CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS

CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS!
War in Iraq Forces Russian Peacekeepers to Withdraw From the Balkans.
By Viktor Myasnikov. Vremya MN, April 16, 2003, p. 3. Condensed text: May 14, 2003

Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin announced last week that Russian peacekeepers would be withdrawn from the Balkans over the next two months. "There are no more military objectives to meet in the region, and no new ones are expected to arise in the immediate future," he said, and then emphasized that the Balkan peacekeeping mission was costing over $26 million a year. There was a time when a move like this would have touched off a wave of accusations that the government was betraying Russia's national interests and surrendering its geopolitical position. But in the light of the Iraq war, the situation in the Balkans no longer looks quite the way it did only a year ago.

  There are virtually no UN forces in the Balkans. The whole UN contingent amounts to 27 servicemen (15 from France and 12 from Ukraine), plus one observer each from Canada, Poland, Russia, Denmark and Turkey. This symbolic military presence "maintains order" in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And the IFOR [Implementation Force] peacekeepers based in Bosnia and Herzegovina are quite officially under the command of NATO's Allied Forces Southern Europe. The country is divided into American, British and French sectors. A Russian brigade is serving in the American sector along with a Swedish battalion; a Ukrainian battalion is serving in the French sector. All of these personnel are thus integrated into NATO structures and are unable to carry out independent missions.

  In Kosovo, NATO's KFOR [Kosovo international peacekeeping force] troops are essentially an occupation force. They entered that autonomous province of Yugoslavia after bombing the government forces into withdrawal. Next to invade were the Albanian militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who usurped power. The Russian paratroopers who seized the airport at Pristina also acted outside the UN mandate. As of that moment, we too assumed the role of self-appointed peacekeepers, although in our own eyes we had asserted ourselves and taken NATO down a peg in the process. In effect, Russia demanded that NATO include a Russian contingent in KFOR. NATO obliged, but time has shown that the payoff from maintaining this presence is quite modest. The Serbs have been "cleansed" from Kosovo, and the province has been drifting inexorably toward a "Greater Albania."

  Russia's presence in the Balkans lends legitimacy to the processes occurring there under US and NATO control. If Kosovo should declare independence, we would find it hard to show that we had had nothing to do with it. We would have to bear our share of the responsibility for creating yet another locus of terrorism and drug trafficking. And with the final breakup of Yugoslavia, there are no more strategic Russian interests in the region to speak of. Especially since no responsible dialogue on this issue is being pursued with either the Serbian leadership or NATO. (There was no such dialogue in the past, either.)

  President Putin signed a decree last December extending the deployment of Russian Armed Forces personnel in the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina to July 31, 2003. At the time, the need for the Russian contingent in the Balkans was not yet in doubt. But immediately after the start of the current US-British operation, talks were opened with the NATO leadership on withdrawing our peacekeepers from the Balkans. Russia made it quite clear that it no longer intends to clean up other people's messes. Even if the UN passes a resolution to deploy peacekeeping forces to Iraq, Russian nationals will not be part of them. . . .

SECTION: International Affairs -- Europe -- THE BALKANS; Vol. 55, No. 15

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