Blow-by-Blow ‘Collision’ Book Recounts in Detail Diplomacy Surrounding Kosovo War by David Tobenkin The 1999 Kosovo war, pitting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s members against a rump Yugoslav government that sought to ethnically cleanse its rebellious, largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo province, has been largely pushed out of the world’s consciousness by the agony of Iraq and the inhumanity of Darfur. But the underlying vexing problem of how diplomatic efforts can best address such intra-country, inter-ethnic disputes remains. “Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo” is a new book that examines the multilateral diplomacy surrounding the Kosovo war. Author John Norris was communications director for U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the lead diplomat for the United States on the crisis, and his book provides a highly readable, blow-by-blow history of the diplomacy that sought to resolve the conflict. As presented by Norris’s book, the Kosovo conflict suggests that aggressive multilateral diplomacy, coupled with the use of limited force, can perhaps solve such disputes, or at least prevent the worst outcomes for them. The book recounts the genesis of the crisis, in which Serbia sought to ethnically cleanse its majority Albanian province and drove more than a million Kosovar Albanians into neighboring Albania and Macedonia. NATO responded with a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia in spring and early summer of 1999. The conflict was complicated by a chilling Russian-NATO standoff that threatened a direct clash between NATO and the former superpower for the first time since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Finally, trilateral diplomacy among the United States, Finland and Russian diplomats set the terms for ending the conflict that largely mirrored NATO’s demands and that compelled Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to agree to them. As Talbott notes in his masterful forward to the book, the Kosovo campaign, though small in scope, was a first in several respects: the first time in 50 years of existence that NATO went to war, the first time that a coalition of countries attacked a regime to end its brutalization of a national minority, the first time airpower was enough to ensure victory, and the first time that U.S. armed forces conducted a sustained military operation without suffering a single combat fatality. In short, to some it served as the template for the concept of a “good” war that is necessary to address the predations of petty tyrants in a post-Cold War era. Notably, the use of force against Serbia also occurred without an authorizing U.N. Security Council resolution. Much of the book centers on Talbott’s negotiations with Finnish President and European Union Special Envoy to Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari and former Russian Prime Minister and Special Envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin to forge terms that Milosevic would accept to end the conflict. That step was a critical and accomplished piece of statecraft. It averted a policy schism between U.S. and European allies, avoided the difficulties posed by direct negotiations among too many parties, and increased Russian interest in the process by facilitating direct access to the United States. Perhaps most decisive was the participation of Finland, which was historically close to Russia yet a member of the European Union. This enabled Finland to offer itself as an essentially neutral third party trusted by both sides and also allowed the European Union to feel that it had a seat at the negotiating table. Agreement by Russia and the United States on the terms for ending the conflict, in turn, isolated Yugoslavia from its main ally, Russia, and led to rapid concession by Milosevic, who had previously succeeded in dividing the West. Norris necessarily concedes that diplomacy did not solve the underlying Kosovo ethnic conflict. The end of the war led to the deployment of some 50,000 NATO-led peacekeepers and international stewardship of the province, although it remains within Serbia. But the issue of Kosovo’s final status remains an open one and, certainly, there is no evidence that the war or the diplomacy that accompanied it set the framework for the emergence of a tolerant, multiethnic society. Large numbers of Kosovar Serbs have fled the province, and those who remain do so in small ethnic enclaves and are subject to persecution by the dominant Kosovar Albanians. Less than 1 percent of Serbs in Kosovo participated in the province’s parliamentary elections in October 2004. Economic recovery has been limited, and there is high unemployment and little international investment. In addition, the NATO bombing campaign resulted in substantial civilian casualties. On the other hand, the genocidal horrors of the earlier conflict in Bosnia were averted. There, Bosnian Serb troops in 1995 slaughtered an estimated 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia, the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II. Former U.S. Envoy to the Balkans Richard Holbrooke recently described the massacre in the Washington Post as “the failure of NATO, of the West, of peacekeeping and of the United Nations.” In addition, NATO managed to restrain Russian plans to push its military forces into Kosovo and thereby averted a direct conflict between the United States and Russia. Norris, who is now chief of staff of International Crisis Group’s Washington office, provides good fly-on-the-wall coverage of key diplomatic events. He conducted interviews with senior White House, NATO, State Department, Pentagon and international officials involved in the decision-making, and consulted the existing written record of the Kosovo conflict diplomacy. Next Page