of your own people, to whom you present yourself as their champion and protector against hostile outsiders, namely the West, with which you have just done a deal. As a result, you are guaranteed more years in power as their autocratic ruler.

In moment of candor, American and European diplomats describe Mr. Milosevic's behavior in the last eight months in Kosovo in this neat sequence. They know, they say, that by offering some face-saving concession to NATO - which despite its bravado has been reluctant to carry out the air strikes that it continues to threaten - Mr. Milosevic has outfoxed the West once again. The Yugoslav President was allowed to make a mess in Kosovo over the summer when the West was on vacation and when there was concern that getting tough with him might disturb election in Bosnia.

THE BILL

In the afternoon - 250,000 refugees, burnt villages and irrevocably ruined relations between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo - the United States is left with the cleanup. Washington will foot a big portion of the bill for an expected 2,000 international monitors, and for much of the aid for refugees. Some put the total price at $500 million - a lot for an underdeveloped, rural province about the size of Connecticut.

There are many reasons, of course, beyond the crises he creates that make Mr. Milosevic the man to deal with in Belgrade. For more than a decade, he has been the master manipulator of Serbian politics, and his political machine remains in firm control of the state-run press and broadcast media. Whatever horror officials in Washington express about his appeals to crude nationalism, it is depressingly clear that he has a lot of material to work with when he stirs ethnic passions: a distrustful culture built on long-held sagas of martyrdom. But to the West, Mr. Milosevic goes out of his way to present himself as less extreme that some others. To prove the point, he has chosen as his coalition partner Vojislav Seselj, who is even more of a nationalist and who had led a charge against "traitors" in the independent media and universities.

Still, does the West really have to play Mr. Milosevic's game? Is it time to think about whether - and how - he could be displayed as Serbia's leader? These questions are being increasingly raised in the aftermath the Kosovo agreement.

"there needs to be a policy review that emphasizes ways of getting rid of Milosevic," said David L. Phillips, the executive director of the International Conflict Resolution Program at Columbia University and who visited Kosovo last month. "To have to go back to Belgrade while Milosevic holds court is no longer tenable."

Mr. Phillips says the United States can shape its polices so that Mr. Milosevic is weakened, not strengthened, and he maintains that one of the weakest chinks in Mr. Milosevic 's armor is the existence of a United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. "It is time for Louise Arbour to make a move against Milosevic and other Yugoslav officials, " said Mr. Phillips, referring to the tribunal 's chief prosecutor. " at this juncture there should be plenty of evidence and eyewitnesses to crimes against humanity by forces under the control of Mr. Milosevic."

Many pro-Western Serbs in Belgrade who oppose the Milosevic regime, like Srbobran Brankovic, a leading Serbian pollster, agree that the possibility of prosecution at The Hague could be turned to the West's advantage as it struggles to contain Mr. Milosevic's ambitions. He said a major motivation for Mr. Milosevic's agreement to sign the Dayton agreement on Bosnia the three years ago was his calculation that, as a guarantor of the peace, he would not be made a target of the tribunal.

PLAYING TO FEAR

"I think he has an abnormal fear of the tribunal," the Serbian pollster said. "People in his circle said that when it was first mentioned that he might be tried in The Hague, that he was in a panic."

Mr. Milosevic's popularity at home is not quite what it is advertised abroad. His personal approval rating in Serbia has slid from a high of 40 percent in the early 1990's to 20 percent today.

Mr. Brankovic and other pro-Western Serbs say they are not persuaded by the argument that the only alternative to Mr. Milosevic is Mr. Seselj, who enjoys about a 16 percent approval rating. There are, he says, substantial independent voices of moderation that need to be encouraged in Serbia's universities, in its independent media, in its trade unions and among its few struggling entrepreneurs - even in the army.

Mr. Milosevic, who relies on the Interior Ministry's well-paid police force to protect him and to repress opponents, is not well liked in the Yugoslav Army; it is underpaid and has lost all the battles that he sent it into in the last eight years. This feeling was surprisingly evident in remarks last week by the army's chief of staff, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who rose through the ranks during the glory days of Marshal Tito.

"Many leadership members have subjected everything to their own interests," General Persic said in what seemed a veiled reference to Mr. Milosevic. "The Serbs have been at war since 1991 and we still don't have an ally. We were never this isolated and we were never without allies."

How to capitalize on these signs of dissatisfaction is the challenge.

In many quarters in the West, the notion of lightening the financial and investment sanctions that have been placed on Serbia is heresy, a sign of caving in to Mr. Milosevic.

But educated Serbs who would like to see Mr. Milosevic disappear argue that the sanctions actually play into his hands by allowing him to argue that the wicked West is responsible for a catastrophic drop in living standards.

The sanctions also encourage a pirate economy in which a tight circle of Milosevic cronies get all the spoils. And barriers to international travel fall especially hard on Western-oriented Serbs, rather than on Mr. Milosevic's rural supporters.

But given the West's pattern of letting Mr. Milosevic play out his hand, there is not much optimism among educated Serbs in Belgrade that the game will change very soon. They note the three-year time frame for the interim political status of Kosovo agreed to in the negotiations with the United States. "He will say I'm the guarantor of the peace and security in the region, and the West will say 'yes,' " said Mr. Brankovic.

Some diplomats in the Western embassies here are more critically optimistic, however.

They point out that instead of operating on a land-for-peace concept, Mr. Milosevic operates on a land-for-power principle. Thus, he gave up his fight for Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia, but retained power as leader of a truncated Yugoslavia dominated by Serbia. In time, given the realities in Kosovo, where the majority ethnic Albanians are struggling for independence, he will also lose Kosovo, these diplomats say. Montenegro could follow, if Mr. Milosevic chooses to provoke a crisis there. At that rate, Mr. Milosevic is likely one day to wind up king of a suburb of Belgrade, still in power but of no relevance to the United States.