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Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov of Russia is due in Belgrade today,
with the stated purpose of stopping NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia
and laying the groundwork for a peaceful settlement of the crisis.
As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stressed to Foreign Minister
Igor Ivanov when they talked by telephone yesterday, the precondition
for a return to diplomacy is an end to the frenzied slaughter that Serbian
soldiers, police officers and paramilitary gangs are carrying out against
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. If that is Mr. Primakov's message to President
Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia today, the mission may help. If not,
it won't.
As befits a democracy, Russia's foreign policy reflects attitudes on
its home front. Russian public and parliamentary opinion across a broad
spectrum has been greatly riled by NATO's action. A number of democratic
reformers, including three who plan to visit Washington later this week,
have criticized the alliance for fueling the flames of Russian ultranationalism.
Because NATO was founded 50 years ago to deter the Soviet Union, many
Russians react viscerally to its continuing existence, its enlargement
and, now, its resort to force against another country with strong historical,
ethnic and religious ties to Russia.
However, there would be something perverse about Russia's appearing
to side with the Belgrade regime in the current conflict. During the
past decade, Russia and Serbia have been diametrically opposed in handling
their post-Communist transitions. Since the Soviet Union dissolved,
eruptions of bloodshed and repression like the one in Chechnya have
been exceptions to the rule. By and large, the emergence of 15 new independent
states has been remarkably peaceful, and many of those states, notably
including Russia itself, have moved quickly to join the democratic community.
By contrast, the breakup of Yugoslavia has been an ongoing horror, replete
with war, irredentism, mass graves, charred villages, concentration
camps and waves of refugees. It is worth pondering how much better off
Europe would be today if Serbia had followed the example of Russia,
Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics. Conversely, it is not
hard to imagine how much worse off the whole world would be if anything
like the meltdown of the old Yugoslavia had occurred across the 11 time
zones of the old Soviet Union, with 30,000 nuclear weapons in the mix.
While the United States and Russia have had their disagreements, they
have accomplished a great deal together on the basis of mutual interest,
including in the Balkans. Our troops are still serving together in Bosnia.
Along with Britain, Italy, France and Germany, the United States and
Russia hammered out a deal that the Kosovo Albanians, at least, have
accepted. In his rejection of international efforts to end the crisis
peacefully, President Milosevic has violated an agreement he made with
President Boris Yeltsin and repeatedly defied appeals from the very
men -- Mr. Primakov and Mr. Ivanov -- whom he plans to receive today.
For more than a year, diplomats from the United States, Russia and other
countries conducted patient, peaceful diplomacy while Belgrade brutalized
-- and radicalized -- Kosovo. It was only when that diplomacy hit a
brick wall that NATO decided it had to act, especially since Mr. Milosevic
was clearly using the talks as a cover for village-by- village devastation
of Kosovo.
The escalation of the atrocities since then has crystallized the
challenge: this is barbarism in our own time, in the heart of Europe,
on the eve of the 21st century. It is hard to believe that Russians
of any stripe would want to defend, or identify themselves with, an
abomination against the most elemental standards of decency and a repudiation
of much that the Russian people themselves have achieved since they
put Soviet Communism behind them.
-- First appeared in March 30, 1999 New York Times
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