It was past 10 p.m., the end of a long, cranky day of shuttle diplomacy in the Balkans.
U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke returned to his hotel suite at the Belgrade Hyatt, eased his bulky frame into an inviting armchair and kicked off his shoes–something he had done earlier this day with profound diplomatic consequences.
That afternoon, in the ethnic Albanian town of Junik, with a passel of reporters and photographers in tow, Holbrooke held an impromptu meeting with a couple of low-level Kosovo Liberation Army representatives in the house of a local dignitary.
Entering the Albanian house, Holbrooke did what Albanians customarily do when they enter someone’s house. He took off his shoes.
Hours later, images of a shoeless Holbrooke, sitting on the floor of a simple peasant house, chatting with a KLA official dressed in army fatigues, flickered across television screens around the world.
In Serbia, the images ignited a firestorm of outrage. Serbs consider the KLA a terrorist organization. The U.S. tends to agree and up until that afternoon it had kept the separatists at arm’s length.
So why was America’s next ambassador to the United Nations sitting down with terrorists, the Serbs wanted to know. Why had he kowtowed to the KLA by removing his shoes, they demanded. Why was Holbrooke shoeless while the KLA soldier seated next to him wore boots?
Holbrooke dismissed the flap with a shrug. The meeting with the KLA had been unplanned and “unofficial.” He said he could not even recall the names of the officials with whom he had met.
But Holbrooke, a diplomat who knows how to use his outsized personality to project U.S. muscle but who also appreciates the subtlest of nuances, is not one to stumble–shoeless or otherwise–into a meeting with a group of gun-toting rebels. What message was the U.S. envoy trying to send and to whom?
As Holbrooke explained it, the purpose of the unusual visit to Junik had been to get a firsthand look at what was happening on the ground in Kosovo, the unhappy province that Serbs have said is their Jerusalem but which is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Albanians.
The Albanians have been clamoring for independence since 1990, when the autonomous status they had been granted by Marshal Tito, the longtime Yugoslav leader, was abruptly canceled by the Serbs.
The Clinton administration’s position on Kosovo is a tricky one. It sympathizes with the Albanians’ misery but not their demand for independence. It views Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic as the chief architect of repression in Kosovo but backs his claim that Kosovo belongs to Serbia. It wants a return to Kosovo’s pre-1990 autonomous status.
The only thing that has prevented Kosovo from erupting into violence long ago is the improbable presence of Ibrahim Rugova, the ethnic Albanian leader who for eight years has preached the politics of passive resistance to Serb rule.
But Rugova’s approach has gotten him nowhere with Milosevic, and Rugova’s supporters are losing patience.
The professorial Rugova remains the dominant player on the Kosovo stage; he is still popular with the masses and commands considerable moral authority. But increasingly his supporters see the KLA as the only way to get Milosevic’s attention.
Nobody, including Holbrooke, quite knows what to make of the KLA. Its leadership remains unknown even to other ethnic Albanians.
“One problem is that, on the military side, there is no clear Albanian chain of command with which to deal on talks about a cease-fire,” Holbrooke said. “You can make a deal with Rugova, but he can’t enforce it.”
At the same time Holbrooke was sitting with KLA representatives in Junik, Robert Gelbard, the U.S. special envoy to the Balkans, was attempting to open a dialogue with the group’s political leadership in Europe.
But Holbrooke acknowledged that even after Gelbard’s talks with the unnamed officials in an undisclosed European capital, it still was unclear who really controlled the group.
Best estimates are that the KLA has 1,000 to 2,000 men under arms. It appears to be adequately funded by Albanians living abroad, and there is no shortage of young Albanian men eager to sign up.
The Clinton administration’s immediate goal is to get the sides to pull back so the current state of low-intensity warfare does not suddenly become something much worse. Of particular concern to the U.S. are the armed checkpoints that have begun to sprout up everywhere in Kosovo.
Under pressure from Holbrooke, Milosevic has backed off a bit. KLA hasn’t.
“We’ve asked the KLA: If we get Milosevic to pull back his security forces, would you pull back the checkpoints? They said, `How can we? We’ll be killed,’ ” said a senior U.S. official.
The KLA is said to control about one-third of the territory in Kosovo, but it has yet to demonstrate the ability to hold any of it when confronted by superior Serbian firepower.
The guerrilla group lacks coherent military and political strategies, but that is likely to change. “Somewhere out of those mountains will come a Fidel Castro to pull this thing together,” the American official gloomily predicted.
To forestall that, the U.S. and its allies have been busy building up Rugova while trying to restrain Milosevic by threatening direct NATO intervention in the conflict. While almost no one believes that anything good can come out of a NATO attack on targets in Yugoslavia, the U.S. is convinced that the present negotiations have no chance of succeeding without the credible threat of force.
The flip side is that if NATO is seen to waver in its resolve, it could see its bluff become a self-fulling prophecy. “The more Milosevic doubts our resolve to use force, the more likely we will have to,” the American official said.
He noted a further irony. “If Kosovo were an internationally recognized country like Bosnia, NATO planes would be in action today,” he said.
This is small comfort to Kosovo’s frustrated Albanians, who ask why the U.S. and its allies supported Slovenia (population 1.9 million) and Macedonia (population 2 million) when they broke away from the former Yugoslavia, while Kosovo, with a population of 2.2 million that is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, is told it must remain a part of Serbia.
The official answer is that Macedonia and Slovenia were “republics” within the old Yugoslav system, while Kosovo is a mere “province.”
The real answer, however, is Dayton.
The Dayton accords that ended the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina upheld the principle of Bosnia’s territorial integrity. If the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo were encouraged to pull out of Serbia, there would be nothing to prevent the Serbs or Croats from demanding anything less in Bosnia.
No one knows this better than Holbrooke, the author of the Dayton accords.
