> The Vancouver Sun                               Thursday, June 10, 1999
>
> A Soldier's View
>
> MILOSEVIC HELD OUT AGAINST A HUMILIATING PEACE ACCORD
>
>         Many of us were critical of the bombing campaign's
>         wastefulness; in the end, we were proved right.
>
>         By Lewis MacKenzie
>
>         How quickly some commentators, particularly in Canada and
> the United States, jumped on and off the Kosovo war bandwagon.
>         Since the first hint of a ceasefire more than a week ago some
> reputable columnists proclaimed a NATO victory and declared that
> the air strikes worked to perfection in forcing President Slobodan
> Milosevic's capitulation.
>         They decried the retired politicians, bureaucrats and generals
> who said the air strikes would fail as a bunch of crybabies who were
> woefully out of date.
>         Assuming that I was included in this condemnation I decided to
> research what some of the anti-bombing alumni had actually said.
>         To my considerable pleasure I discovered that the Kissingers
> and Powells, the Lord Owens and Ambassador Bissetts of the
> world, and further down the food chain, the MacKenzies, never
> said that air strikes would not prevail. Let's face it, if the most
> powerful military alliance in the world possessing two-thirds of all
> the fire power on the face of the Earth and including three nuclear
> powers, cannot bring a tiny country of 11 million citizens to heel we
> had better get rid of the alliance.
>         All the critics of the bombing, without exception, persuasively
> argued — in my biased opinion — that bombing was not the best
> option available. In fact, bombing was a very bad option, creating
> as it did exactly the humanitarian catastrophe it was trying to stop.
>         Prior to the negotiations at Rambouillet in March there were
> approximately 100,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees in countries
> bordering Kosovo and throughout Europe.
>         These refugees had been driven from their homes by two years
> of fierce fighting between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
> security forces and the secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army. After
> 11 weeks of bombing by NATO the number of refugees has grown
> to a million.
>         During the past two weeks Milosevic achieved major
> concessions from the West regarding the two conditions of the
> Rambouillet agreement that encouraged him to start his ruthless
> ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo in March.
>         The first condition achieved by Milosevic had originally
> stipulated that the International Implemental force would have total
> freedom of movement throughout the Federal Republic of
> Yugoslavia. In other words, members of the force would have the
> legal right to go anywhere in the republic at a time of their
> choosing.
>         It's my opinion that Milosevic was under the impression that he
> had been secretly indicted — like a number of others — as a war
> criminal by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague at
> least a year ago.
>         The last thing Milosevic wanted was NATO peacekeeping
> troops patrolling the streets outside his office and residences in
> Belgrade.
>         The humiliation of such an obvious presence by an occupying
> force would preclude any chance he has of staying in power.
>         Milosevic got his way. The current peace accord authorizes the
> international force freedom of movement only in Kosovo. Serbia is
> out of bounds.
>         The key Rambouillet condition that encouraged Milosevic to
> escalate the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo was the statement that the
> future political structure of Kosovo and its status within the federal
> republic would be revisited in three years by way of a referendum
> and the will of the people would be considered.
>         With an overwhelming Albanian majority in Kosovo that
> condition virtually guaranteed Kosovo independence from
> Yugoslavia in the near future. Milosevic would be drawn and
> quartered by his own people if he gave in to such a condition.
>         But in the end he didn't have to; the current peace plan calls for
> autonomy only and there is no reference to independence or a
> referendum.
>         Those who say that Milosevic rejected a better deal at
> Rambouillet than the one he is getting from the international
> community following the bombing campaign have not given the two
> concessions mentioned the emphasis they deserve.
>         Staying out of jail and denying Kosovo its independence are
> clearly sweet personal victories for someone who, for all intents and
> purposes, has lost four wars in the last eight years.
>         Perhaps we should not be too hasty in declaring our own
> unqualified victory.
>         We have been implicated in the displacement of approximately
> one million refugees from Kosovo and the deaths of God knows
> how many.
>         We have destroyed up to $100 billion worth of infrastructure in
> a sovereign nation. We claim we had no quarrel with the Serbian
> people and yet, when all was said and done, we killed at least 5,000
> of them and we are still doing deals with their president.
>         Surely there's something wrong with this picture.
>
> Retired major general Lewis MacKenzie commanded UN troops during the siege
> of Sarajevo in the Bosnian civil war in 1992.