Yeltsin's Balkan threat

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): I have seen Boris Yeltsin drunk and I'm pretty sure I have seen him sober, but unless he does something obvious like singing or falling over it takes a while to decide: both his body language and his speech patterns tend to blur the issue. So it's hard to judge how much thought went into his blood-curdling remarks in a meeting with the Duma speaker, Gennady Seleznyov, that was televised last Friday.

"I've told the NATO people, the Americans, the Germans: 'Don't push us into military action. Otherwise there would certainly be a European, and perhaps a world war'," said the Russian president. And Seleznyov later added that in portions of the interview not shown on TV, Yeltsin also spoke of re-targeting Russian nuclear missiles on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states.

It was just what the Western media needed on a slow day in the air war over Yugoslavia, and they leapt on the notion of a new cold or even hot war with Russia. But NATO's commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, dismissed the threat: "We're going to continue with the mission exactly as planned, regardless of political and diplomatic atmospherics."

It was, indeed, just "atmospherics". As White House spokesman David Leavy said soon after the Yeltsin broadcast: "We've been officially reassured by Russia at a high level that it will not allow itself to be drawn into the conflict in the Balkans." That assurance probably came directly from Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who has really been running the country since the market crash last August destroyed most of Yeltsin's remaining influence.

So why did Yeltsin make these empty threats? It is not necessary to conclude that he was drunk. He had a quite rational personal motive: to ingratiate himself with a Duma dominated by Communists and right-wing nationalists, both anti-Western in their attitudes, who will vote on his impeachment in the coming week.

Yeltsin may also have been conscious of the close parallels between what Russia did to Chechnya on his orders, and what Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic has recently been doing to Kosovo -- and here the personal motive blends into the official policy, for governments that have committed atrocities against their minority populations, or foresee the need to do so in future to stop them from seceding, are always hot on absolute national sovereignty.

That is why NATO is conducting this operation without the blessing of the United Nations. China, anticipating the need to stamp down hard on Tibet again in the future, joined Russia in vetoing UN intervention to stop the killing in Kosovo. But this is more a theoretical than a practical concern for both Beijing and Moscow.

Even if a successful NATO operation in Kosovo were to set a precedent for future military interventions against smallish countries like Rwanda or Cambodia that start massacring parts of their own populations, great powers with nuclear weapons can be quite confident that nobody will ever try to apply the precedent to them. Throughout the horrendous Russian onslaught on the Chechen people, for example, NATO never said "boo".

Yeltsin's wild talk was mainly designed to appeal to the emotions and prejudices of the Duma, and of Russian public opinion in general. Which naturally raises the larger questions: why did Russians more or less freely elect a Duma that is dominated by anti-Western attitudes, and why are almost all Russians now in a state of utter outrage about the wicked things NATO is doing to their gallant and innocent Serbian brothers?

The first question is relatively easy to answer. When the hopes that were aroused by the overthrow of Communism were betrayed by the new elite (largely the old elite, after a quick change of ideological clothes), popular resentment was directed not only at the cynical thugs who "privatised" the old state- owned economy into their own pockets, but at the West.

Russia didn't actually get a free-market economy, but that's what Russians think they have, and most of them don't like it, so they blame the West. (One-third of them even believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to a NATO plot) And this all builds on 75 years of Communist propaganda against the corrupt and decadent West, and on traditions of anti-Western thought that have even deeper roots in Russian history.

But there is a free press in Russia, and most Russians are well educated, rational human beings. How can they blindly back the Serbs in this conflict, ignoring all the evidence of massive crimes committed against the Albanians of Kosovo? In other places with a free press, many people question the wisdom and the legality of NATO's use of force against Milosevic, but relatively few doubt its motives: Kosovo is of no economic or strategic value to anyone.

In Russia, virtually nobody believes that NATO's motives in Kosovo are genuinely humanitarian, just as they cannot believe that the Serbs are in the wrong. The bombing of Serbia therefore seems a malevolent, almost incomprehensible act to Russians, and their media carry preposterous theories to explain it. NATO needs Kosovo as a military base, or it wants to test new weapons, or to create jobs by using up old weapons. Or maybe it's a dress rehearsal for a Western conspiracy to use force to stop developing countries from stealing their markets.

If the hordes of wretched refugees from the cleansing of Kosovo are shown on Russian TV at all, it is implied that they are fleeing NATO bombs. And this is not the result of official censorship and propaganda. It is intelligent Russians trying to make sense of what is (to them) unintelligible.

It's not so much that they love the Serbs (though some are swayed by the old pan-Slavic slogans). They simply cannot believe that in a conflict between Christians and Muslims, Slavic Orthodox Christians can be the villains and Muslims the victims. The notion just does not compute: all of Russian history and culture tells them that Muslims are the enemy. So the war must be about something else than protecting Muslims Kosovars from Serbian aggression.

Nothing can be done to change this Russian mind-set in less than a generation. And nothing needs to be done about it, because Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov is not affected by these stereotypes. He is a fluent Arabic-speaker with wide experience of the Muslim world -- and he knows enough about the Balkans to have no illusions about Milosevic.

Primakov, who will probably run for president when Yeltsin's term ends next year, makes the occasional pro-Serbian public gesture to cater to popular passions, but he will never let himself be drawn into helping Milosevic militarily. Even in Russian domestic politics, the real impact of the Kosovo conflict will probably be slight -- so long as it is over before the parliamentary elections in December, and well before the presidential elections of July 2000.