President Clinton hailed Vojislav Kostunica’s triumph in Yugoslavia on Friday as a victory for democracy on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he promised the U.S. and the allied coalition that rained bombs on Belgrade just a year ago would now lift economic sanctions and provide aid to get the new government on its feet.
“This is an extraordinary victory for the people of the former Yugoslavia who endured oppression and deprivation, who saw through the propaganda, who took their country back with nothing but courage, principle and patriotism,” Clinton said in the White House Rose Garden.
“A dark cloud has lifted, and though tensions and challenges clearly remain, prospects for enduring stability in the Balkans have greatly improved,” he said.
While Washington welcomed the turn of events in Yugoslavia, many questions remain, including the future status of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic; the attitude toward the U.S. of Kostunica, the newly elected president; and the role of Russia, traditionally a Serb ally.
Minutes after Clinton spoke, Milosevic appeared on national television in Yugoslavia and conceded to Kostunica, whose victory in last month’s national election initially was disputed by Milosevic’s forces.
Two days of mass pro-democracy protests, culminating in the occupation of the parliament building in Belgrade and of the state television station, cemented Kostunica’s victory and ended Milosevic’s 13 years of rule.
Milosevic, perhaps second only to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as the Clinton administration’s public enemy No. 1, alarmed U.S. officials when he said in his televised concession statement that he wanted to play a continuing role as the leader of his Serb political party.
Seeking to avoid doing anything that might slow the transfer of power in Yugoslavia, the Clinton administration muted its demand that Milosevic go before a war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Although the U.S. position remains unchanged, Clinton said he didn’t want to “get into all the hypotheticals” and said the U.S. should “work with our allies as closely as we can to see what the right thing to do is.”
Speaking outdoors in a drizzle, Clinton said: “Let’s not, even in the rain, water down the impact of this day. The people there have done an astonishing thing. This is just as big a blow for freedom as we saw when the Berlin Wall was torn down, when Lech Walesa led the shipyard workers in Poland.”
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright framed Milosevic’s fall as the completion of unfinished business from the end of the Cold War.
“The developments of this week are another enormous step toward the creation of a Europe without walls, wholly at peace and fully free,” Albright said at the State Department.
While Albright and Clinton said the democratic triumph in Yugoslavia vindicated their policies of opposing Milosevic and funneling money to opposition movements, Albright said “nine-tenths of the credit” should go to the Yugoslav people.
The Clinton administration bade good riddance to a regime that, in the past decade, played a central role in sparking four wars within the borders of the much larger “former Yugoslavia,” a Balkan region now broken up into a patchwork of countries, republics or separately administered provinces.
Events in Yugoslavia unfolded with such head-spinning speed that the Clinton administration was struggling to keep up. Clinton conceded he was still having trouble with the pronunciation of Kostunica’s name.
White House officials were scrambling to learn more about the law professor and avowed Serb nationalist who has been sharply critical of NATO and the United States and who has said he will not turn Milosevic over to a war crimes trial.
Asked whether the United States now formally recognized Kostunica as president of Yugoslavia, Clinton hesitated, saying he is clearly the president but “still needs to be formally ratified.”
Clinton administration access to information has been limited because the government has had no U.S. officials on the ground there, outside of Kosovo, since the NATO air campaign. Pending formal recognition, the State Department is preparing to re-establish its embassy in Belgrade. Department spokesman Richard Boucher said U.S. diplomats could be in place in a matter of days.
The administration is prepared to lift most of the economic sanctions and begin a flow of financial aid to Yugoslavia. The sanctions issue no longer is tied to Milosevic’s arrest for war crimes. The key requirement, U.S. officials say, is to complete his removal from power and consolidate the new democracy.
At least two sets of sanctions, one imposed by the European Union, the other by the United States, have left the Yugoslav economy in tatters. The European Union is expected to quickly lift an oil embargo and to make permanent the recent temporary lifting of the ban on flights into Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration almost certainly will follow suit, lifting similar U.S.-imposed sanctions, according to a senior State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Two other types of sanctions enforced by the EU and the United States may remain at least partially in place, the official said. They involve bans on financial transactions with companies linked to the Milosevic regime and a ban on travel by people linked to that regime, some of whom face war crimes charges.
The U.S. posture appears to be to let Europe take the lead in developing a strategy for dealing with the new Yugoslav government. Clinton said European governments had pledged to take the lion’s share of the burden of economic aid to the war-torn country in exchange for the U.S. having borne the bulk of the military burden in last year’s 78-day Kosovo campaign.
Much of that economic aid will be spent repairing the damage inflicted by the air campaign, which focused heavily on Yugoslavia’s infrastructure, particularly roads and bridges.
A major question mark is the role of Russia, a country with close religious and ethnic ties to Yugoslavia and whose government has tended to sympathize with Milosevic.
Clinton said he had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that Albright had been “in virtually constant contact” with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.
In fact, Clinton last spoke to Putin over the weekend, before the two-day uprising culminating in Milosevic’s fall from power. And while Albright has contacted most of her counterparts in major European capitals in the past two days, she had not yet spoken with Ivanov as of Friday evening, according to the State Department.
The administration was reduced to relying on conflicting news reports from Russia.
Before Milosevic’s appearance on state television, there were reports that Russia was trying to broker a deal that would have left Milosevic with some vestige of governmental power, an idea Clinton rejected.
“I don’t think there should be a deal brokered here,” Clinton said. If Russia can support the election results and recognize the new government, he said, “that can make a big positive difference.”
Human-rights groups already were speaking out against the possibility that Milosevic might be given immunity from war crimes prosecution.
“Let’s not forget the thousands who were slaughtered at Srebrenica, Vukovar and Sarajevo,” said Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch, naming some of the Balkan cities that long will be associated with the race-based attacks on civilians that marked the decadelong civil war. “He has to be called to account for these atrocities.”
The Clinton administration is particularly sensitive to the lowly status the United States has in Yugoslavia as a result of the bombing campaign and economic sanctions.
Ever the politician, Clinton remarked that “the estrangement of the United States and Serbia has been painful because we have so many Americans of Serbian origin,” with one of the largest concentrations in Chicago. “We have to do something immediately, because they’re under great . . . economic distress.”
Restoring friendly relations with Yugoslavia may not happen automatically under Kostunica, who sharply criticized the NATO air campaign and the economic sanctions and has questioned the authority of the war crimes tribunal to prosecute present or former Yugoslav leaders.
“He’s clearly a Serbian nationalist. He’s a patriot. But he appears to be profoundly devoted to the rule of law and to constitutional procedures,” Clinton said. “And that’s all we ever ask for.”
