Defend Kosovo

Decisive US action will help stop Balkan atrocities

The West always promised that it would never happen. Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, would never be allowed to bring ethnic cleansing to Kosovo.

Yet happen it has. For months, Serbian military and police have been waging an abhorrent campaign against the Albanian civilians who constitute 90 percent of Kosovo's population.

The result has a been a new round of Balkan atrocities. Entire villages have been burned to the ground. Farms have been destroyed. One recent New York Times story described a gruesome scene in which a young woman who was seven months pregnant had been shot dead and her stomach slit open. Nearby, an older couple had been killed, too. The man's head had been cut off and his brain removed and placed next to his wife's body.

We know by now that these horrors are not the excesses of war; they are, in Milosevic's mind, the aim of war: to create terror. Observers estimate that some 250,000 people have fled their homes in fear. And, with the harsh Balkan winter about to begin, an even more serious disaster now looms. Tens of thousands of people are trapped in the mountains without food or shelter.

"Unless the West intervenes in the next few weeks, they will be stacking frozen babies like cordwood," one human rights observer told Time magazine.

As this latest disaster has unfolded, the West has taken on a familiar role. It has issued stern warnings to Milosevic while giving him no reason to take them seriously. Russia has protected Milosevic, in what seems to be the latest example of an antiquated pan-Slav sentiment. Our NATO allies have been reluctant to apply force.

As the Phoenix goes to press, it appears that real action could be imminent. The United States must not falter.

Clinton first needs to speak to the American people. He should explain what Milosevic has done, and what he will continue to do, and what we must do to stop him.

The administration should insist that Serbian forces make an immediate, complete, verifiable, and irreversible retreat from the Kosovo province. This must be followed by serious and speedy negotiations about the province's final status.

If any of these conditions is not met, then the time has come for air strikes. The strikes should not be limited to Kosovo. They should include military targets in Serbia proper. Only this will send the right message to Milosevic and to the military that makes his rule possible.

Some argue that air strikes are not the answer. Military options are, by their very nature, blunt. But Milosevic is a brilliant politician with a keen eye for weakness. It was NATO air strikes against Serb encampments, in the late summer of 1995, that made Bosnian peace possible. Indeed, the alternative to decisive action is even worse: we only encourage more barbaric behavior.

Much has been said about the tangled history and politics of the Balkans. But this should not distract us from a few simple truths. Slobodan Milosevic is bent on consolidating and extending his power. He, and the hatreds he has cynically fanned, are the sources of many of the region's current troubles. He is an evil man who reminds us that the Holocaust is not long behind us. Years of experience teach us that Milosevic will take precisely as much -- and kill precisely as many people -- as we allow him to.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com.