The Trojan horse that 'started' a 79-day war

[Seth Ackerman]

> The Independent
> The Trojan horse that 'started' a 79-day war 
> By Robert Fisk in Belgrade 
> 26 November 1999 
> In the last days of the Paris peace talks on Yugoslavia last March,
> something extraordinary happened. The Serb delegation - after agreeing to
> a political revolution in Kosovo - was presented with a military appendix
> to the treaty which demanded the virtual Nato occupation of all
> Yugoslavia. The Serbs turned it down and Nato went to war. Yet 79 days
> later, Nato - which had refused to contemplate a change in the military
> document - lost all interest in the annexe and at the final dramatic
> meetings on the Macedonian border was content with a Nato force inside
> only Kosovo. 
> Official obfuscation and confusion has ever since surrounded this
> all-important, last-minute addition to the Paris "peace" agreement. Was it
> presented by the Americans to force President Slobodan Milosevic to reject
> the whole peace package and permit Nato to bomb Serbia? Nato sources claim
> the Serbs would anyway never have abided by the Kosovo political accords:
> in which case, why did the West negotiate with Belgrade in the first
> place? 
> Even the text of the military appendix was not known to journalists
> reporting the two sets of "peace" talks in Rambouillet and Paris. The
> Serbs say they denounced it at their last Paris press conference - an
> ill-attended gathering at the Yugoslav Embassy at 11pm on 18 March.
> Although a summary of an early draft of the peace treaty was placed in the
> House of Commons library on 1 March, the full treaty and the military
> annexes together were not put in the library until 1 April - the first day
> of the parliamentary recess and a week after Nato's bombing campaign
> began. 
> The full annexes demanded Nato rights of road, rail and air passage across
> all of Yugoslavia, the use of radio stations, even the waiving of any
> claims of damages against Nato. For any state - even one as grotesque as
> Serbia - this would have amounted to occupation. The Foreign Minister of
> France, Hubert Védrine, said the military appendix was similar to that
> used by Nato when it moved troops into Bosnia and that Nato forces needed
> access to Kosovo through Belgrade. But he has never explained why this
> supposedly essential part of the treaty was abandoned once Nato troops
> moved into the province. 
> Milan Komnenic, who was the Yugoslav Federal Information minister and a
> member of Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement (then in government but
> soon to be in opposition), was in Paris during the talks and has become
> preoccupied with the military annexe. He is writing a book about the
> negotiations, The Trap of Rambouillet. A tall, bespectacled figure with a
> reputation for intelligence and integrity - he admits atrocities were
> carried out by Serbs - he says he still does not understand why the war
> started. 
> "We don't know when the Russians found out about paragraphs six, seven and
> eight of the annexe," he said. "Igor Ivanov [the Foreign Minister of
> Russia] claimed the Russian side didn't know about the annexe at all. The
> surprise is that besides the Americans, no one knew about the annexe. We
> were given it one day before the end of the Paris talks - at 'a minute
> before midnight'. Before that, we heard only rumours about the
> implementation of the political agreement." 
> According to Mr Komnenic, the American negotiator Christopher Hill and the
> Austrian diplomat at the talks, Boris Petritsch, insisted on the annexe
> while the Russian negotiator, Boris Mayorski - who later refused to attend
> the Kosovo Albanian signing of the "peace" agreement - abstained. "Hill
> and Petritsch were 'for' the annexe and [Robin] Cook and Védrine
> apparently agreed with a version - not identical to the final annexe -
> which was called an 'explanation' of the political agreement and which
> said there could be no implementation with a Nato presence only in
> Kosovo," Mr Komnenic said. 
> In January, the Hill plan was published without annexe B in the Kosovo
> Albanian newspaper Koha Ditore, Mr Komnenic says. "And Hill gave Mr
> Draskovic and myself a copy of the plan in February - calling for a
> military presence in Kosovo but not in all of Yugoslavia. Then in Paris,
> Hill put annexe B on the table - one day before the collapse. I don't even
> know if our side knew till then about the annexe... But when we realised
> the danger of war was threatening, we de facto accepted the political
> agreement. It's clear the Americans were surprised by our acceptance of
> the agreement. So they were preparing their trap." 
> Since the military annexe became widely known, Western leaders have either
> tried to explain it away as a routine addendum to any peace implementation
> or an essential mechanism to get Nato into Kosovo. Mr Cook has adopted
> both tactics. Replying to Sir Peter Emery in the Foreign Affairs Select
> Committee on 28 April - when the Nato bombardment had been going on for
> more than a month while half the Albanian population of Kosovo was being
> "ethnically cleansed" by the Serbs - Mr Cook said: "The proposal for a
> military presence in Kosovo was one confined to Kosovo." This, he said,
> would require a "force agreement" with the Yugoslav government "that may
> [sic] be the text which has appeared". The issue, he said, had never been
> raised by the Serb delegation "which suggests to me that there is
> something deeply false about the idea that this is now the basis on which
> talks broke down". The idea that the military annexe was the "casus belli"
> was a "canard". 
> Goran Matic, a minister in Mr Milosevic's government and a close friend of
> the President, says that the European Contact Group designed the political
> framework for the Rambouillet talks and that at one meeting the Russians
> refused to discuss the political and military annexe. "Around the end of
> the second week of March, our delegation received the paper which
> contained the military annexe," Mr Matic said. "The Contact Group had
> managed to present the paper without the Russians. Our delegation,
> together with Mayorski, decided to withdraw acceptance of the paper
> because it wasn't produced by all the Contact Group. For this reason, we
> said the paper was only 'informal'. But the Americans were trying to
> 'legalise' the paper, which wasn't acceptable to the Russians. Mayorski
> put in a written objection. We were ready to accept the political solution
> of the Kosovo problem and UN troops to regulate the implementation - but
> not Nato troops in occupation. United Nations Security Council resolution
> 1244 [which ended the conflict] could have been accepted before the
> bombing." 
> In any event, when Nato commanders met the Serbs for the
> "military-technical agreement" at the end of the war - after thousands of
> Kosovo Albanians had been murdered by Serb forces and as many as 1,500
> civilians killed by Nato bombs - the supposedly crucial military annexe
> was never mentioned. Miraculously, Nato - with 40,000 troops to move into
> the province (10,000 more than originally envisaged) - no longer needed
> appendix B. Not a single Nato soldier moved north of Kosovo into the rest
> of Serbia. 
> What was the real purpose of Nato's last minute demand? Was it a Trojan
> horse? To save the peace? Or to sabotage it?
>