The New York Times

Friday, June 18, 1999

Clinton Sees No Quick Effect of Indictment on Milosevic

By JANE PERLEZ

COLOGNE, Germany -- Still trying to sort out the untidy aftermath of the Kosovo war, President Clinton suggested Thursday that the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by the war crimes tribunal would serve to isolate Serbia on the international stage but would not immediately affect Milosevic's personal position in Belgrade.

As forensic experts prepared to enter Kosovo to examine mass grave sites that could yield evidence for the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Clinton urged patience on what the outcome of Milosevic's indictment would be.

"I do not believe that the NATO allies can invade Belgrade to try to deliver the indictment," Clinton said at a news conference with the French President, Jacques Chirac. "That does not mean that this is not an important thing, or that there won't someday be a trial." Sometimes, he added, "these things take a good while to bear fruit."

In Paris, Clinton held talks with Chirac and the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, on the future of Kosovo and the Balkans. He strolled in the Tuileries gardens, spent half an hour shopping on Rue St.-Louis en l' le, and then flew to Cologne, Germany, for a three-day meeting of the seven leading industrial countries and Russia.

On Sunday, Clinton is scheduled to meet the Russian President, Boris N. Yeltsin. At the top of that agenda will be the Russian military role in Kosovo, which Administration officials said they hoped would be settled by then at talks between American and Russian military officials in Helsinki, Finland.

How to deal with the reconstruction of the Balkan region but at the same time not reward Milosevic has become one of the trickier problems that the allied leaders are beginning to confront. Chirac and Clinton said Thursday that they favored relief aid to Serbia, on the ground that the Serbs had suffered.

Chirac expressed the justification for the ban on economic assistance to Serbia most strongly: "There can be no economic development aid to a regime which is not democratic and whose present leader, furthermore, has been indicted with crimes against humanity by the international war crimes court."

How long Milosevic will retain his grip on power and how vulnerable he is now that his troops are withdrawing from Kosovo are being assessed by Balkan specialists in the Clinton Administration as well as in Western Europe.

The question of his survival in power is important because economic experts assert that to try to revive southeastern Europe without including Serbia is a tough proposition. "It is difficult to conceive of the reconstruction of the Balkans without the participation of Serbia, because the land routes go through Serbia," said Vladimir Gligorov, an economist at the Institute for Comparative Economics in Vienna.

For countries like Bulgaria and Macedonia to regain their trade, for instance, bridges through Serbia would have to be repaired, economic experts said. Bulgaria announced Thursday that it had lifted its ban on the export of oil to Serbia.

So far, officials said they believed that Milosevic would strive to consolidate his power in the police force, his traditional source of strength. It is too early to assess how the Yugoslav Army would react to Milosevic's decision to order their withdrawal from Kosovo.

But in the short run, they said, Milosevic will probably prevail. He has already sent signals that he will organize parliamentary elections before the end of the summer. By calling quick elections, Milosevic is apparently planning to take advantage of the disarray among the democratic opposition forces.

Milosevic will also try to create an atmosphere of normalcy by lifting the state of war that he imposed at the start of the air strikes.

The call this week by the leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church for Milosevic's resignation was important symbolically and represented a dramatic shift in the church's attitude, officials said. But its practical effect on Milosevic in the short term is hard to predict in a country where the political opposition is barely visible and the church is not the powerful popular force that it is in some other countries.

In the longer run, Western diplomats said their hopes for unseating Milosevic depend on some influential sector of Yugoslav society's becoming disenchanted enough to put political pressure on a leader who has proved impervious to opposition in the past.

Milosevic's closest cronies, Western diplomats said, may find it increasingly difficult to maintain their wealth.

It was some of those businessmen, particularly those close to Milosevic's wife, Mira Markovic, who appear to have had considerable influence in persuading Milosevic to agree to the peace settlement, a senior Administration official said.

These cronies are not going to be much better off now, diplomats said. About 300 Serbian officials and businessmen, all close associates of Milosevic, are unable to get visas to European Union countries. The ban on visas for those people was put in place last year as part sanctions to punish the Milosevic Government.

"The economic pressure will increase, and these people could turn against him," a European Union diplomat said.