Peacekeeping's pitfalls

Growing tensions along the border between Kosovo and southern Serbia could mark the first challenge for President-elect Bush's foreign policy team.

By Laura Rozen

Dec 22, 2000 | The situation on the border between Serbia and Kosovo is rapidly deteriorating into a full-fledged crisis -- for NATO peacekeepers, Serb politicians who face elections Saturday and ethnic Albanians, more than 5,000 of whom have fled in the past few weeks out of fear of an imminent Serb crackdown. The new Yugoslav authorities have threatened to send troops into Serbia's Presevo Valley, which borders Kosovo, if NATO peacekeepers can't quash rebel activity.

The growing guerrilla unrest alarms many because it was a similar situation in Kosovo between 1998 and 1999 -- when ethnic Albanian rebels routinely attacked Serb police patrols -- that triggered the massive Serbian military retaliation against Kosovo villages that were suspected of harboring rebels. Brutal Serbian military retaliation, including massacres of civilians, launched the mass exodus of close to a million ethnic Albanian refugees and, ultimately, the NATO bombing campaign.

The simmering crisis may also present the first major test of President-elect George W. Bush's foreign policy. Bush and the leaders of his foreign policy team have roundly criticized the deployment of American peacekeeping troops on post-conflict missions such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo as a drain on U.S. military readiness. Currently, some 6,000 troops are posted in Kosovo and another 4,250 in Bosnia.

Last weekend, gunmen near the village of Gornje Karacevo, a hamlet that lies close to the border between eastern Kosovo and southern Serbia, fired on American peacekeepers. The rebels were retaliating because the soldiers -- with the help of Russian peacekeepers -- had blown up a road connecting the region with Serbia. The route had been a popular one with smugglers and a band of Albanian rebels who are fighting to liberate three Albanian-inhabited towns that lie just on the other side of the Serbian border.

The towns are located within a three-mile-wide buffer zone that separates NATO-patrolled Kosovo from southern Serbia. Serbian forces are forbidden to enter the zone, according to the military agreement that brought an end to NATO's bombing campaign. Ironically, that presents a problem for the U.S. troops charged with establishing law and order in the area. It means they must act alone in sealing the border and halting the regular flow of rebels back and forth across it, bringing weapons, money and men from Kosovo.

An American working in eastern Kosovo confirmed Wednesday that the U.S. has sent in special forces to try to quash the rebel movement that is believed to have carried out hundreds of armed attacks in the past 10 months. More than 19 people have been killed and 42 wounded in the attacks -- mostly Serbian policemen.

"They've brought in special units -- Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALs. And some of them are operating inside the buffer zone," the source, who works in a support capacity with the peacekeeping mission, said Wednesday from Gnjilane, the headquarters of the U.S.-patrolled sector of eastern Kosovo. "They've kept it real quiet too."

In these final weeks of the Clinton administration, the peacekeeping troops have been taking forceful steps to stamp out the cross-border trafficking. Peacekeepers have sought to capture and interrogate the often-armed rebels and smugglers who sneak across the hilly goat paths at night. They've bombed the roads the guerillas use. They've seized weapons from them. They've tried to prevent the infiltration of Serbian forces in civilian guise and bring security to an area of heavy emotional interest to both Albanians and Serbs. It's exactly the kind of peacekeeping scenario that President-elect Bush criticized during his campaign -- and it's one that the Clinton administration is quietly trying to eliminate before the former Texas governor assumes the presidency in January. And coming 18 months after Slobodan Milosevic ordered Serbian troops out of Kosovo, it's the kind of work that Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell and incoming National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice don't think American soldiers should be undertaking. After accepting his invitation to become Bush's secretary of state, Powell promised Saturday "to undertake a review" of U.S. participation in NATO peacekeeping missions in the Balkans "right after the president is inaugurated."

"Our armed forces are stretched rather thin and there is a limit to how many of these deployments we can sustain," Powell said.

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