What It Would Take to Cleanse Serbia - Sonja Biserko From Belgrade
Suggests Denazification of Serbia (NY Times)

By BLAINE HARDEN

Along the blood-spattered timeline of Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia,
Kosova is merely the hideous Now. There was a Before -- in Croatia and
Bosnia. Assuming that Milosevic retreats from Kosova with his dictatorship
intact, as now seems likely, Balkans experts foresee an unspeakable After.

It may feature: Fratricidal civil war in Montenegro. Ethnic cleansing of
Hungarians in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. Mass murder of Muslims in
the Sandzak region of Serbia. No need, for the moment, to bother about
the location or correct pronunciation of these obscure places. The world
will likely learn. Just as it learned where Kosova is -- or was -- before
more than 700,000 human beings were chased from their homes in a
systematic military campaign of burning and intimidation, theft and murder.

If the pattern holds, Milosevic will soldier on, using Big Lie manipulation of
television to tap into a collective soft spot in the Serbian psyche. Even as
legions of non-Serbs are dispossessed or killed, he will continue to inflame
the Serbs and preserve his power by reassuring them that, yes, they are
the victims.

Given the character of Milosevic's regime and knowing that there is almost
certainly more horror to come, a bold, if impractical, question is just now
beginning to be formulated. Is it finally time for outside powers to make
the effort necessary to cure a national psychosis inside Serbia that has
been destabilizing a corner of Europe for a decade?

Put another way, has the time come for NATO to do in Serbia what the
Allies did in Germany and Japan after World II?

To follow that model, Serbia's military would have to be destroyed, and
Milosevic crushed, by an invasion that almost certainly would cost the
lives of hundreds of U.S. soldiers. After unconditional surrender, the
political, social and economic fabric of Serbia would be remade under
outside supervision so that the Serbs could take their place in a
prosperous and democratic world.

The question cuts three ways. Will it happen? Should it happen? Could it
possibly work?

The answer to the first part of this question, at least for the foreseeable
future, is a resounding No Way. The other answers, however, are
provocative enough to make it worthwhile to suspend disbelief and indulge
the fantasy of a post-Milosevic Balkans.

Let's start, though, with the real world. Policy-makers and long-time
students of the West's slow-motion intervention in Yugoslavia during the
1990's see no possibility of Milosevic's military defeat or of Serbia's
occupation.

An agreement last week between the West and Russia outlined the kind of
solution the outside powers would seek instead -- a withdrawal from
Kosova of the Yugoslav army, police and paramilitary fighters, with an
international security force to replace them. Details of the deal are still
being argued over, but one thing was clear: If the outside powers can get
him to sign on, Milosevic would remain in power in his shrinking Yugoslavia.
Thus, he would have the opportunity to "cleanse" another day. The West's
calculation seems to be that avoiding a land war, keeping NATO together
and cementing relations with Russia outweigh the long-term costs of
letting Milosevic off the hook.

That, then, is the real world.

Such a course does nothing, of course, to eradicate extreme Serb
nationalism.

The only way to stamp out the disease, protect Serbia's minorities and
bring lasting peace to the Balkans is a Japan- or Germany-style occupation
of Serbia, according to Daniel Serwer, who until two years ago was the
director of European intelligence and research for the State Department.
Serwer concedes that occupation has never been on the West's list of
serious options, but he echoes many experts on the Balkans when he
argues that it should be.

"It is very hard to see how Serbia undergoes this process all on its own,"
said Serwer, now a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a research group
in Washington. "This regime is deeply rooted. It is not like some
dictatorship that you take off its head and it will die. It is so corrupt and
the corruption is not superficial."

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a Harvard historian who wrote "Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," published a kind of
manifesto last week that demands Serbia "be placed in receivership."

"Serbia's deeds are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany
only in scale," Goldhagen wrote in The New Republic. "Milosevic is not
Hitler, but he is a genocidal killer who has caused the murders of many
tens of thousands of people."

It is worth remembering, though, that Milosevic is an elected leader,
having won three elections that were more or less fair. That, along with
the Serb leader's soaring popularity in the wake of NATO bombing, support
an argument that what ails Serbia goes far deeper than one man.

No one makes this argument more powerfully than Sonja Biserko, director
of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and a former senior
advisor in the European department of the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry. Ms.
Biserko, who fled Belgrade a week after the NATO bombings began, said in
New York last week that Serbia's fundamental problem is not Milosevic, but
a "moral devastation" that has infected her nation.

"People in Serbia are undergoing a mass denial of the barbarity of the
ethnic cleansing in Kosova," Ms. Biserko said. "This denial is itself
commensurate to the crime taking place before the eyes of the world."

Ms. Biserko, who met 10 days ago with Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright and urged her to consider occupation, believes that Serbia's
opposition politicians are incapable now of coming to grips with a culture
of victimhood. "Serbs have managed now with the NATO bombing to
convince themselves they are victims and as victims they cannot be
responsible for what happened in Kosova," she said.

A surreal sense of victimhood in Serbia is nothing new. During the siege of
Sarajevo, when Serb forces ringed that city with artillery and routinely
killed its civilians, Belgrade television reported that Bosnian Muslims were
laying siege to themselves. "The Serbs continue to defend their
centuries-old hills around Sarajevo," said Radio-Television Serbia.

To shatter this Looking Glass victimhood, Ms. Biserko offers a prescription:
Indictment of Milosevic by the War Crimes Tribunal. A military defeat of
Serbia and demilitarization of the country. Highly publicized trials that will
force Serbs to confront the savagery committed in their name. A Western
takeover of the mass media, with strict prohibitions against the
dissemination of extreme Serb nationalism. A Marshall Plan for the Balkans.

Asked why the West should be willing to undertake an occupation that
would risk many lives, cost billions and take years, Ms. Biserko shrugged:
"What other choice is there?"

"The Western world has lost its political instinct," she said. "To bring
substance to the ideals of human rights, at some point you must be willing
to commit troops."

But could the occupation of Serbia work? Could it break the cycle of
violence? Two prominent historians believe it could, if done properly.

"The key in Japan was unconditional surrender," said John W. Dower, a
professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
author of "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II." "The
Americans went in and they did everything. They had a major land reform.
They abolished the military, simply got rid of it. They drafted a new
constitution. This is what you can do when you have unconditional
surrender."

Dower was struck by the eagerness with which a defeated people
welcomed reform. "In Japan, the average person was really sick of war,
and I think that would be the case in Yugoslavia," he said. "The Americans
cracked open a repressive military system and the people filled the space."

The occupation of Germany also suggests ways of dealing with Yugoslavia,
according to Thomas Alan Schwartz, a historian at Vanderbilt and author
of "America's Germany."

"When Germany was totally defeated, it provided opportunity," he said.
"You could be physically there, controlling the flow of information and
using war-crime trials to show the Germans that atrocities were done in
their name."

Without something similar in Serbia, Schwartz said, "We can look forward
to more trouble in Serbia.

"What reminds me of Germany is the comparison to the end of World War
I," he added. "Then, the Germans had this powerful sense of being victims.
There was a deep resentment that Hitler was able to exploit. It will be the
same in Serbia when NATO bombing stops."

The Japan and Germany analogies, of course, are flawed. Those
major-league powers ravaged parts of the world that America cared about.
Occupation was nothing less than emergency triage for the worst violence
in history.

Milosevic, by comparison, is small potatoes. He leads a minor-league
country that periodically lays waste to poor, unpronounceable,
strategically irrelevant places. Pristina is not Paris.

There is, though, an inkling that the West has begun to try for a solution.
In Bosnia, 32,000 NATO-led troops and High Commissioner Carlos
Westendorp are even now doing the hard, slow, complex work of healing
that country.

Westendorp has not attempted a Japan-style remake of the
Serb-populated half of Bosnia (just as nobody has tried to do that in
neighboring Croatia, with its own accomplishments in ethnic cleansing).
The indicted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic have not
been hunted down. Radical Serb parties have not been banned. But tough
action is being taken. Westendorp ordered radical Serb nationalists out of
state television. He has fired the nationalist zealot who was elected the
Bosnian Serbs' president. If Serbs violently object to what the
peacekeepers do, NATO-led forces shoot to kill.

In a recent interview in Sarajevo, Westendorp said most Bosnian Serbs are
cooperating because they are sick of war. It will take time, he said, but
the West has enough money and muscle in Bosnia to extinguish the will to
war. The one insoluble problem, he said, was the leader in Belgrade.

"If getting rid of Milosevic fails," he said, "then everything fails."