Commentary

21st March 1999

A new Cold War

By Mervyn de Silva

"History will record it. I know it will because I shall write it myself", said Winston Churchill.

We can be sure that the present leaders of Tito's Yugoslavia will not enjoy that privilege.

"Kosovo peace talks stall as Belgrade masses troops", reported Reuter on Friday. The beginning of another World War? No. The American cavalry will certainly not charge into Kosovo. Though the US has been baptised the sole superpower, the American cavalry will not send its troops to help resolve the conflict. The President Bill Clinton has problems in the White House, serious domestic problems so to say.

In any case the Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union torn by disunion has neither the resources nor the will for intervention. Russia has its own internal conflicts to resolve. After the Baltic states asserted their independence, Russia is only a superpower, militarily, though there is no Warsaw Pact, the Soviet reply to NATO.

Conflict, armed conflict, is more frequent within nation-states than between sovereign states. The nation challenges the State. The huge arms bazaar has become the well-equipped distributor for combatants mobilised under the powerful flags of race and religion - in the Indian sub-continent caste too, though the violence is more local than nation-wide.

The Yugoslav 'war' is limited in territory and the number of armed combatants involved small. But the weaponry is quite sophisticated and a neighbouring country is involved, Albania, once the only western ally of China, in the bitter Sino-Soviet ideological war.

NATO Role

Yes, Conflict Resolution requires some neutral arbitrator. And so a six-nation "Contact Group" met in London. NATO warned both sides, the Serbs and the ethnic Albanian leaders that they must respect the tight timetable drawn up by the "Contact Group". The exchanges of the "group", would meet outside Yugoslavia, and the official communiqué made it a point that C.G. will hold talks in a neutral country - like the negotiations held in Dayton, Ohio, meetings which led to a resolution of the armed conflict in Bosnia, in 1995.

But diplomacy was not all. NATO issued a stern warning to both warring parties. NATO Secretary-General, Javier Solana added that the alliance was prepared to strike and "rules out no option". Both sides must ensure "full respect" for the demands of the "international community". So, NATO represented the "international community".... another demonstration surely that NATO calls the shots in this unipolar world.

Its main concession to the Kosovo Liberation Front was 'increased autonomy for an interim three-year period. NATO as the main agent of "conflict" resolution exercise demonstrated its muscle... just in case. But where was the United Nations (UN) the agency vested with the power to resolve armed conflicts, particularly separatist conflict? At least one Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali served long enough at the UN. The United Nations provides a forum for free expression - for each party to conflict to present its case but NATO calls the shots, an important development in the post-Cold War world.

It is Soviet implosion that has contributed to the prevailing global power structure. The rest is long speeches, some quite educative, in the General Assembly, which is generally half-empty. It is armed conflict, particularly in strategic regions, that the US decides the "resolution".... unless the member-state is ready to defy the will of the sole superpower.. Castro's Cuba or Saddam Huseein's IRAQ .... or Iran, armed with the sword of ISLAM. There is little that Secretary-General Kofi Annan can do. Divisive, armed secessionist conflicts, were and are the most dangerous threats to the newly independent "third world" countries. Now the threat has moved to Europe... and eastwards to what was the USSR, now just Russia.

Is this to be a unipolar world? The Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov of Russia knows the Arab world intimately but not the East. Evidently he will visit China and Japan. Economics, say Russian diplomats, will be item I on his agenda.

New order

Already Europe has taken a step that can be read as an act of defiance or anti-American.

"Whatever the measures and tactics employed developments such as the emergence of the EURO currency have all got one thing in common.

In the lopsided new world order that we see today there is increasingly united chorus of dissent against uncontrolled and unaccountable US dominance and hegemony... the terrain of opposition "must be broadened", says Dr. Farish Noor, the Malaysian academic and secretary-general; an internal movement for a just world. A war by the Third World against the hegemony of the dollar. Money talks.

How will Russia react? If Prime Minister Primakov's answer to NATO will be closer relations with India, India still has the Indo- Soviet friendship treaty. All-important is China, the next century's superpower, and of course Japan, the economic superpower.

Kosovo may be in all history books then - a defining moment - on the way to the 21st century.

Hulftsdorp Hill

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