Lessons of war should help unite Europe

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Times Senior Correspondent

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 5, 1999

Given all the different languages, customs and national personalities, it's easy to forget what a compact place Europe really is.

Flying from Vienna, one of the most refined European capitals, to Sarajevo, one of the most blighted, is like going from Tampa to Atlanta. Driving from the olive groves of Greece to the beer halls of Germany takes about as long as going from one end of Florida to the other.

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Or it used to.

The modern highway through Yugoslavia is, of course, closed these days. Anyone trying to get from the Greek peninsula to western Europe by car or truck has to make a detour that lengthens the trip by several hundred miles and three additional countries.

If the war between NATO and Yugoslavia has shown anything, it is that Slobodan Milosevic is in a prime place to make mischief for tens of millions of people. You need only look at a map to realize the impact that Yugoslavia -- sitting at a geographic crossroads -- can have on much of eastern Europe and a good part of western Europe as well.

It is for this reason that many will cheer the news of an apparent peace agreement, yet still have the shivery sense that nothing will be settled for good until Milosevic is gone.

Since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan and other critics have insisted that the United States has no strategic interest in such a far-off place. If Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo can't get along after 600 years, the argument goes, why should we bother to step in and risk the lives of U.S. soldiers?

This misses the point. The United States clearly has an interest in Europe -- it's our major trading partner and home to our closest allies -- and Europe clearly has an interest in what's happening in a rogue European country like Yugoslavia. Let's just recap for a moment what Milosevic's 10-year campaign of ethnic cleansing has meant, directly and indirectly, to this vital part of the world:

More than 30,000 NATO peacekeepers, including 6,500 from the United States, are about all that's keeping the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina from reverting to chaos. It will take decades and billions of dollars to recover from the war among Croats, Muslims and Milosevic-backed Serb troops. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have yet to return home, the economy is a mess and the once-cosmopolitan capital of Sarajevo and other cities still look like bombed-out ruins.

Croatia, another Yugoslav spin-off, is faring somewhat better after its own civil war. But the ethnic divisions that Milosevic is so good at stirring up continue to haunt that country and thwart efforts to resettle more than 100,000 ethnic Serbs uprooted by Croats from their homes.

The refugees fleeing Kosovo have put enormous strains on neighboring Albania and Macedonia, the poorest countries in Europe. Fear of political turmoil in those places has in turn alarmed their neighbor, Greece.

And what will become of all those refugees -- more than 1-million now living in fetid tent cities or trying to build new lives in countries as far away as Australia?

It's worth noting that of the hundreds of homeless refugees I met in Macedonia, not one blamed the NATO airstrikes for their plight. Yet the decision to bomb Yugoslavia has created its own problems, ones that critics surely will blame more on NATO than on the root sources -- Milosevic and Serb nationalism. So out of fairness, let's take a look at those too:

Italy, a key member of NATO, has felt a serious blow to its tourism industry. With NATO jets thundering off from nearby air bases, several civilian airports in Italy have been able to operate only sporadically. Some cruise lines canceled stops along the Adriatic coast after fishermen pulled up defective bombs jettisoned by NATO pilots.

Greece and Croatia, two other tourist-oriented countries, have also suffered from false but widespread perceptions that they are in the middle of a war zone. And Lufthansa, the huge German airline, has complained of losing millions of dollars a day because of flight delays at its Frankfurt hub, a prime staging area for NATO troops and planes.

There has been more economic bad news. The euro, the common currency adopted by 11 European countries Jan. 1, has dropped dramatically in value, at least in part because of concerns that the war could spread. The bombing of bridges along the Danube, a major shipping route, has had a devastating impact on Bulgaria, whose economy was only beginning to revive after decades of communism.

With the effects of the war extending far beyond Yugoslavia's borders, it is remarkable that the NATO partnership -- comprised largely of European nations -- has held up so well.

Italy and Greece, despite internal opposition to the bombings, have given NATO free access to their air bases and seaports. Weaker leaders like Gerhard Schroeder of Germany have emerged stronger for their resolve, and strong ones like Tony Blair of Britain have seemed downright Churchillian at times. Many leaders are talking seriously of the need for Western Europe to develop a joint defense system, independent of NATO and the United States.

It's probably too much to hope that this kind of European togetherness would prove to Slobodan Milosevic that there can be strength in ethnic diversity. But at least it appears to have scared him into accepting a peace plan.

In the long run, the best defense against Milosevic and other nationalist troublemakers is a stronger bond among all European nations. It is heartening to see that former communist states like Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and others hope that their support of the NATO efforts may eventually allow them to join NATO, the European Union or both.

Jacques Paul Klein, the international community's No. 2 man in Bosnia, put it this way in a recent speech in London:

"We are dealing with a whole region that is either still gripped by crisis or staggering out of it; a region in which the moral vacuum left by communism has made the killing easier and the tragedy all the worse."

The way to create an "open, democratic, free-trading Balkans," he continued, "lies in a massive effort to bring political and economic know-how to every country in the region, on a much greater scale than anything we have attempted so far. . . . We need to wean the people off the old party structures, on which they depend for their jobs, their children's education and their entire livelihoods. It is a kind of modern feudal bondage."

It is ironic that some of America's Cold Warriors who advocated spending billions to fight the communist threat now persist in seeing Kosovo as an insignificant backwoods unworthy of U.S. attention. But in an era of globalization, one well-situated dictator can show how small and interlocked Europe, and the rest of the world, really is.