1.

Across this near-exhausted century, imagery recurs. The knock at the door, the forced march, the mass evacuation – expressions now impossible to hear without their attendant echoes:

PRISTINA: The Albanian districts of the city have been pretty much emptied of their residents by now. Almost every home has been broken into, not even looted but simply destroyed.

The streets are filled with the sound of heavy gunfire both day and night…. Everyone seems to be shooting….

I just interviewed the doctors who saw the body of the slain human-rights lawyer Bayram Klimendi. They said they could not confirm how many times he’d been shot because his body showed “bad and deep signs of maltreatment” – torture….

My friends in the outside world call and tell me to leave. God, I do want to get out of here. I can’t stand it anymore….

But now it seems we have no choice. The knock on the door we had long feared has finally come. My family and I have been ordered to leave.

There is no time to finish this report. We have to leave NOW. I don’t know where. It seems I am about to join the ranks of the refugees I was writing about only a few days ago.^[1]

Then they were herded into passenger cars and livestock cars. Their money and their documents were stolen….

Before the trains departed…, Serbian troops joked bitterly that refugees were being given free train trips to Macedonia in exchange for their homes and belongings….

Enver Vrajolli, 25, an economics student, said he saw what happened to a neighbor in his sixties who refused to leave his house. He was shot.

“We had only one choice: to leave or be killed. We chose to go,” said Vrajolli…. “As we were leaving, [the city] was empty. There were only military forces and police left.”

“It was very horrible,” Gjylizare Babatinca, 32, said as she described how her family was forced out of a house Wednesday by masked Serbs with automatic rifles…. “We were forced into the train cars they use for animals. We were packed tightly together…. It was completely dark, and we did not know where we were going.” ^[2]

Such drawing of half-century parallels, of the parallel, derives in fact from a failure of memory. How much more comfortable to invoke Europe in the 1940s than Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s, a mere few years ago. It is no accident that Serb forces—regular army soldiers, Interior Ministry specialists, and paramilitary marauders—were able to “cleanse” hundreds of thousands from Kosovo in a matter of days. For nearly a decade now, while Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton and other Western leaders watched—while we watched—Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, his Bosnian Serb henchman Dr. Radovan Karadzic, General Ratko Mladic, and various army and paramilitary commanders have been developing these techniques, refining them, perfecting them.

  
From the well-documented stories of a great many cities and towns and 
   villages, dating back to the cleansing of the Krajina of Croats during 
   1991 and 1992,[4]  
   one can extract a rough standard operating procedure: 

  
  
1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and 
   after warning the resident Serbs—often they are urged to leave or 
   are at least told to mark their houses with white flags—intimidate 
   the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and 
   then bring them out into the streets.
  
2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those 
   capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, 
   professors.
  
3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from 
   men of "fighting age"—sixteen years to sixty years old.
  
4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men 
   to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country.
  
5. Liquidation. Execute "fighting age" men, 
   dispose of bodies.
  
Too highly schematic to do justice to the Serbs' minute planning—for 
   each town, each village, each situation is different—these 
   five steps nonetheless comprise the elements of the program that worked 
   for the Serbs during 1991 to 1995, the main years of the Yugoslav wars. 
   Serb troops, both regular army and security forces, working closely with 
   their savage paramilitary protégés managed to "cleanse" 
   more than 70 percent of Bosnian territory during a mere six weeks in the 
   spring of 1992. 

   

   Percentages of Bosnians actually killed varied widely, partly according 
   to the strategic value of the target. In Brcko, for example, which commands 
   the critical and vulnerable "Posavina Corridor" linking the 
   two wings of Bosnian Serb territory, Serb troops herded perhaps three 
   thousand Bosnians into an abandoned warehouse, tortured them, and put 
   them to death. At least some US intelligence officials must have strong 
   memories of Brcko:

  
  
They have photographs of trucks going into Brcko with bodies 
   standing upright, and pictures of trucks coming out of Brcko carrying 
   bodies lying horizontally, stacked like cordwood.... [5] 
  Similarly, pilots of American U-2 spy planes took photographs of the monumental 
  "cleansing" operation General Ratko Mladic unleashed in and around 
  Srebrenica during July 1995. An angry Madeleine Albright, then the US representative 
  to the United Nations, released the photographs to her colleagues—doing 
  so long after anything could have been done for the men of Srebrenica but 
  at a time when "the international community" had begun to show 
  sympathy for the Krajina Serbs, whom the Croats were then expelling en masse 
  from their homes.[6] 
  Thus we are able now to gaze upon photographs of Bosnian men gathered in 
  a field, guarded by Serb soldiers; then of the same field days later, its 
  grass now disrupted by what appear to be newly dug and refilled mass graves. 
  

  

  Together with a videotape showing another group of Bosnian men sitting terrified 
  at the feet of their Serb captors, and a relatively large number of survivors' 
  accounts, we can now piece together the intricately planned and flawlessly 
  executed minuet that allowed General Ratko Mladic and his Serbs, in less 
  than a week, to expel nearly twenty-five thousand women, children, and old 
  people from Srebrenica and to murder and bury perhaps seven thousand "fighting 
  age"men there.[7] 
  

  
What cannot be overemphasized, both in Bosnia 
   and now in Kosovo, is the planned rationality of this project, the mark 
   of brutality routinized: 

  
Though many people were "indiscriminately" 
   killed, tortured, beaten and threatened, the process was anything but 
   random. The first objective was to force the Muslim populations to flee 
   their home towns and create an ethnically pure Serb territory. A certain 
   amount of immediate, "demonstrative atrocity" was therefore 
   deemed necessary. The more random and indiscriminate the terror and violence, 
   the easier this goal would be achieved.
  
Imposition of terror, the more "indiscriminate" the better, 
   breeds fear; fear breeds flight. Some there were, however, who would not 
   be encouraged to flee: 
  
 
   

   
  

  
 
  
The second objective was to minimize possible future Muslim 
   resistance. To the Yugoslav military, steeped in the Titoist tradition 
   of territorial defence and people's war, every man was a potential fighter. 
   Thus, men of military age were singled out for particularly brutal treatment. 
   In Visegrad, one observer witnessed a paramilitary gunman announcing, 
   "The women and children will be left alone..." As for the Muslim 
   men, he ran his finger across his throat.[8] 
  Today, as this plot is reinterpreted in the stories of refugees interviewed 
  hard upon the Albanian and Macedonian borders[9]  —reinterpreted, that is, as 
  news—we must struggle to remember that by now the stories could 
  not be more familiar, and hence more predictable. 

  

  Consider Selim Popei, for example, from the village of Bela Krusa, who on 
  April 3 paused not far from the Albanian border to speak into the microphones 
  and tell the world's television viewers how, at eight o'clock on March 25, 
  the morning after the NATO planes started bombing, the Serb army tanks came 
  and surrounded his village; how the Serb special police caught two hundred 
  of the fleeing villagers; how from those they separated out forty-six men. 
  For his part, Selim was sent over with the women: an old man, he had now 
  become a witness: 

  
They killed five of my children. The youngest was thirteen, 
   the oldest was forty-five. The others were thirty-two, twenty-two and 
   eighteen. They killed my brother's sons too. I was about twenty steps 
   away when I saw it with my own eyes. We all saw it, the women too.
  Then there is Jalai al-Din Sepulahu, another old man, who told how he and 
  his friends from the village of Krusa Emade were cowering in a basement 
  when the Serbs found them. 

  
They collected all the people. They separated the women from 
   the men. They told the women to leave. They put the men against the wall. 
   And they killed the men. I don't know what else to say. My brother was 
   killed, three of my cousins, and the son of one of them. They were all 
   killed.
  
And finally Mehmet Krashnishi, who comes from Krusa Evolva, a tiny village 
   next door. He appears younger than the others, even with the burns on 
   his face and his hands heavily wrapped in white bandages. Early on the 
   morning after NATO warplanes dropped their first bombs, he said, Serb 
   troops came to his village. 

   

  
They rounded up all the villagers. They separated men from women. 
   To the women they said, "You may go to the border," and they 
   put us men in two big rooms. They said, "Now NATO can save you," 
   and then they started to shoot. And when they finished shooting us they 
   covered us with straw and corn and set it on fire. We were one hundred 
   and twelve people. I survived with one other man.
  
Mehmet, reenacting a narrative familiar from the massacres 
   at Srebrenica, collapsed and played dead as soon as the Serbs began shooting. 
   He was burned in the fire, he said, but when the Serbs left to fetch more 
   fuel to finish burning the bodies he managed to flee.[10] 

   

   Why then look to Auschwitz when Prijedor and Srebrenica and Brcko lie 
   so much closer to hand? The answer is not far to seek. 

   

   2. 

   

   Endgame: we have finally stumbled into it, the confrontation the West 
   has labored so long and so hard to avoid, the consequences of a politics 
   of gesture. All the hesitations, hypocrisy, half-solutions, compromises, 
   and wishful thinking on which Western, and above all American, policy 
   have rested for nearly a decade—all stand revealed for what they 
   are in the reality of those hundreds of thousands of people massed along 
   the Macedonian and Albanian borders, deposited there with such efficiency 
   by Slobodan Milosevic, the great peacemaker of Dayton. 

   

   Under the pressure of such events, memories of high officials flicker, 
   grow dim. Consider Lawrence Eagleburger, George Bush's former secretary 
   of state and perhaps the dominant American official during the first months 
   of Yugoslavia's implosion, who wrote, on Day Twelve of the bombing: 

   

  
  
When the Yugoslav Federation began to break up...and the first 
   signs of ethnic strife became apparent, the Bush Administration took a 
   relatively hard look at what to do. We had no illusions about the fact 
   that to have an effect would mean involving several hundred thousand ground 
   troops, and for better or worse we decided that it was a swamp into which 
   we did not want to walk. NATO may no longer feel it has that choice; if 
   so, it is vital that those who make the decisions take as realistic a 
   view as we did as to what intervention would entail.[11] 
  Almost impossible not to admire the artistry here, the rhetorical subterfuges 
  so densely interwoven and blithely deployed—from preventative shilly-shallying 
  ("a relatively hard look," "for better or worse"), to 
  dubious and self-justifying opinion masked as inarguable conclusion ("would 
  mean involving several hundred thousand ground troops"), to illogical 
  severing of present difficulties from past mistakes ("NATO may no longer 
  feel it has that choice"), to brazen pomposity ("it is vital that 
  those who make the decisions take as realistic a view as we did"). 
  

  

  Of the half-dozen or so opportunities that 
  "the international community" had to avert and then to halt the 
  violence in the former Yugoslavia, at least two—and those with the 
  lowest potential cost—came during the administration of Mr. Eagleburger's 
  former boss, the "foreign policy president," George Bush. At least 
  from September 1990, when the CIA issued a "National Intelligence Estimate" 
  predicting that "the Yugoslav experiment has failed, that the country 
  will break up" and that "this is likely to be accomplished by 
  ethnic violence and unrest which could lead to civil war,"  
  12 Eagleburger and others knew the 
  war was coming, and for a number of reasons—including the victory in 
  the Gulf War and a strong reluctance to endanger the political benefits 
  it brought—they undertook no serious diplomatic effort to prevent it. 
  When on the very eve of Yugoslavia's break-up, in late June 1991, Secretary 
  of State James A. Baker III's one-day "flying visit" failed to 
  solve the problem—the use of force had already been taken explicitly, 
  and quite unnecessarily, off the table—Baker returned to Washington, 
  licked his wounds, and uttered the now-famous dictum: "We've got no 
  dog in this fight." The wisdom of this homely judgment is now clear 
  for all to judge.

  

  President Bush unceremoniously handed off the Yugoslav problem to the Europeans, 
  who, pleased to be granted such an important task, declared (in the words 
  of Luxembourg's foreign minister) that "this is the hour of Europe." 
  "Europe," unfortunately, discovered it had no military—America's 
  retreat from the field had removed the NATO alliance as a fac-tor—and 
  thus was forced to negotiate while lacking any powers of coercion. 

  

  By the fall of 1991, as the Serbs prosecuted bloody artillery sieges on 
  the Croatian cities of Vukovar and Dubrovnik, the Europeans' diplomatic 
  effort had clearly failed. President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia begged the 
  Americans to send the Sixth Fleet on a "sail-by" of Dubrovnik 
  which might, he thought, warn the Serbs off. General John Galvin, the Supreme 
  Allied Commander in Europe, prepared plans, which could have included "clearing 
  the Serbs gunboats off the water," but Washington declined to go forward, 
  unsure what the Serbs' response would be. Said Eagleburger: 

  
They "might" have gotten the message. They might also 
   not have gotten the message and then we would be faced with the 
   question of what to do next.
  This is a rather puzzling attitude, as Wayne Bert writes in The Reluctant 
  Superpower: 

  
Eagleburger seemingly had no misgivings about the value of American 
   credibility unless some overt threat was made for which there was no follow-through. 
   Complete inaction, in his view, did not compromise US credibility.[13] 
  And complete inaction, of course, did not pose the terrible risks that action 
  did; for if in the case of any forceful action, even a warning, the US could 
  have no guarantee the Serbs would be deterred, and since, if they were not, 
  the administration would be obliged to take another action to see that they 
  were (for to do less would be to destroy American credibility)—well 
  then, by definition, to act at all risked losing all control of American 
  policy. Under this odd logic, even the slightest warning, or the refusal 
  to take the use of force "off the table," virtually equals a slide 
  down a "slippery slope" to the use of Eagleburger's "several 
  hundred thousand ground troops." 
  
Missing from this calculus, of course—leaving aside the highly questionable 
   assumption that only ground troops might have halted the war at this point, 
   before it moved into Bosnia—is any notion that the war in Yugoslavia 
   should be prevented or stopped, that the prosecution of a prodigiously 
   brutal war in post-cold war Europe might somehow be harmful to American 
   interests—that inaction, in a word, might hold within it its own 
   severe risks. On this point Secretary Eagleburger, a former ambassador 
   in Belgrade who had known Slobodan Milosevic there, was quite emphatic: 
   

   

  
I have said this 38,000 times and I have to say this to the 
   people of this country as well. This tragedy is not something that can 
   be settled from outside and it's about damn well time that everybody understood 
   that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each 
   other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.[14] 
  Eagleburger believed that the war could be, indeed must be, left to "burn 
  itself out." The war's continuance posed risk, apparently, only to 
  the people "killing each other"—itself a remarkably misleading 
  and harmful characterization coming from a high American official, since 
  by then no one could doubt that, though all sides had committed atrocities, 
  the Serbs, who were using "ethnic cleansing" as their main technique 
  of war, had committed the overwhelming number. Rape, massacre, deportation: 
  these were not regrettable byproducts of the fighting but actions intrinsic 
  to achieving the Serbs' territorial objectives. 

  

  3. 

  

  The war did not burn itself out: indeed, it was in implicit recognition 
  that it might not that Lawrence Eagleburger, now secretary of state for 
  a lame-duck George Bush, chose in late 1992 to send Slobodan Milosevic and 
  his military commander the so-called "Christmas Warning," advising 
  that "in the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, 
  the United States will be prepared to employ military force against the 
  Serbs in Kosovo and in Serbia proper." Bosnia and Croatia could burn 
  and smolder for years, and did; Kosovo, bordered by Macedonia and Albania, 
  was deemed to be the geopolitical limit, the "red line," as a 
  Clinton official later called it. If Eagleburger or other Bush officials 
  even suspected that their refusal to commit resources of any sort, political 
  or military, to stop Milosevic in Croatia or Bosnia might lead him to doubt 
  their determination to prevent him taking what action he pleased in Kosovo—which, 
  after all, remained Yugoslav territory—they showed no sign of it.[15] 

  

  For Governor Bill Clinton, campaigning against the "foreign policy 
  president," Bosnia and the atrocities being committed there had served 
  as a superb issue; for President Bill Clinton, struggling to enact a tax 
  bill and other controversial domestic programs, Bosnia represented a black 
  hole that threatened to swallow his administration. As a candidate he had 
  uttered bold words threatening the Serbs with bombing; as president he limited 
  his boldness to scuttling the "Vance-Owen plan," the peace proposal 
  then on the table, which he criticized as not "going far enough" 
  in reversing the Serb war gains, and then blamed his failure to attack the 
  Serbs from the air on the recalcitrance of the European allies, whose troops 
  were on the ground performing "humanitarian" missions. 

  

  And so, beneath the great welter of diplomatic activity, the matter essentially 
  rested until the summer of 1995, when the Serbs seized Srebrenica, which 
  had been designated, in a policy strongly advocated by then UN Representative 
  Albright, a UN-protected "safe area." The Americans, however, 
  were unwilling to commit troops; the bedraggled city was defended only by 
  a few hundred Dutch "blue helmets." In their concern for the safety 
  of those peacekeepers, the Europeans blocked air attacks, the only way possible 
  to save the city. Shortly before Srebrenica was overrun, a Bosnian Muslim 
  soldier showed a Dutch UN "blue helmet" a simple formula he had 
  written on a sheet of paper meant to show the true value the "international 
  community" placed on human life: "30 UN = 30,000 Bosnians."[16]  

  

  In Srebrenica, no UN soldier died at the hands of the Serbs; seven thousand 
  Bosnian men did. The collective savagery and humiliation of Srebrenica, 
  together with the pressures of the coming US presidential election and Clinton's 
  belated realization that if the Europeans decided to withdraw their troops 
  from Bosnia, as they now threatened to do, he would 
  
be obliged, because of his own pledge, to commit US troops to help extract 
   them—all of these, in late August 1995, led NATO to send its warplanes 
   at last to bomb the Serbs. 

   

   Three months later Slobodan Milosevic sat at the peace table at Wright-Patterson 
   Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He had come, many American officials believed, 
   because "the bombing had worked." He had come as well because 
   the tide had turned against his Bosnian Serb protégés; because 
   Franjo Tudjman's American-supported Croatian army had driven the Serbs 
   out of Krajina, whch they had occupied during the war's first days; because 
   under the umbrella of their new NATO air force the Croats and Bosnians 
   had fought and begun to win on the ground—and Milosevic had come, 
   finally, because he knew the time had arrived to make a deal and to reap 
   all the international prestige as "peacemaker" that would come 
   with it. 

   

   4. 

   

   As had the Yugoslav wars, the Dayton peace sprang from the forehead of 
   Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of Greater Serbia, the man who had built 
   his power by inciting and exploiting Serb nationalism. Milosevic would 
   now be the "acceptable" representative of Dr. Radovan Karadzic 
   and his Bosnian Serb associates; he "brought them along," guaranteed 
   their compliance. When the foreign troops arrived in Bosnia to enforce 
   the agreement, his intelligence services provided information about the 
   movements and intentions of Muslim and Serb "terrorists"—an 
   indispensable service for the American military especially, whose first 
   priority, because of the lack of political support for the mission at 
   home, was to avoid casualties. 

   

   As Milosevic could not have failed to see, this priority would make of 
   Dayton a "cold peace," an agreement that would put an end to 
   the fighting but would show little success in reversing ethnic cleansing 
   or in punishing its most notorious practitioners. Clinton, in one of the 
   more eloquent speeches of his presidency, had explained to Americans why 
   he must send their sons or daughters to Bosnia. Still, approval ratings 
   stayed low; his audience remained unconvinced. Given such inescapable 
   realities, American officials sadly concluded, as they had in Haiti the 
   year before, that the loss of even one soldier might threaten the mission. 
   (Who could forget Mogadishu or the perils of "mission creep"?) 
   Certainly they did not intend to risk American troops to capture Karadzic 
   or Mladic or to escort refugees back to their homes. 

   

   And so it was left. The peace of Dayton was a half-peace. The Bosnian 
   people were left with half a country, a quasi protectorate. Though at 
   the start of each of the first two years that American troops were stationed 
   in Bosnia President Clinton had twice promised they would be home in twelve 
   months, he did not keep his promises, nor has he renewed them; for Clinton 
   well knows that if American soldiers go home so will Europeans and that 
   without either, Dayton, fragile as it remains, will surely collapse. 

   

   Milosevic, meantime, saw the men he had created, 
   Karadzic and Mladic, marginalized, named as criminals, while he attained 
   an importance to the West none could have imagined even months before. 
   At home, however, he confronted an economy destroyed by sanctions and 
   war and a political world that seemed to be closing tightly around him. 
   Having bid a humiliating goodbye to Slovenia when it declared its independence 
   in 1991; having fought a bloody war over the Croatian land of Krajina 
   and then watched Franjo Tudjman's tanks, three years later, sweep through 
   and cleanse it of its two hundred thousand Serb residents; having seen 
   the Dayton Accords make of the Republika Srpska an unworkable parastate 
   built of stolen land and mass graves; having watched his last republican 
   allies, the Montenegrins, vote into office an unsympathetically liberal 
   government—having watched all this from his darkened Belgrade palace 
   now become the heart of a shrunken, imploding Yugoslavia, was it not perfectly 
   natural that Slobodan Milosevic would return to the scene of his greatest 
   triumph, the Serb holy land of Kosovo?

   

   5. 

   

   How appropriate then that Kosovo should be the scene of the endgame, the 
   confrontation that Slobodan Milosevic himself helped the West to escape 
   in Bosnia. For Kosovo was not only the Serb leader's political birthplace, 
   where he had traveled in 1987 to declare to resentful Serbs (who by then 
   comprised scarcely one in ten Kosovo residents) that the Kosovar Albanians 
   "shall no longer dare to beat you!"—Kosovo was also where 
   George Bush had drawn the "red line" on Christmas Day 1992, 
   recognizing implicitly that however many people "killed each other" 
   in Bosnia and Croatia, only "conflict in Kosovo"—beyond 
   the red line—would so severely threaten American interests as to 
   demand that the US "employ military force." Four months later, 
   Clinton's secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was rather more explicit: 
   

   

  
We fear that if the Serbian influence extends into [Kosovo or 
   Macedonia], it will bring into the fray other countries in the region—Albania, 
   Greece, Turkey.... So the stakes for the United States are to prevent 
   the broadening of that conflict to bring in our NATO allies, and to bring 
   in vast sections of Europe, and perhaps, as happened before, broadening 
   into a world war.[17] 
  One might have expected a matter of such magnitude to have occupied a central 
  place on the peace table at Dayton, and yet, though the Americans, according 
  to Richard Holbrooke, "repeatedly emphasized to Milosevic the need 
  to restore the rights of Kosovo's Albanian Muslims, which he had revoked 
the accords ignored Kosovo. The Americans were in a hurry: 
  they needed a Bosnia agreement, only Milosevic could deliver it to 
  them, and he knew it; and he would brook no diplomatic meddling in what 
  was unquestionably "Serb land." 

  

  To say that at Dayton "the long-feared crisis in Kosovo was postponed, 
  not avoided,"[18] 
  as Holbrooke does, does not go far enough; for the fact that the peacemakers, 
  in "solving" Bosnia, ignored Kosovo dealt a severe blow to the 
  prestige of Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, then the nonviolent "leader" of 
  the Albanian "shadow republic" there. Rugova, writes Noel Malcolm, 
  

  
had spent four years telling his people, in effect, that they 
   must be patient until the international community imposed a final settlement 
   on ex-Yugoslavia, in which their interests would also be respected. But 
   that settlement...left the Albanians of Kosovo exactly where they were.[19] 
  
Very quickly Rugova would find his political primacy challenged by the 
   leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerrilla band that, driven by 
   long-suppressed grievances, rose up throughout the country with startling 
   speed. American officials described the KLA publicly, and until very recently, 
   as "a terrorist organization." 
  

  
Scarcely a year ago Milosevic began responding, 
   as was his custom, by sending his security forces and policemen to storm 
   those villages where the guerrilla presence seemed strongest—and 
   to massacre anyone they found. The techniques could not have been more 
   familiar. This, however, was Kosovo, beyond the red line. Had not the 
   United States vowed to respond to such "Serbian action" by employing 
   "military force...against the Serbs in Kosovo and in Serbia proper"? 
   It seemed, however, that the red line had begun to fade; Clinton officials 
   now spoke not of warplanes and tanks but of "using every appropriate 
   tool we have at our command" and making "the Serb economy...head 
   further south."[20] 

  

  In May, Richard Holbrooke managed to persuade Milosevic for the first time 
  to meet with Rugova; then the Clinton administration brought the pacifist 
  leader to Washington to "increase his international prestige." 
  It was a significant achievement—or would have been, had not American 
  diplomacy already been overtaken by the reality on the ground, where Milosevic's 
  men went on murdering civilians, sending tens of thousands fleeing into 
  the mountains. Under these conditions the "terrorist" KLA had 
  decisively seized the political initiative. 

  

  Throughout the summer of 1998, the Americans and their Western allies struggled 
  to negotiate a Kosovo agreement but were confounded both by Milosevic's 
  intransigence and by the Russians' insistence that the matter should be 
  handled under the auspices of the United Nations (where the Russians, increasingly 
  concerned about the West's exclusion of them from Balkan diplomacy, could 
  have made use of their veto to protect their Serb allies). Only in October 
  would Richard Holbrooke manage to negotiate a "unilateral" deal with Milosevic 
  in which the Serb leader recognized Kosovo as a legitimate "international" 
  issue; agreed to permit an "air reconnaissance regime" over the territory; 
  and pledged to admit to the territory two thousand "unarmed observers." 
  

  

  Perhaps it would have worked had they been armed peacekeepers, but this 
  Holbrooke had not even proposed. Milosevic would, of course, have resisted 
  an armed force, whatever it was called; more important, President Clinton, 
  who would have had to contribute American troops to any such mission, felt 
  himself too weakened by the impeachment scandal even to contemplate asking 
  Congress or the public to approve it. Still, Holbrooke's October agreement 
  saved many lives: for a time Milosevic's forces withdrew and tens of thousands 
  of civilians were brought down from the mountains. 

  

  But as Milosevic's forces moved out, in many areas KLA fighters moved in. 
  And on January 15, Serb Interior Ministry troops stormed the village of 
  Racak. Even as the operation unfolded, according to leaks from American 
  intelligence sources, a Serb deputy prime minister was ordering the Kosovo 
  police commander to "go in heavy."[21]  
  Arriving in Racak the following day, Kosovo Verification Mission investigators 
  would find:

  
1 adult male shot in the groin. He appeared to have been shot 
   while running away.
  
 
   
3 adult males shot in various parts of their body including their backs....

   
   
 1 adult male killed outside his house. The top of his head had been 
    removed and was found approximately 15 feet away from his place of death. 
    The wound appeared to have been caused by an axe....

   
   
 5 adult males shot through the head.

   
   
 1 adult male shot outside his house with his head missing....

    

    1 adult male shot in head and decapitated. All the flesh was missing 
    from the skull.

    

    1 adult female shot in back.... [22]  
  
  
 And so on. The Serbs had "gone in heavy." Forty-five were 
   dead. 

  

  
 6. 

   From the bloody village of Racak to the elegant castle of Rambouillet: 
   here the French held a farcical gathering complete with all the trappings 
   of a grand diplomatic conference - Secretary of State Albright and her staff, 
   her Western counterparts, various guerrilla leaders of the KLA. The two 
   most important seats, however, were empty. No high-ranking NATO military 
   leader attended, and neither did Slobodan Milosevic. Western leaders made 
   their demands:Milosevic must withdraw most of his troops from Kosovo; 
   must accept 28,000 armed peacekeepers (4,000 of them American); and agree 
   to a three-year transition to Kosovo's autonomy. If he did not accept 
   these conditions by the end of the conference, the West would bomb Serbia. 
   President Clinton vowed not to let the deadline pass, then did. Western 
   leaders again threatened bombing, then seemed surprised when he didn't 
   give in. Finally, caught in their own ultimatum, they were at last forced 
   to send their warplanes, and this time without Croatian tanks or Bosnian 
   infantry to fight for them on the ground. 

   

   All the while, it is now clear, Slobodan Milosevic was preparing his vast 
   operation in Kosovo. In a long career, this would be his masterpiece, 
   cleansing the Serb homeland of its Albanian interlopers in a matter of 
   weeks. This should, again, have come as no surprise; as late as February, 
   George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, had actually predicted 
   in public testimony that Milosevic would do precisely this.[23] 

   

   As I write, the refugees keep coming, the bombs go on falling, in Washington 
   the talk grows of dispatching "ground troops." Though Milosevic 
   may be trying to overthrow the Montenegrin government, though Macedonia 
   is dangerously swollen with refugees, we hear less now of the "red 
   line" or of the geostrategic importance of Kosovo. Matters, at last, 
   have come to appear simpler than that: American officials, if they wish 
   to consider themselves "leaders" in the "most successful 
   military alliance in history," are obliged to accept the reality 
   of Bosnia and now of Kosovo—that in a country bordering a NATO member, 
   soldiers shelled cities packed with defenseless civilians; paramilitary 
   troops raped, tortured, mutilated, murdered; that troops took away many 
   young men who have not reappeared. All of this happened under the eyes 
   of American leaders;

   

   all of it was quite well known at the time, or very shortly afterward. 
   And it happened, and is happening, in Europe, America's strategic "backyard."

   

   That these events were allowed to unfold, and so soon after Germans tore 
   down the Berlin Wall, says something about America. Not only is the world's 
   great liberal power, with all its might, unwilling, as we are so often 
   told, to be "the policeman of the world" - even on ground where every precept 
   of Realpolitik would suggest it should be - but the idealist values that 
   were proudly assumed to be a vital part of America's vision of itself 
   as a democratic power in the world, and that American leaders so often 
   hailed during the Cold War, appear suddenly desiccated and pale. Whatever 
   happens in the coming weeks - whether Western leaders order their troops 
   to fight in the Balkans or Slobodan Milosevic holds onto Kosovo and a 
   reluctant West accepts the Kosovars - the ugly history that led up to this 
   bloody impasse has not been confronted. Will Americans recognize this?and 
   what conclusions will they draw? These are the questions posed by Kosovo's 
   future, and our own.

  
—May 6, 1999
  

  
 
  
Notes

  
[1] See 
   "The Knock on the Door: Letter from Pristina," by an anonymous correspondent. 
   Global Beat Syndicate, NYU Center for 
   War, Peace, and the News Media: www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/ syndicate, April 
   1, 1998.
   
   
[2] See John Daniszewski and 
   Elizabeth Shogren, "With Refugees From Kosovo, Tales of Terror," Los 
   Angeles Times, April 2, 1999, p. A5.
   
[3] See Daniszewski and Shogren, "With Refugees 
   From Kosovo, Tales of Terror." 
   
[4] 
   For a description of the techniques of ethnic cleansing see my earlier 
   articles in these pages, among them "America and the Bosnian Genocide," 
   December 4, 1997; "Clinton, the UN, and the Bosnian Disaster," 
   December 18, 1997, and "The Killing Fields of Bosnia," September 
   24, 1998, all three of which form part of a ten-part series. 
 
[5]Though "photographs of the bloodbath in Brcko remain unpublished to this 
   day," the authors attribute this description to "an investigator working 
   outside the US government who has seen the pictures...." See Charles Lane 
   and Thom Shanker, "Bosnia: What the CIA Didn't Tell Us," The New York 
   Review, May 9, 1996, p. 10. 
   
[6] 
   In August 1995, with Srebrenica's Muslims buried, Franjo Tudjman's Croats 
   launched a lightning attack to retake the Krajina region and succeeded 
   in "cleansing" the territory of perhaps 150,000 Serbs, most of whom belonged 
   to families that had lived in the territory for centuries. It was, until 
   recent weeks, the largest single act of ethnic cleansing of the war.
   
[7] For an account of the Srebrenica operation, see "The 
   Killing Fields of Bosnia, " The New York Review, September 24, 
   1998, pp. 63-77. 
  
[8] 
   See Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War 
   Crime (Penguin, 1996), pp. 75-76.
   
[9]     At this writing it appears that the Serbs have so far limited their massacres 
   of military-age men to villages and towns, while in Pristina and other 
   cities they have been more selective, murdering politicians, human rights 
   lawyers, and other members of the intelligentsia, while in some cases 
   detaining large numbers of men in police stations and military barracks.
   
[10] These 
   stories are drawn from Christiane Amanpour's report broadcast on "Strike 
   on Yugoslavia," Cable News Network, April 3, 1999.
   
[11] See Lawrence S. Eagleburger, "NATO, In A Corner," The New York Times, April 4, 1999, Section 4, p. 11

   
[12] See David Binder, "Yugoslavia Seen Breaking Up Soon," The 
   New York Times, November 28, 1990, p. A7.
   
[13] Wayne 
   Bert, The Reluctant Superpower: United States Policy 1991-95  (St. 
   Martin's, 1997), p. 119. Italics added. See my "The US and the Yugoslav 
   Catastrophe," The New York Review, November 20, 1996, pp. 56-64, 
   for a full treatment of this period.
   
[14] 
   Quoted in "Method to the Madness," Decision Brief (Center for Security 
   Policy, Washington, D.C.), October 2, 1992, p. 3.
   
[15] 
   See David Binder, "Bush Warns Serbs Not To Widen War," The New York 
   Times, December 28, 1992. Mr. Eagleburger's recent statement that 
   "NATO may no longer feel it has [the] choice" to avoid intervening in 
   Kosovo seems further evidence that the "Christmas Warning," however uncompromising 
   its language, was hardly a firm commitment to "employ military force." 
   
[16] See David Rhode,  Endgame:The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, 
   Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 
   1997), p. 68.
   
[17] 
   See Stephen Engelberg, "Weighing Strikes in Bosnia, US Warns of Wider 
   War," The New York Times, April 25, 1993.
   
[18] 
   See RichardSee Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (Random House, 1998), p. 
   357. 
   
[19] 
   See Kosovo: A Short History (New York University Press, 1998), p. 353. 
   
[20] 
   See "US Warns of 'Serious Action' Against Belgrade on Kosovo," Agence 
   France-Presse, March 4, 1998, and "US State Department Press Briefing," 
   March 5, 1998. 
   
[21] See Julius Strauss, "Massacre Evidence 
   Mounts Against Milosevic," Sunday Telegraph, January 31, 1999.
   
[22] See "Massacre of Civilians in Racak," Kosovo Verification 
   Mission, January 17, 1999
 
   
[23] See 
   Craig R. Whitney with Eric Schmitt, "NATO Had Signs Its Stragegy Would 
   Fail Kosovars," The New York Times, April 1, 1999, p. A1.