THE CONFERENCE

    The participants at the conference including Sir Alfred Sherman, former Canadian ambassador in Belgrade James Bissett, Cambridge historian Dr. Michael Stenton, and German writer and editor Juergen Elsaesser were unanimous in their assessment that the NATO war against Yugoslavia marked a significant turning point for the West as a whole.

    Several contributions from foreign visitors tended to concentrate on the way in which the principle of state sovereignty, and of the rule of law itself, has been subverted in the name of humanitarian intervention. They were in broad agreement that, so far from demonstrating the vigor of Western nations in their ruthless pursuit of an ideology of multi-ethnic democracy and international human rights, the whole Balkan entanglement may be seen as a disturbing revelation of the West's moral and cultural decay. In the words of Thomas Fleming,

    Western democracies, incapable of telling the truth or assessing reality, anesthetize their citizens with massive doses of pop culture and political propaganda. To counter the bold moves made in Europe by a newly insurgent Islam, the West offers irresolute compromises and world-weary defeatism.

    While most visitors' contributions tended to scrutinize the significance of the rampant Western Serbophobia, the hosts focused on the equally unfathomable incoherence of the Serb response. Dr. Vojislav Kostunica, a leading figure in the democratic opposition to Milosevic, wondered if the loss of identity and the acceptance of collective culpability was the ultimate price that may be demanded of the Serbs and, if so he said it is the one they must never accept. The issue of preserving national and cultural identity loomed large with several other contributors. Slobodan Rakitic, president of the Writers Union, pointed out that the Balkans are the testing ground for the ability of small nations to resist absorption into the global political order and popular culture.

    As a first step toward understanding the challenges that we all face after the Balkan Storm, the symposium in Belgrade has thrown significant light on the quandary of the West as manifested in the Balkans. Several contributions, which will be published in Byronica and (we hope) as a book, will be of interest to all who ponder the dilemma of coping with the modern world and yet not becoming helots of a post-human new international order.

   POLITICAL SITUATION IN SERBIA

   While Serbia after almost a decade of sanctions and 78 days of last year's NATO bombardment proved to be unsurprisingly impoverished, the spirit of fortitude of our interlocutors was startling. But the unbroken spirit of writers, poets and politically active intellectuals does not necessarily reflect the morale of most ordinary people, struggling to make ends meet on $100 or less a month. Even though we have not encountered it first hand, we were assured that an air of resigned defeatism most aptly characterizes the prevailing mood of Serbia today.

    Indeed, the country is in dire straits: Its economy in free fall, its society in tatters, its middle class pauperized or exiled, parts of its territory under foreign occupation. And yet, the regime of Slobodan Milosevic does not appear to be in any imminent danger. His opponents in Belgrade despair over the fact that the Serbs are fatally squeezed between the hammer of the West and the anvil of Milosevic, who in the memorable phrase of Michael Stenton - will not flap his wings as long as he can feed on the ever-shrinking innards of Inner Serbia.

    But we have also witnessed the overwhelming perception among our hosts mostly dedicated opponents of the regime that there exists a fundamental anti-Serb bias in the Western, and primarily American policy in the Balkans. This in turn has enabled Milosevic to linger on, in spite of the seemingly endless stream of disasters and defeats the nation has endured under him.

    Milosevic's domestic opponents and West European diplomats familiar with the Serbian political scene are in broad agreement on what the United States can and should do to promote change. First of all, lift all the sanctions. According to Simon Jenkins of the London Times, as in Iraq, sanctions make the rulers rich and everyone else - the professionals, the merchants and the workers - poor. They pollute the political economy and degrade public order. There are few Europeans who dispute Jenkins' conclusion that, far from encouraging the people to rise up in revolt, the sanctions do the opposite. Canada's Globe and Mail (March 1, 2000, The evil lord of Serbia rubs his hands by Marcus Gee) aptly summarized the problem:

    An evil lord rules over a poor medieval town. The lord is so cruel to his people, and such a nuisance to his neighbours, that all the nobles of the land band together to overthrow him. There is one problem: None of the nobles are willing to shed a drop of their own blood. So, instead of attacking the lord in his castle, they surround the town and let nothing in or out -- no food, no water, no wagons, no people. Eventually, the nobles reason, the townsfolk will be so hungry and poor that they will rise up and overthrow the lord themselves. This, in a nutshell, is the Western plan for unseating Milosevic, the evil lord of Serbia. NATO bombed him into pulling out of Kosovo last spring, but it stopped short of toppling him.

    Since the end of the Kosovo war last June, the victorious Western powers have tightened the economic noose on Serbia, choking off all legal trade and reducing the Serbian economy to a gasping wreck. Most Western leaders insist that, as long as Mr. Milosevic is in power, there will be no end to sanctions and no Western help in repairing the billions of dollars in damage from last year's air strikes. A crueller and more stupid policy would be hard to imagine, as Mr. Gee put it.

    And yet, so far the United States has resisted even mild European pressure to ease the sanctions, except for such purely symbolic gestures as the recently announced temporary reintroduction of air links with Belgrade.

   AMBASSADOR BISSETT'S EXPERIENCE

   Just how difficult it is to entertain ideas in today's Western democracy that are deemed politically incorrect by the powers-that-be was aptly demonstrated by the government of Canada in its treatment of the former Canadian ambassador in Belgrade, Mr. James Bissett, who was a member of our group. 1*

    As The Globe and Mail reported on January 29 (Ottawa slaps gag order on ex-envoy to Yugoslavia - Diplomat spoke out against NATO air strikes, by Simon Tuck), in the early 1990s, James Bissett spoke in Belgrade for all Canadians:

    About a decade later, Ottawa doesn't want him even speaking to Canadians in Belgrade. Mr. Bissett, Canada's ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1990-92, was paying a social visit to friends and former colleagues at the Canadian embassy this week when officials told him they had orders from Ottawa to prevent him from speaking to staff on embassy property. Now retired, Mr. Bissett was in the region as a guest of a U.S.-based academic organization that had organized a seminar to discuss the post-war fortunes of the Balkans.

    Ottawa's gag order follows on the publication of a column Mr. Bissett published in The Globe and Mail on 11 February, in which he criticized the Canadian government and other NATO countries for their handling of the Balkan crisis. He wrote:

    Hailed as a victory for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the bombing, on closer analysis, can be seen as an unmitigated failure with far-reaching implications for world peace. Canada must demand more of its political leaders before they lead us into another war.

    In the same article Mr. Bissett opined that Canada's flagrant violation of international law was conducted without public awareness or parliamentary debate. NATO's bombing campaign, he said, was a direct violation of the United Nations Charter and NATO's own treaties and was responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 Yugoslav civilians. So much for humanitarian intervention.

    In a telephone interview from his hotel in Belgrade Mr. Bissett told CBC Radio's As It Happens that at first he felt the snub was a petty act, as payback for his public criticism of NATO's military campaign against the Serbs. He later came to feel it was a more serious effort to squelch opposition to the Canadian government's policies.

    Foreign Affairs Department spokesman Jim Wright told CBC Radio that officials in Ottawa had instructed the Belgrade embassy staff not to spend any time talking with Mr. Bissett because they had better things to do. Wright said the embassy staff was busy with a humanitarian mission that was visiting Belgrade at the same time.

    This was not the real reason, of course. A senior official with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, who was independently contacted by The Globe and Mail at about the same time, unwittingly contradicted Mr. Wright and confirmed that there was, in effect, a gag order on Mr. Bissett. Our concern is that Mr. Bissett's views on Yugoslavia are being used by the Yugoslavian authorities for their own propaganda reasons, to prop up a regime that has been indicted for war crimes and isolated by the rest of the world, he said. Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy is noted for his self-avowed espousal of Canadian ideals abroad. He lists them as, inter alia, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and multi-ethnicity. The scandalous treatment of Mr. Bissett, a proud Canadian, puts in question Mr. Axworthy's propagations.

    OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

   Quite apart from the fundamental flaws in this Administration's strategy in the Balkans, there are certain practical steps that should be taken immediately if the U.S. government is serious about its stated goal of getting rid of Milosevic. This would necessitate the encouragement of a broad front of all Serbian democratic forces committed to change. Washington's current overt support for its preferred opposition factions Alliance for Change, and its ineffectual Citizens' Alliance ingredient - is counterproductive. It makes opposition leaders look subservient to the United States, the country that had bombed Serbia but a year ago. This is tantamount to political suicide, and such impression is only reinforced by President Clinton's announcement last July that $10 million of U.S. funds would be turned over to the opposition. This has enabled the regime to claim that its opponents are in the pay of foreign governments.

    But first and foremost, the United States and the rest of NATO's Humanitarian Bombers' Club should publicly and unambiguously declare the same degree of commitment to the return of some quarter-million Serb and other non-Albanian refugees evicted from Kosovo (and another half-million expelled from the Krajina and other parts of Croatia since 1991) that had accompanied the demand for the return of Albanians displaced during the bombing campaign. As Bishop Artemije pointed out during his February visit to Washington, without such an assurance the proponents of political change in Serbia cannot answer the charge that the leaders of Western powers are hypocrites practicing situational ethics and selective humanitarianism. Sadly, if the media-political treatment of the standoff in Mitrovica is an indicator (see next page), such a change in U.S. policy is not on the horizon.

    Only by accepting that the solution of minority issues lies in a democratically transformed Serbia that has a rightful and legitimate place in the community of nations, the West will finally and perhaps fatally undermine Milosevic. To bring about a new dawn for Serbia, especially the U.S. policy in the Balkans should reflect the pragmatic acceptance that there are at least some legitimate Serbian aspirations and interests. Continuing collective punishment of the Serbs because of Milosevic effectively enables him to remain in power, thus justifying further castigation from inside the Beltway.

    The present single-minded policy towards the Serbs of all-stick-no-carrot has to be changed. If it is not, it will lead to the creation of an embittered, bankrupt twilight zone in the heart of the Balkans, thus preventing a stable and just peace in the region. This outcome is not what the West needs, or what the people of the Balkans deserve.

1 * You can hear Mr. Bissett's interview with CBC Radio (As It Happens, Thursday, January 27, 2000) on the Internet. The CBC in-house trailer for this interview is pretty accurate: Canada's former ambassador to Yugoslavia experiences a diplomatic incident at the Canadian embassy in Belgrade. He's made persona non grata by the very government he used to serve. Check it out on: http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/asithappens/real/pt1-00-01-27-aih1.ram