By Roger Cohen; New York Times Service
copyright International Herald Tribune nov 11 1998
When Richard Holbrooke reached an agreement last month with President
Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to avert North Atlantic Treaty
Organization air strikes in Kosovo, the German government waited two days
for a copy of the accord before finally squeezing one out of the Yugoslav
Embassy in Bonn.
''It was almost funny,'' a senior German official said, ''if it was not so
worrying. There seems to be very little willingness to treat the Europeans
on an equal footing. Our impression is sometimes that the Americans prefer
to cut us out and that they are no longer capable, intellectually speaking,
of being part of a team.''
As with Bosnia, Kosovo has once again sharpened tensions between the United
States and the European Union over security issues, revealing a
European incapacity to mount a concerted response to a crisis in Europe
without American leadership.
When the Balkan wars began in 1991, the Europeans at least had pretensions
of resolving the crisis themselves. Foreign Minister Jacques Poos of
Luxembourg, representing the European Union, uttered the famous phrase,
''The hour of Europe has dawned.''
But as fighting raged in Kosovo this summer, senior European officials
conceded, there was not an inkling of a coherent European response, even as
the Continent prepared to take a decisive step toward greater economic
union. The vacuum opened the way for Mr. Holbrooke's whirlwind negotiations
- - and then deep European misgivings about continuing American domination of
security issues in Europe almost a decade after the end of the Cold War.
''We get criticized for too little leadership in Europe and then for too
much,'' Mr. Holbrooke said. ''The fact is the Europeans are not going to
have a common security policy for the foreseeable future. We have done our
best to keep them involved. But you can imagine how far I would have got
with Milosevic if I'd said, 'Excuse me, Mr. President, I'll be back in 24
hours after I've talked to the Europeans.'''
Western officials said the Europeans were particularly incensed by Mr.
Holbrooke's failure to attend a meeting of the five-nation Contact Group on
Oct. 15, two days after the agreement had been reached in Belgrade.
It was that group - made up of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and
the United States - that formally gave Mr. Holbrooke his mandate to
negotiate with the Yugoslav president.
Although the U.S. deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, attended the
meeting, European officials felt that they had been slighted.
Almost a week later Mr. Holbrooke made a special trip to Paris to have
dinner with Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine of France in an effort to make
amends.
Europeans were also angry at how the appointment of an American, William
Walker, to head the mission to Kosovo of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe had been decided. ''We provide two-thirds of the
expense and the personnel, and then the appointment is made with almost no
consultation,'' said an official.
At one point, angered by what was seen as a lack of consultation by the
Americans on Kosovo, the top British official in the Foreign Office made a
formal protest to the National Security Council, officials said.
Mr. Holbrooke said the European protests were generally overblown or
insignificant expressions of frustration and masked a reality of fruitful
cooperation. ''It took us four years to put together anything effective in
Bosnia and four months in Kosovo,'' he said. ''That is progress.''
The chief American negotiator in Kosovo, Christopher Hill, has been working
closely with Wolfgang Petrisch, the Austrian ambassador to Belgrade who is
representing the European Union, because Austria holds its rotating
presidency. Moreover, Britain, France and Germany are putting the final
touches on a 1,500-member ''extraction force'' to be based in Macedonia,
bordering Kosovo. That force would, if necessary, protect the observers in
the mission headed by Mr. Walker.
