By Franz Schurmann

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Prediction #10 for Tuesday, April 20th,1999

The Serbs Can't or Wont Do or Die for Milosevic.

• Introduction:
  

  On April 15 in his San Francisco speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors President Clinton set forth a "future vision" for peace, prosperity and freedom in the Balkans that cannot take effect until Slobodan Milosevic is removed from office.

  In earlier days of empire that would have meant that Milosevic's head be personally delivered to the Emperor.

  This being the case there is no room for a "negotiated" peace to the Kosovo conflict. The touted German "plan" which proposed to jump-start a peace process by means of a few confidence-rebuilding moves by Clinton and Milosevic is dead in the water.

  No one should dismiss Clinton's vision as only rhetoric. As summer approaches Clinton will launch an even more grandiose peace plan for the Mideast. In its February 14-20 the London-based Arabic weekly magazine Al-Majalla revealed that plan: a common market confederation between Israel, Palestine and Jordan --- similar to the "Benelux" (Belgium-Netherlands-Luxembourg) of the 1950's.

  Both the Balkan and the Mideastern visions are based on the same political logic. Mini-states in both regions cannot survive on their own. They need to co-operate with each other and eventually integrate in order to attain peace and prosperity. That can only happen if "ancient ethnic hatreds" are eliminated. And it can only be done through practice of democracy and tolerance of diversity. The end result for both the Balkans and the Mideast will be the peace, prosperity and freedom as a once balkanized Western Europe now enjoys. Peace, prosperity and freedom were the visionary pillars of the world view set forth by Clinton in another San Francisco speech a month ago.

  Both plans require that their region's respective dictators be eliminated: Milosevic from Serbia and Saddam Hussein from Iraq. For the moment Milosevic is a greater obstacle than Saddam.

  The Mideastern plan can only be implemented if by summer's beginning the Kosovo war is ending --- on Clinton's terms. That means Milosevic will be finished, the Serbian forces disintegrating and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) under firm American control so that it doesn't proclaim Kosovo independence.

  Can Clinton topple Milosevic, bring about the disintegration of the Serbian army and keep the big US allies like France and Germany as well as the smaller ones like the KLA under control over the next six weeks or so?

  There is no point in hedging an either-or prediction. It's clear that six weeks from now NATO either will be stuck in another quagmire with no light at the end of the tunnel or the ambitious goals Clinton has laid out for the Kosovo venture will have been reached or are clearly reachable.

• Prediction:
  I predict that Clinton will once again win. Milosevic will either be dead, out of office or on his way out. Once that happens the vaunted Yugoslav (= Serbian) army will disintegrate. And all America's allies, big and small, will so marvel at the new American world giant that they will meekly fall in line.

• Outcome:
  Some 50,000 NATO troops are poised to enter Kosovo. The NATO command says those forces must immediately fill the vacuums left by the retreating Serbs lest "chaos break out" --- translate to mean "before the KLA gets in."

  Yet NATO forces already have militarily helped the KLA forces. This means that if Serb and KLA forces clash NATO will have no choice but to back the latter. Such clashes are exactly what NATO wants to avoid through a fine-tuned evacuation-and-occupation agreement. So, unless surprises occur, I rate this prediction also as 90% correct.

The reasoning behind my prediction depends on one basic assumption: Bill Clinton is one of the smartest and shrewdest presidents in American history.

That being the case I cannot imagine why he would have stated such big and short-term goals unless he thought he had a good chance of achieving them: eliminate Milosevic, destroy the Serbian army, lead all the refugees back to Kosovo. And do all this without bringing about a new cold war with Russia.

One can retort that a lot of smart and shrewd leaders in history made such mistakes: Hannibal about Rome, Napoleon and Hitler about Russia, Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam. But voracious reader Clinton knows about all of them.

In the Balkans present and past often determine the future. It's said that people have suffered so much that they don't believe in any other kind of future. First a few things about Serbia's present condition.

The French, long friendly to Serbia, know a lot about Serbs. In the April 6 issue of Le Monde Laurent Caramel wrote a depressing analysis of Serbia's economy entitled "do-nothingism and croneyism." He compares that economy to "a paper castle resting on shifting sands." But then says agriculture has not suffered and that peasants who form 40% of the population are Milosevic's main support.

Another expert, this time a Serb, Veljko Vujacic, now professor of sociology at Oberlin College and earlier a student of mine at UC Berkeley, makes some relevant comments about Serbia's past.

When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 resistance came mainly from the royal Yugoslav army commanded by General Drazha Mihailovic and his Chetnik forces. According to Vujacic, they had the allegiance of the majority of the Serbs in Serbia. But Serbs who lived in the then Hitlerite State of Croatia revolted against Ustasha fascist terror. They then quickly swelled the ranks of the growing Communist Partisan movement. The Partisans won and Tito-led Yugoslavia came into being. The Chetniks collapsed and Mihailovic was shot.

Not long before the Dayton accords were signed in November 1995 these so-called Krajina Serbs were ethnically cleansed, most of them ending up in Serbia. They had been brought into western Croatia and Bosnia in the 1700's by the ruling Habsburg empire as soldiers to protect their frontier (krajina) against the Ottoman empire.

NATO commander General Clark has repeatedly said that his military goal is to destroy the Yugoslav army and the state's infrastructures. Russian president Boris Yeltsin says: "Bill Clinton hopes to win, he hopes Milosevic will capitulate, give up the whole Yugoslavia, make it America's protectorate." But "we will not allow this. This is a strategic place, the Balkans."

Yet, according to White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, Yeltsin also told Clinton he would not allow Russia to be drawn into the Kosovo conflict.

In April 1941 the Soviet Union did not move to help Yugoslavia resist the Hitler onslaught. Except for the Serb Chetniks, Yugoslav resistance crumbled. A little over two months later Hitler invaded Russia.

To me the situation now looks similar to April 1941. Without Russian support, almost entirely isolated on the European and world scene, with a third --- and most likely much more --- of its work force unemployed, with rural peasants who will just retreat to their fields and refugees still bitter about the loss of their Krajina homeland Serbs do not seem able or willing to do or die for Slobodan Milosevic.

This could be the analysis given Clinton by his advisers as he prepared his visionary San Francisco speeches.