Abstract
NATO leaders tour the Reagan building courtyard during NATO's fiftieth-anniversary celebration in April.
I woke up one morning in late April to discover that Washington, D.C. had become a police state.
It was Friday morning, just before nine–the end of rush hour, when downtown is usually awash in honking cars and scurrying pedestrians, the hustle and bustle of lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and activists fighting for their places before the federal trough. Grab a cup of coffee, visit the ATM, grab a newspaper, and rush across the street to the office to begin another day of administering democracy to the nation and the world.
But not that day.
Throughout downtown Washington the streets were virtually empty. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island Avenues–central arteries of L'Enfant's plan for the city–were devoid not only of traffic but of parked cars as well. The curbs of some side streets were lined with vehicles, all belonging to the Secret Service, the FBI, or a host of other law enforcement authorities. Uniformed police were posted at most street corners. Mailboxes had been unbolted and carted away in the night. Manhole covers had been bolted shut and a central subway station taken out of service. Post offices and city government, schools, businesses, and many federal offices had shut down for the day. And in the center of the city an eight-block area had been sealed off with barricades and police lines.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was celebrating its birthday.
Inside the secured zone, behind concrete barricades, armored cars, and rooftop snipers, was a scene worthy of imperial Rome. Phalanxes of intimidating guards escorted processions of sleek black chariots along the boulevards. They stopped before imposing public buildings to disgorge the governors, scribes, and centurions of the civilized world.
Forty-three heads of state, their foreign and defense ministers, army chiefs of staff, and countless retainers converged on the Forum. They'd come intending to celebrate the triumph of the most powerful military alliance the world has ever known. Instead they found themselves in a council of war, trying to decide what to do about the barbarians marauding along the frontier.
The scene
The interior of the new Ronald Reagan Building had been transformed into a staging area for a media circus. Its marbled halls resembled a busy airport terminal with journalists, television crews, and government officials shuttling between briefings, telephone banks, lunch counters, and a special summit shopping arcade. The central atrium was packed with banks of TV “stand-up” locations. Sometimes a half dozen anchors could be seen standing in a neat row, simultaneously delivering scripted remarks before their respective camera crews. Others gathered around large banks of closed-circuit TVs broadcasting the live proceedings in the auditorium next door. Only a handful of journalists were actually allowed into the meeting hall during “open” meetings. The rest waited for briefings and press conferences where the latest information would be sprinkled out like fish food over a tank of hungry guppies.
But this is how big political events are covered. The press is thrown meat at scheduled feedings and each reporter does his or her best to tear into it in search of substance and hidden meaning. The best have cultivated “relationships” with spokesmen, staff members, even high officials with access to the actual proceedings, which are closed-door affairs. With considerable social and interrogative skills they grab a moment with one of these unnamed sources. Both source and journalist know the game. The source releases tidbits and unattributable comments in an effort to prejudice public opinion to his cause. The journalist tries to gauge what the truth of the matter is, but must be careful not to offend the source, his only access to the proceedings. Coverage is filled in with on-record interviews with various analysts who, like the journalist, weren't in the room either.
In other words, as far as solid, verifiable information goes, you might as well be watching the proceedings on C-SPAN in the comfort of your own home.
But then you'd miss the “scene.”
At the summit the scene included a wide range of exclusive shopping opportunities. There was something for every budget. In the Media Hall vendors sold commemorative t-shirts, hats, jackets, and pins. The Post Office peddled special “NATO's 50th” first-day-of-issue postage stamps, an instant collector's item because only credentialed media and officials had access to the issuing location. Anne Hand, the jewelry designer, had a booth selling gold NATO summit earrings and matching necklaces ($75 to $150).
For the bigger spenders, the second floor of the main summit building had been turned into a modest military exhibit with offerings from a dozen NATO countries. The guest book was a list of who's who in the defense ministries of the 25 prospective NATO members in the “Partnership for Peace” program. Journalists were invited by appointment, but our presence was clearly less than welcome. Military officers from several nations glowered suspiciously as my group of four passed by with our uniformed escort.
Briefers stretched the English language to avoid the obvious and not particularly controversial fact that various “technology options” were on display to facilitate their purchase and adoption by Partnership for Peace military leaders. All the officers in the building wore credentials marked “Vendor.” The focus was on low-cost, high-tech training and communications systems. At the Finnish exhibit, for instance, a Finnish officer extolled the virtues of a fully secure cellular phone system developed by Nokia. Behind him a mute video presentation offered chemical gas monitoring solutions from Xenvi, another Finnish company.
The showpiece of the exhibit hall was the demonstration of a computerized network simulation of a large peace enforcement and refugee operation in a fictional European nation. Using “off-the-shelf” computer technology and leased satellite lines, NATO had assembled an inexpensive system linking “command posts” in Hungary, Sweden, and the Netherlands with the simulated “headquarters” here on the second floor of the summit building. Staff officers from a score of Partnership for Peace nations monitored troop movements, refugee needs, and a no-fly zone on computer screens, then coordinated their responses between the far-flung command posts.
In another room face-to-face video links had been established with the Hungarians, Swedes, and Dutch. For our benefit, a photograph was simultaneously transmitted to all three posts. Moments later the officers in Sweden and the Netherlands held up printouts of the image. The Hungarians hadn't gotten theirs. They tried again. No, not here yet. A third time also failed–no surprise to those of us who've lived with the vagaries of the Hungarian phone system. “Let's move on,” our escort suggested before a fourth attempt could be mounted.
I myself was feeling a bit disconnected, particularly from NATO's war in Yugoslavia and the humanitarian crisis it was being fought to prevent. So I wandered out of the Forbidden City to check out the dissenters.
Doublethink in the park
An angry crowd of Serbian-Americans filled the park opposite the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, but the scene was straight out of Belgrade. The demonstrators already numbered several thousand, and they were growing by the busload. Young, old, and in-between, they donned “NATO Target” t-shirts and buttons. They chanted “Kosovo is Serbia!” and “Stop the Bombing.” Men sported military caps and berets. Teenagers waved Serbian flags and made three-fingered stiff-armed salutes. Whistles and bullhorns made a powerful din. Signs read “Words not Weapons,” “Stop the Third Extermination of the Serbs,” and “Why Serbia?”
The Orthodox priests, Serbian-American community leaders, and others who addressed the crowd gave this last question short shrift. They expressed outrage at the killing of dozens of men, women, and children by NATO bombs. Several speakers reiterated that Serbia was a “civilized nation,” suggesting there might be grounds for doubt.
But what was not discussed was the other, far wider-scale slaughter taking place back in the motherland. Here, as in Belgrade, people convinced themselves that the organized expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians simply wasn't occurring. The Albanians, one speaker announced, were fleeing the NATO bombing. As for widespread reports of rape and mass executions, these were but provocative lies distributed by Serbia's enemies. The Serbs, of course, were cast as the innocent victims of some vast, inexplicable conspiracy involving Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, all of Serbia's neighbors, hundreds of thousands of lying Albanian refugees, and much of the world's media.
It was a disturbing scene. It brought back memories of chilling conversations with Serbs in Bosnia a few months after the end of that country's war. There, too, the Serbs were innocent victims maligned by lies spread throughout the world by their enemies. A man in Sokolac confronted me with “irrefutable” evidence that such a conspiracy existed. He'd seen the pictures that Western television stations were broadcasting of recently uncovered mass graves in Srebrenica containing the remains of thousands of Muslim men and boys rounded up by Serbs when they seized the town. “Serbs killed no one in Srebrenica,” he solemnly announced, “so how can you deny there is a conspiracy when your television broadcasts pictures of these bodies?” Bystanders nodded in agreement.
In Bosnia I could attribute such circular logic to mass brainwashing engendered by a steady diet of nationalist propaganda on Serbian television. But the Washington protesters were Americans. Many had never lived in Serbia and most of the rest had left their country many years before Milosevic came to power. They'd watched this and Serbia's other wars on network television, read about them in American newspapers, seen nearly a decade of documentary evidence of ethnic cleansing and massacres by both Serb and Croat forces. I expected their outrage that NATO bombs were falling on friends, relatives, and compatriots. But I wasn't prepared for the Orwellian doublethink, the denial that anything unpleasant could be happening in Kosovo apart from NATO's air campaign.
Dusan Jelaca, a retired steelworker who moved to Chicago from Serbia 35 years ago, expressed his pride in being an American citizen. American people are honorable, he tells Serbs back home, but they are being lied to by their government. “Do you think Serbia would be stupid enough to be pushing all these people from their homes with the entire world watching?” he asks. “It's all Clinton's lies and propaganda to turn the world against Serbia.”
Quid pro quo
For a handful of American corporations, NATO's fiftieth anniversary summit was more than just a war council over Kosovo. It was the ultimate marketing opportunity.
A dozen corporations paid $250,000 apiece for the privilege of having their executives sit on the board of directors of the summit's host committee, a private-sector network that raised nearly $8 million in cash and in-kind support for the event. In exchange, they gained unparalleled access to top ministers, military officers, and even heads of state from the 19 NATO member states and 24 partner nations in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
The companies included automakers Ford, General Motors, and Daimler-Chrysler, and high-tech companies like Microsoft, Ameritech, and SBC Communications, as well as prominent military contractors like Boeing, Motorola, and TRW.
Created at the behest of the Clinton administration, the host committee underwrote a substantial portion of the summit costs, including transportation, communications, and computer equipment for 1,700 visiting dignitaries, and suave black attaché cases for each of the 3,000 accredited journalists. They also hosted a series of embassy parties, a media party, and two huge official receptions for the visiting delegations.
“These are new markets for these companies and, yes, frankly they wish to establish contacts to facilitate sales to these new regions,” said Amb. Alan John Blinken, chairman of the host committee's board of directors. “But there's nothing wrong with that. It's the particular way we do things in the United States.”
Blinken, a New York investment banker who served as U.S. ambassador to Belgium, said the countries of Central and Eastern Europe need access to the new products and technologies U.S. corporations can provide. “Sometimes the best philanthropy is self-interest,” he added.
While the bombs fell over Kosovo during the run-up to the summit, host committee guests gathered at embassy cocktail receptions for some low-key Washington lobbying. At the Hungarian embassy reception, I was introduced to Gen. George Joulwan, former NATO Supreme Commander. He's now at Global USA, a Washington lobbying firm. Emissaries from Raytheon, Arthur Andersen, and the host committee corporations sipped Hungarian wines with East European diplomats, uniformed military officers, and corporate lobbyists.
Blinken said the war in Kosovo hadn't made their job any easier, particularly in the area of public relations. “We'd wanted to introduce NATO to the American public at large,” he said. “I guess we won't have any problem with that now, though it's not really the image we had in mind.”
–C. W.
Why, I asked, would Clinton wish to orchestrate such an enormous anti-Serb conspiracy?
Until this moment Mr. Jelaca had been speaking with great confidence. Now he looked flustered. “I don't know,” he said dismissively. “Maybe someone pays him.”
It was the same with other protesters I spoke with. Steve of Detroit, a U.S.-born protest organizer in his late 20s, believed that Serbs were helping Albanians by evacuating them from bombed areas (at gunpoint, minus their money and possessions?); that the Kosovars' demand for autonomy is a farce because they were given autonomy 25 years ago (Milosevic later took it away); and that Albanians lived happily in Kosovo until the bombing (the province had been under a reign of terror for more than a year). But Steve had no answer for why the outside world would have organized against Serbia in such a fashion. “I don't know,” he shrugged. “Maybe NATO needs to flex its muscles for its fiftieth birthday.”
Not everyone was in the mood to party.
Perhaps somewhere Steve of Detroit and Dusan of Chicago know their alternative story line doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't even come with a plausible motive. But it has to be believed. To do otherwise would be to admit the painful fact that there are very good reasons why much of the Western world is allied against Serbia, and that its society is not as civilized, honorable, or humane as they'd like to believe.
In anger other protesters betrayed bits of the truth. An elderly woman later rushed up to loudly denounce me as a member of the “media conspiracy” against Serbia. “We are civilized people fighting this Islamic cancer at the heart of Europe and you are all liars and criminals.” A young man in black beret and sunglasses asked why I, as a representative of this conspiracy, was protecting the Albanians, when “everyone” knows they are “smugglers, drug dealers, and criminal businessmen.” Another woman was handing out leaflets arguing that communism had been a Jewish conspiracy. The connection to the NATO bombing was unclear, but she did not seem the least out of place.
Spin control
Back inside the fortifications, journalists were scurrying to and fro trying to piece together what was really going on behind the closed doors of the main summit hall. Behind security checkpoints and guards, the leaders of the alliance were presumably locked in acrimonious debate over the goals, conduct, and legality of their first war. But whenever NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana addressed the press, the message was that alliance leaders were completely unified, the air campaign was working, and victory would soon be at hand.
Call it spin control, the sort of media management practiced every day by sundry spokesmen, advertisers, politicians, and public officials. Solana wasn't really briefing the press on the proceedings; he was sending a message to Milosevic and the rest of the world that NATO had the stomach to continue bombing until its demands were met. Yet it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to find evidence that this wasn't entirely the case.
Most obvious was the alliance's failure to endorse the possible use of ground troops. Greece and Italy opposed their use. France insisted they only be used with U.N. Security Council approval, which was not likely because of Russian and Chinese opposition. Germany's coalition government–which includes the pacifist Green party–had been strained by the air war and it had reservations about a ground action. Hungary, the most obvious staging area for an all-out invasion of Serbia, wished to avoid developments that would make ethnic Hungarians in northern Serbia a target for Serb paramilitary vengeance. Just getting everyone to agree to continue and intensify the air campaign was a considerable accomplishment.
Nor was it at all clear in late April that nato was winning its war. Nato Supreme Commander Wesley Clark insisted nato was winning because Serbia was taking a beating while NATO's air armada was nearly unscathed. But on the ground Milosevic had largely achieved his aims–cleansing Kosovo of Albanians. NATO's air campaign had completely failed to achieve its original objective of preventing such cleansing. Now its war aim was to secure Belgrade's approval for a nato peacekeeping deployment to supervise the return of the Albanians. Bombs alone didn't appear to be doing the trick.
Nor were NATO's members unanimously supportive of the precedents the war was setting for the alliance. A sovereign state had been attacked, ending the notion that nato was a purely defensive alliance. The attack occurred outside its membership area, and had taken place without the approval of the Security Council. This at the very least bent international law and NATO's own charter. France and Germany both argued that nato must get U.N. approval before undertaking any future “out of area” mission, including the deployment of ground forces or the stopping of ships at sea.
In this way, the war in Kosovo also shaped decisions on NATO's future. Long before the war started, the United States had pushed for the alliance to redefine itself and its mission to reflect post-Cold War geopolitics. To keep the United States involved in European security matters, Washington wanted nato to become a vehicle for combating “twenty-first century threats” throughout Europe and beyond. That would mean taking military action to combat terrorism, ethnic strife, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as far afield as the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. In the U.S. view, that would include taking action against sovereign nations, even without the approval of the Security Council. “This was always expected to be the toughest issue at the summit,” a senior Western diplomat told me. Kosovo brought it all to life.
In the end the United States got only half of what it wanted. The new “strategic concept” approved at the summit gives nato the role of regional policeman, but with more restrictions than Washington had wanted. If it is to protect the security of its members, the alliance may now mount “crisis response operations” throughout the “Euro-Atlantic area.” But the latter term would presumably exclude the Middle East and northern Africa, which is why the United States had wanted no geographical definition. And the wording is vague when it comes to the authority of the Security Council. That body “has the primary responsibility” for the maintenance of international peace and security and “plays a crucial role in contributing to security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic region.” The ambiguity reflects the lack of consensus on the issue.
A new best friend
If the war was causing friction with Russia and China, it was also endearing the United States to the country with the most at stake (apart from Serbia itself). Albania, Europe's poorest and perhaps least stable country, is now America's best friend in the Balkans.
That was the message Albanian Foreign Minister Paskal Milo brought to the summit talks. Speaking to a couple of dozen journalists at the National Press Club, Milo said that the United States has a role in the Balkans and should play an active part in its affairs. “Without being inside the European family of nations it will not be possible [for Albania] to face all of the problems that exist in the Balkans,” he said. “It is better to fight together against these forces that are not temporary ones.”
Milo's impoverished country was likely to wind up as the only real winner in the Kosovo conflict. It is suddenly a vitally important piece of geography, a haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees, and a willing staging ground for NATO forces. And because there is virtually no infrastructure to speak of in Albania, NATO will probably wind up building desperately needed roads, airports, port facilities, power plants, communications, and housing.
Meanwhile, just the presence of thousands of U.S. troops has lessened the sense of lawlessness in much of the countryside. Milo called our attention to the needs of the refugees who, he said, had little chance of returning home before winter. This means they will need proper housing, and lots of it. Albania is hoping the outside world will replace the refugees' tents with brick-and-mortar cities.
“Albania is one of America's best partners,” Milo added passionately. “Being together with you we will build the future.”
After he finished speaking, a perky reporter for one of NATO's in-house magazines jumped up to present him with a NATO tie. Milo agreed to pose for her photographer. Smiling, he and the bleach-blond reporter shook hands, holding the tie between them as if it were an Academy Award. Then his bodyguards whisked him off to his waiting motorcade.