Road to Peace in Kosovo Will Be Rocky

WASHINGTON -- Even if the agreement reached with President Slobodan Milosevic ends the bombing of Yugoslavia, staggering problems lie ahead, first among them the repatriation of nearly a million Kosovars to the land of ashes and graves that was their home.


If they do return, experts on the region said, the Kosovo Albanians will probably rally behind the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, making the rebels even less likely to disarm or abandon their dreams of independence, which NATO opposes.


"There are three things to watch as this unfolds," said Michael Mandelbaum, a professor of foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "First, the war isn't over until the bombing stops. Second, it's not a success until the refugees return. And third, it will not hold until the KLA is disarmed.''


Beyond that, the United States and its allies must still find a way of dealing with Milosevic, now indicted for war crimes but still the man in charge in Belgrade, and presumably still viscerally opposed to autonomy for the Kosovo Albanians.


Then the allies have to repair relations with the Russians and the Chinese, which have been sorely strained by the Kosovo conflict.


Beyond that stretches the enormously costly challenge of rebuilding the devastated economies of Kosovo, the rest of Serbia and their neighbors. Only if that succeeds can the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization begin to think of ending the stewardship they have now assumed, whether by design or miscalculation, in the perennially troublesome Balkans.


"What remains unresolved far exceeds what has been resolved," Michael Mandelbaum, the director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, said.


The gloomy and cautious talk stood in contrast to the hopes raised by Belgrade's apparent agreement to conditions for an end to the 10-week bombardment negotiated by Russia's special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. As described by the negotiators, these conditions include the verifiable withdrawal of all Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, the deployment of a NATO-led peace force and the return of refugees.


To the experts, however, the very fact that Milosevic had agreed to a deal touched off alarms. Many voiced suspicions either that he would test allied resolve further, as President Saddam Hussein has done repeatedly in Iraq, or that he would undermine the peace in other ways.


"Milosevic is a master of close negotiating sessions," Walter R. Mead, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. "He has been able in the past to manipulate Western responses by coming close, moving away, appearing to agree."


David Rieff, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute who has written extensively on the region, said: "If Milosevic is able to call some kind of victory, this is a pause, rather than the end. I hope I'm wrong, God knows. But my sense of this is that strife is mother's milk to Milosevic. He hasn't changed. He's no different from the man responsible for the Bosnian War and the mass expulsion of most Kosovars and the murder, we'll probably discover, of many, many thousands."


Assuming that the deal works, a Pentagon official said, NATO forces must work swiftly to assess the situation in Kosovo and to determine when and how the refugees can start returning home. One problem, the official said, is to prevent a chaotic flood of refugees. The official said the first priority would be to care for the untold thousands of Kosovars driven from their homes but still wandering about in the province.


Some experts, however, thought it might prove difficult to persuade many refugees to return home.


"All I hear from people who follow refugees is that many will choose not to go home," Mead said. "It's too late to put in a crop, their homes are devastated and burned down, the roads are all in a mess, there's nothing to go back to except a winter of starvation. In the camps, they at least had food. So they'll probably have to winterize the camps anyway. There's no chance for a lot to go back before spring."


Haass added: "NATO cannot coerce them to return. It has to be safe. They have to have shelter, a livelihood."


If NATO does succeed in bringing home the refugees, the peacekeeping forces will be confronted with the problem of disarming a strengthened rebel army and quelling demands for independence. Thursday's agreement reportedly reaffirms that the guerrillas should be disarmed and that Kosovo should remain, at least formally, a province of Serbia.


The Pentagon official acknowledged that the guerrillas pose a serious problem. "We are obviously paying a lot of attention to that particular issue," he said.


The overarching problem, Susan Woodward, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said, "is that all the people we want to help us make a stable Kosovo have been destroyed by the effects of the bombings. They're either in third countries, or so traumatized that they can't be reorganized, or they've been killed."


"The people who are going to control the next stage of the process are the KLA," she added, "however fragmented and internally rivalrous they are. But they're not prepared. So all the assumptions we are making - that the refugees want to return, that we can work with these people, that we can restore civil society - are wrong."


The long-term challenge before NATO will be to find ways of disentangling itself from the Balkans. That, the experts agreed, will require restoring a viable economy to the entire region, including Serbia, still its central force.


"Whether as monitors, European Union development and reconstruction experts, NATO armies, I think that this decision in Kosovo means that not only are we in Kosovo, but we're in the south Balkans for a generation," Rieff said. "But there's no long-term solution to this crisis without a solution to Serbia. Everything else until then is just first aid."


But there was general agreement that no assistance for Yugoslavia is possible as long as Milosevic is there. Experience shows that this is not a man who will give way willingly, especially since all that awaits him outside the presidential office in Belgrade is a trial for war crimes in The Hague, Netherlands.


"We've taken ownership of the Balkan problem," John J. Mearsheimer, professor of politics at the University of Chicago, said. "I kind of imagine Milosevic smiling and saying, `We tried to deal with the Kosovars and the KLA; now let NATO try.'"