> Copyright 2000 U.P.I.
> United Press International
>
> September 25, 2000, Monday
>
> SECTION: GENERAL NEWS
>
> LENGTH: 800 words
>
> HEADLINE: Analysis: Kostunica not Clinton administration's man
>
> BYLINE: By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI senior news analyst
>
> DATELINE: ATHENS, Greece, Sept. 25
>
> BODY:
> UPI ANALYSISVojislav Kostunica's claimed success in the first round
> of the
> Yugoslav presidential election Sunday was an unpleasant shock to both
> incumbent
> Slobodan Milosevic and the Clinton administration, which is trying to
> topple
> him.
>
> Kostunica's alliance of 18 opposition parties claimed Monday that he
> was
> leading Milosevic -- Serbia's ruler for the past 13 years -- by a
> landslide
> margin of 17 percent, 53 percent to 36 percent, across the mountainous
> nation of
> 23 million people. Even his rivals, the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical
> Party,
> put him ahead by almost the same margin, 53.5 percent to 37.9 percent.
>
> Kostunica is the joker in the pack of Balkan politics. He is the far
> from
> charismatic, unfashionable candidate whom neither Milosevic nor the U.S.
> government took seriously at first and whose popularity neither of them
> was
> prepared for.
>
> Milosevic was convinced that the democratic opposition fostered by the
> U.S.
> government was so fractious, disorganized and argumentative that no one in
> his
> country would take them seriously. He was right.
>
> Milosevic also calculated that the opposition activists favored by the
> Clinton administration would be seen by most of the Serbian people as
> either
> traitors or nave puppets of Washington who would sell their country into
> the
> hands of the United States and its allies.
>
> These countries, in Serb eyes, had showed their true colors by bombing
> Yugoslavia into submission last year, Milosevic believed. He was right
> about
> that, too.
>
> But what Milosevic never counted on was the challenge of an opponent
> who
> would demand an end to confrontation with the West but also condemn the
> NATO
> bombing of his country last year and the subsequent occupation of Kosovo
> province by NATO forces to Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing forces there.
>
> Kostunica, a 56-year-old law professor at Belgrade University, did all
> of
> that. And in so doing, he removed the only trump card Milosevic had left
> to
> attract any genuine popular support -- the argument that he and only he
> stood
> between the people of Serbia and the dissolution of their state.
>
> But Kostunica's rise has proven to be far from welcome to the Clinton
> administration, especially to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.
>
> Albright has spearheaded the efforts to make an example of Milosevic by
> having him handed over to the International Court of Justice in The Hague,
> capital of the Netherlands, and tried there as a war criminal.
>
> But Kostunica implacably opposes having Milosevic or any other
> prominent Serb
> tried as a war criminal, no matter how terrible was their conduct during
> the
> last nine years of conflict in the fragmented former communist federal
> state. He
> also regularly denounces the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year as
> "criminal."
> And he flatly opposes granting Kosovo province, with its more than 90
> percent
> Albanian Muslim majority, any independence from Orthodox Christian
> Serbia.
>
> In many respects, if Kostunica does win, he will present the Clinton
> administration -- or its successor, whether Vice President Al Gore or
> Texas Gov.
> George W Bush -- with a far trickier problem than Milosevic does.
>
> U.S. leaders -- Republican and Democrat alike -- are now used to
> attacking
> Milosevic as, if not a Hitler, then at least a Saddam Hussein figure. They
> have
> made clear they hope that a pro-American opposition candidate will
> eventually
> succeed him and agreed to U.S.-mediated solutions to Bosnia and Kosovo.
>
> But Kostunica is not pro-American. He is as virulent a critic of recent
> U.S.
> policies as Milosevic himself. And he has said he is determined to not to
> give
> an inch on the Kosovo issue. Yet he had nothing to do with Serbian
> ethnic-cleansing activities in Kosovo or any previous acts of aggression,
> mass
> murder or ethnic-cleansing in the 1991-95 Bosnia conflict.
>
> He even opposes the operation of the ICJ in The Hague that U.S.
> officials now
> believe is essential to serve as a deterrent to any future European
> leaders who
> might contemplate such massive state crimes.
>
> From Washington's point of view, a Kostunica victory would leave
> Serbia
> under the control of a tough, implacable nationalist for another political
> cycle
> and many more years to come.
>
> It would derail U.S. hopes of negotiating a broad settlement to
> Yugoslav
> issues on Washington's terms. And it would even remove whatever optimism
> remained before that Milosevic was the only obstacle to the desired U.S.
> outcome because he was standing in the way of the democratic aspirations
> of his
> own people.
>
> From the Clinton administration's point of view, the trouble with
> Kostunica
> is precisely that he does appear to accurately express the democratic
> aspirations of the Serbian people.
>
> The only trouble is that they are not the aspirations that the Clinton
> administration would like them to be.
>
> LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
>
> LOAD-DATE: September 26, 2000
>