June 4, 1999
NEWS ANALYSIS
Fruit of Miscalculation
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Serbia -- From the start, this has been a war
of miscalculation.
NATO, led by the Clinton Administration, assumed that a relatively
short period of bombing
would be enough to
cause President Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate over Kosovo.
Drawing the wrong lessons from
Bosnia, Western officials underestimated the historical and cultural importance of Kosovo to the Serbs.
And the allies badly undervalued
the province's political importance
to Milosevic, who rose to power
on the promise to protect the Serbs of
Kosovo against the Albanian majority.
But Thursday, as he accepted a deal
not much better than he was offered
before the bombing began 10 weeks
ago, Milosevic seemed to have
miscalculated as badly.
The Serbian leader, for his part,
expected the NATO alliance to split,
particularly as the number of civilian casualties grew. He is unlikely to
have thought Bill Clinton would ignore those casualties and even intensify the bombing.
While the alliance's southern tier
became frazzled as refugees flowed
into Albania and Macedonia and then
into Western Europe, the human tide
neither destroyed Serbia's impoverished neighbors nor sundered the alliance.
Milosevic was right in his calculations that NATO did not want to
risk a ground invasion of Serbia,
whose citizens, no matter how some
may revile Milosevic, seemed
willing to die for their country.
While only a ground invasion could
sweep him from power, he ultimately came to believe that NATO could
continue its comparatively cost-free
bombing campaign for many more
months, striking civilian targets as
well as military ones and utterly
devastating Serbia.
With his own losses mounting -- at
least 1,200 civilians have died in
NATO accidents and NATO estimated Thursday that at least 5,000 Yugoslav
soldiers and policemen have died --
Milosevic clearly decided that
now was the moment to end an unequal war and preserve his own power.
He is evidently calculating again.
At least for now, he is surviving
NATO's war against his country with
his power intact.
In a weak political field, he still
looks like a titan, and for many in
Serbia -- especially the working
classes, the old and the poor -- he is
likely to retain his aura of mastery.
His party is already claiming to have
inspired this little nation to a noble
resistance against the combined
forces of 19 of the world's most advanced nations.
"This is a little nation that resisted
for two months against the greatest
might that has ever existed in history, and there was no demoralization,
no panic, no mass desertions," said
Aleksa Djilas, a historian, exaggerating only a little.
"This has shown that Western public opinion has proved less humane
than we believed: It was willing to
tolerate far higher casualties in the
country being attacked than we had
assumed, and it was prepared to
tolerate far fewer casualities on its
own side than we had assumed."
Serbia's weak democratic opposition parties, largely muzzled during
the war by censorship, have been
eager to say that Milosevic's
problems will really begin after
peace is established, once the patriotic fever has passed and people
awake to the economic ruin around
them.
There is some truth to that, even
Milosevic's supporters agree, as
the country faces a hot summer and
a cold winter with demolished electrical power stations and heating
plants.
The bombs have done enormous
damage to the economy, which was
already battered by eight years of
international sanctions. Billions of
dollars of factories and equipment
have been smashed, and nearly every important highway or railway
bridge has been damaged or destroyed, along with the country's
only two oil refineries.
And as long as Milosevic and
his top aides, many of them recently
indicted for war crimes, remain in
power, it remains to be seen whether
Serbia will get any serious reconstruction aid or investment from
Western countries or the European
Union.
If anything, the West may tighten
economic sanctions, increasing the
sense of isolation of its relatively
cosmopolitan citizens.
Western aid itself -- or the promise of it -- is already being used as a
sort of incentive to Serbs to depose
Milosevic, by electoral means or
otherwise.
And it is possible that the Yugoslav
Army and the police, having withstood NATO's extensive bombing in
Kosovo without cracking, will find
that Milosevic has made peace
at too cheap a price, discarding their
own sacrifice and that of their dead
comrades.
Already Vuk Obradovic, a former
general who leads a small opposition
party, has called for Milosevic's
resignation and asked: "What was
the price of this war? And what did it
accomplish?"
Those questions have now been
echoed by the former Mayor of Belgrade, Nebojsa Covic, who broke
with Milosevic in 1996.
While military casualties have
been a state secret, Yugoslav generals have said recently that they were
relatively low, estimating that 1,800
people have been killed or wounded
badly enough to leave their posts.
But NATO officials, in a response
today, estimated that perhaps 5,000
Yugoslav military and police troops
have been killed and more than
10,000 wounded -- the first time the
allies have provided such figures.
Whatever the number, the report
by NATO seems to be another effort
to increase the political pressure on
Milosevic from an angry citizenry that may feel betrayed by the deal
on Kosovo after so many dead. The
Serbs themselves like to speak of
their small families, compared to
large Albanian ones, and the loss of
enough conscript sons could set off
spontaneous demonstrations, like the
ones recently repressed in Krusevac,
Aleksandrovac and Cacak.
While Yugoslav officials tried to
minimize the importance of those
demonstrations, they also vowed to
crush them, and this sort of war
weariness in the southern Serbian
heartland, where Milosevic has
always found his strength, is likely to
have been another important factor
in his decision to end the war.
For all Milosevic's new vulnerabilities, he remains lucky in his
fractured, disputatious opposition.
The ultranationalist leader of the
Radical Party, Serbia's deputy
prime minister, Vojislav Seselj,
vowed today to quit the Government
if NATO troops enter Kosovo. He will
no doubt try to challenge Milosevic in elections, but most Serbs are
not going to find the prospect of even
more tension with the world community a politically attractive platform.
Once out of power, Seselj will
also find the draconian press laws he
favored put to use against him.
And the democrats are too busy
either knifing each other or competing for Milosevic's favors in coalition governments to do him significant harm.
Zoran Djindjic, the prominent
leader of the Democratic Party, has
probably destroyed his political career in Serbia by fleeing to its sister
republic, Montenegro, while others
remained in Belgrade under the
bombs.
Vuk Draskovic, the leader of the
Serbian Renewal Movement and a
former leader of the democratic opposition, still commands the largest
political following there. He was
prominent in pushing for an early
peace settlement, and he has his own
television station because his party
controls the Belgrade municipality.
But Draskovic is considered
flighty, and as he praised the peace
accord Thursday, he also made it clear
that he would be more than willing to
rejoin Milosevic's Government,
especially if Seselj quits. If so, he
could be a useful interlocutor with
the West for the indicted President
Milosevic.
