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The tide turns
Serbian troops begin to leave Kosovo and refugees plan their return as a welcome but uncertain peace takes hold in the region.
By Laura Rozen
[06/10/99]

Capitol Hill's odd couple
Guess what happens when a white conservative and a black liberal join forces?
By Jake Tapper
[06/10/99]

Justice, Texas-style
The district attorney of Harris County keeps putting 'em on death row.
By Robert Bryce
[06/09/99]

Waging diplomatic war
NATO is dictating a peace deal at the U.N. that will virtually guarantee Kosovo's future independence.
By Ian Williams
[06/09/99]

Prisoner of its past
The recent eruption of anti-Americanism in China reflects a deep-seated historical identity as "victim" that is holding back its emergence as a major power.
By Orville Schell
[06/08/99]

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While President Slobodan Milosevic was declaring victory back home on Belgrade television, the Yugoslav representative to the United Nations, Vladislac Jovanovic, told delegates that this was one of the darkest pages in the history of the Security Council, which would lead to the dismemberment of a sovereign European state.

Unresolved still is the question of the terms of Russian involvement. The Russian newspaper Pravda reports that 2,200 Russian paratroopers will not arrive for another month, by which time the NATO forces will be settled in. Some of the Russians are beginning to wonder whether they are not just there to put truth in the rumor that this is an international force, since they will clearly not be able to fulfill the original plan of creating a Serbian enclave within Kosovo. Indeed there are even suggestions in Russia that they should be posted to a sector outside of Kosovo altogether.

While the military side is sorted out, many are less than sanguine about the prospects of the United Nations running what is in effect a whole country, building up the administration from scratch. Luckily, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is among the skeptics. One major problem is a financial one. Washington's continual refusal to pay its U.N. dues arrears means that the organization has little or no financial or human resources for such a major operation.

The plans envisage the United Nations farming out much of the work to other agencies and departments. For example the European Union would look after reconstruction, the Organization for the Security of Europe would arrange elections, the United Nations'[ own peacekeeping department would provide international police and the U.N. Commissioner for Refugees would work with non-government organizations to resettle the Kosovars. All of this will have to start at a much more rapid pace than the United Nations' typical lethargic, bureaucratic crawl, in order to fill the administrative vacuum likely to be found on the ground.

In fact the eight pages of Resolution 1244 are remarkably clear. It is going to be one of the memorable ones -- like the mother of all resolutions, No. 687, which ended the Gulf War. That one also led to a decade of sanctions, an intermittent, low-intensity air war and high-intensity diplomacy. This time, the United Nations seems to have learned some valuable lessons from a decade of dealing with Milosevic. This resolution allows the troops carte blanche to enforce the peace plan, eliminating the need to play "mother may I" in front of the Security Council for future authorizations of force.

Some who have been here before remain skeptical. Bosnia's ambassador to the United Nations, Muhamed Sacirbey, commented ruefully to Salon News, "We had some good resolutions too -- but it all comes down to the implementation. The Western powers seem to have learned their lessons from Bosnia. Ironically, they were the ones who had a lack of will to implement before, but that seems to have changed."

In fact, the resolve of the Western alliance seems to be the best guarantee that the resolution will indeed be enforced. If everything goes according to plan, there will be nothing but a few token Serbian personnel in the province 11 days from now. Quite simply, barring a major miracle, Serbia will never control Kosovo again.

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