Rambouillet, part 1: The State of Play

A while back I wrote a series of posts about the 1998-9 Kosovo conflict.  If you’re interested, here they are:  Prelude to War,  The Serbian Ascendancy, Things Fall Apart, And So To War.  This post continues that story up to the unsuccessful Rambouillet peace conference of February-March 1999.

So by early 1999, the Serbian province of Kosovo was the scene of an ugly guerrilla war.  Civilian casualties were mounting rapidly.  There were bombings and curfews and disappearances.  Over 100,000 people were already refugees, and the situation was clearly going to get worse and not better. 

There was a concerted effort to solve the problem by holding a peace conference in the spring of 1999. This was the Rambouillet Conference, and its goal was to produce a peace agreement between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians. It failed, leading directly and immediately to the Kosovo War.

Does an unsuccessful peace conference from the previous century hold any lessons?  Or is this purely of academic interest?  

The Rambouillet Conference got its name from its location:  the Chateau de Rambouillet, a Gothic castle that was upgraded to a lovely chateau with gardens in the years just before the French Revolution.  As peace conference venues go, it was absolutely A-tier.

The conference was held there because various European states — particularly the French and Germans — had been embarrassed by how, back in 1995, the US had effortlessly taken over the negotiations to end the war in Bosnia.  The final peace conference to settle the Bosnian conflict — a European war — was held in Dayton, Ohio.  Awkward!  Well, now Europe would show that a European problem could be solved in Europe.

As noted above, the background to the conference was the rapidly deteriorating situation in Kosovo, where a decade of oppression by Serbia had given rise to an armed guerrilla movement — the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA.  By the end of 1998 much of Kosovo was a de facto war zone, and over 100,000 Kosovars had fled their homes.  There had been a number of ugly incidents and massacres.  For Rambouillet, the particular precipitating incident was the Racak Massacre in January 1999, where 45 people were killed by Serbian security forces.  Available evidence suggests that most or all of the dead were unarmed civilians, and that was the version accepted in Europe and the US.

Racak caused Europe and the US to say, at last, that Something Had To Be Done About Kosovo.  So the Milosevic government was basically told, in so many words, that they had to come to the negotiating table or they would be bombed.

— There’s an alternative version of Racak, in which most or all of the dead were KLA fighters, including women, children and the elderly — they were “soldiers” whose clothes had been changed after death to make them look like civilians. This is pretty obvious nonsense, but it’s unanimously believed inside Serbia to this day.  It’s also the official position of the Russian government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has given multiple interviews stating that Racak was “staged” as a provocation. 

This brings us to Russia’s position on the Kosovo conflict.  Russia at this time was still under Boris Yeltsin — Putin wouldn’t take over until the following year — and was near a nadir of power and influence.  The Russian economy was a shambles, the Russian military was in a state of near collapse, and Russia had very little ability to project power abroad.  Nevertheless, Russia couldn’t be ignored. 

Russia had traditionally been sympathetic to the Serbs.  More relevantly, Russian public opinion saw the Serb situation in Kosovo as analogous to the Russian situation in Chechnya — a majority Muslim “republic” that nevertheless was an integral part of a Slavic and Orthodox nation.  The Russian Orthodox Church, in particular, encouraged Russians to view Serbs as their “Orthodox Slavic brothers” who were being victimized and slandered.

So Russia had been deeply involved in diplomatic discussions over Kosovo.  Unfortunately, Yeltsin was in a dismal diplomatic position.  He couldn’t ignore Russian public opinion and arm-twist Milosevic into compliance, but neither did Russia have the capacity to support Serbia with anything but words.  1999 Russia could not afford a military confrontation with NATO.  So, Yeltsin tried to keep discussion of Kosovo inside the UN (where Russia had a veto on the Security Council) or OSCE (where Russia still exercised a fair amount of influence).  

Unfortunately for Yeltsin, by January 1999 this was no longer an option.  Serbia had aggressively ignored a couple of UN Resolutions, and had also pretty much laughed off the Holbrooke Plan for a cease-fire.  So the Europeans and Americans were both pretty much out of patience with the Milosevic government.  And unlike in Bosnia a few years earlier, this time the Europeans — the Germans, the French, and especially Tony Blair’s Labour government in Britain — were all in for aggressive diplomacy backed by the threat of military force.  

That phrase deserves repeating: not force, but diplomacy backed by the threat of force.  Nobody, in early 1999, particularly wanted to bomb Serbia.  What everyone wanted was a diplomatic solution.  But the Serbs had already ignored multiple attempts at diplomacy.  So now a threat of military force would be added to the equation.  Of course, once the threat of force is in play, you’re on a potential escalation ladder: if the recalcitrant party still won’t agree, you must either back down and admit your threat was a bluff, or carry it into action.

The Kosovo conflict has been largely overshadowed by the Iraq war a few years later, and to some extent the two have been muddled together in memory: Kosovo gets interpreted as a prelude to Iraq.  This isn’t really correct, though.  There are some obvious similarities, from “a US-led coalition attacking a single, much smaller isolated country” to “Tony Blair being all in”.  But there are also some very large differences.  And one of the biggest is that nobody actually wanted a war in Kosovo.  In Iraq, the goal was quite clearly to force Saddam Hussein into a corner by making demands that he would never agree to.  In Kosovo — at least at first — this was firmly not the case.  Everyone was looking for a solution that would give the Serbs an off-ramp.

Of course, one other big difference is that negotiations in Iraq only involved Saddam Hussein.  Negotiations in Kosovo involved two parties: the Serbs and the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army.  And this made things much more difficult in every possible way, because (1) the Serbs absolutely did not want to talk to the KLA, and (2) the KLA didn’t much want to talk to the Serbs either — they just wanted their demands met.

It got worse.  On the Serb side, while Saddam Hussein was an absolute dictator, Slobodan Milosevic was not.  He was a populist strongman who controlled a narrow majority in the legislature.  A large chunk of the country hated him.  His control over Serb media was large but not complete; his control over the armed forces was shaky.  Milosevic was an authoritarian ruler with a great deal of power, but he wasn’t a dictator and he couldn’t ignore Serb public opinion.  And Serb public opinion firmly did not want to give up Kosovo.  Also, institutionally throughout the Serbian government and security forces, there was a very strong distaste against talking to the KLA.  They were perceived as Serb-murdering criminals and terrorists, full stop, and the idea of sitting down to talk to them was deeply repugnant.

Meanwhile, on the Albanian side, there was another set of problems.  First off, the KLA was not recognized by anyone as legitimate representatives of the Kosovo Albanians.  For one thing, up until early 1998 — just a year ago — the KLA had been small, obscure, and hopeless.  And while they were no longer small and hopeless, they were still pretty obscure.  The KLA leadership was mostly guys in their twenties (the foot soldiers were almost all high school and college age), and none of them had exactly been working the diplomatic cocktail circuit.  

Furthermore, the KLA combined an opaque communal leadership structure with some extremely rigid doctrine.  And one part of that doctrine was, No Compromise.  The KLA was sworn to independence for Kosovo.  The only “negotiations” to be held with the Serbs were negotiations for withdrawal.  Discussing anything short of independence was very suspect.  Actually agreeing to anything short of independence could be very dangerous indeed.

— If this sounds a bit familiar to some English-speaking readers, well yes:  there were several points of similarity between the KLA and the IRA.  The split between hardliners and negotiators was an obvious one.  (Paranoia about informers or touts was another.)  

And again: the KLA wasn’t recognized as representing the Kosovar Albanians.  Insofar as anyone was so recognized, it was the shadow “government” of Ibrahim Rugova, who had been trying to wage a campaign of nonviolent resistance for almost a decade at that point.  Rugova had become a minor diplomatic personality, and there was a fair amount of international sympathy for him and his movement. 

The problem was, within Kosovo he was almost entirely discredited.  The great majority of Albanians felt that nonviolent resistance had failed.  The Serbs had simply continued plundering and oppressing them, the world had mostly ignored them, and everything had gotten worse.  And Rugova wasn’t particularly charismatic or a notably effective leader.  Nonviolent resistance was pretty much all he had to offer.  So by early 1998, most Albanians were simply ignoring him.

— Interestingly, during this same period the Serbs were embarking on something of a charm offensive towards Rugova and his people.  Up until 1998, they’d mostly ignored him.  But now Serb media was talking him up as a potential partner for peace, and there was talk of some modest concessions: some Albanian=language courses at the university, perhaps.  This was of course a ploy to split the Albanians, and it was of course too little and far too late.  But it does explain some odd stuff that would happen a bit later, such as Rugova appearing on TV with Milosevic during the early days of the bombing.

So that was the state of play in early 1998.  The Europeans and Americans were out of patience with Milosevic and the Serbs, and ready to try arm-twisting diplomacy backed by threats of force.  Yeltsin’s Russia wanted to help the Serbs but had limited diplomatic clout and zero capacity for military intervention.  Milosevic wanted to stay in power, which drastically limited the concessions he could make; he had built his whole political career on “Kosovo is Serbia”, and he couldn’t easily back down from that. On the Kosovar Albanian side, there was the KLA — obscure, opaque, inexperienced on the diplomatic stage, and very reluctant to talk about anything but swift and full independence for Kosovo.  And there was also Ibrahim Rugova — internationally recognized, the Milosevic government syrup-sweet willing to talk to him, but with zero support or credibility left among the mass of Kosovar Albanians.

How these disparate partners were brought together at a very elegant chateau an hour’s drive southwest of Paris… is a story for the next installment, when and if.