From Free Life, Issue 30, May 1999
ISSN: 0260 5112

The people who are most likely to be asking themselves that question at the moment are not so much the British (who, in any case, cannot pronounce the various names) but the Russians. With this series of Balkan wars, which began in 1991 or thereabouts, lazy journalism has reached its height. We have been fed every cliché and erroneous information acquired painlessly from propaganda hand-outs that are in existence. One of the current favourites is the tremendous fellow-feeling the Russians have for the Serbs, who are fellow Slavs (a historical canard if ever there was one) and Orthodox. This rather ignores the fact that both Russia and Serbia are led by people who were to a great extent Communist apparatchiks and whose allegiance to the Orthodox Church is, therefore, slight. President Yeltsin did have himself baptised and people in that country have not yet stopped laughing. President Milosevic, I suspect, did not even bother to do that, but just as he managed to don the mantle of an ultra-nationalist, so he has realised that he can utilise the Orthodox Church and its teachings for his own purposes.

In the meantime an opinion poll in Russia produced the following fascinating results, not actually quoted by most of the British media: around 70 per cent maintain that Russia should stay out of the conflict completely, around a third think that Russia should try to mediate and send humanitarian aid to the Serbs, 9 per cent think that Russia should send military aid and only 1.2 per cent have declared themselves to be ready to go and fight for their Serb brethren. Even the Orthodox Church attracts more people than that.

What has confused commentators is the apparent belligerence of some of the politicians, in particular of Mr Yeltsin. (Though it must be pointed out that Mr Ivanov, the Foreign Minister, seems to spend his whole time trying to control the damage caused by yet another of the President's outbursts.) Exciting anti-Western feelings in Russia is not very difficult. They are there all the time, under the surface it is true, but real, nevertheless. Russian attitudes to the West have always been rather ambivalent. This ambivalence was heightened by the deliberately fostered swaggering resentment of the Soviet period. Since the collapse of the Soviet system the resentment has grown, as has the feeling of inadequacy, which increases resentment in turn. Perfectly intelligent people in Moscow told me in all seriousness that the reformers and other politicians deliberately wrecked the Russian economy because they were in the pay of the Americans. The display of NATO strength may well make the Russians feel insecure and angry but it has also surprised them. It will not take anybody of any intelligence long to work out that this latest stage of the Balkan wars was set off by politicians against military advice just as the Chechen war was. As one is frequently told in Russia: "We expect it from our people, but what were yours looking at?" The answer is, of course, who knows, but certainly not at the intelligence reports or expert analyses submitted to them. Would NATO predicate a bombing campaign entirely on the notion that Mr Milosevic will see the light, just as Mr Yeltsin had assumed that the Chechens would just roll over if the politicians involved could read and think?

The most difficult problem the Russians are facing is the need to acknowledge that they are not now a great power. This has been obvious for some time: you cannot be a great power if you are perpetually holding out a begging bowl. However, the West, in its entirely consistent inability to take the right decision about any post-communist country has encouraged Russia to think that nothing very much has changed. The group of G7, supposedly all developed industrial nations, was extended into G8 to include one that was neither: Russia. Other equally silly decisions were taken. All it did was to postpone the evil hour when Russia had to accept that things have gone very badly wrong and some internal reforms will have to be achieved before the country can be up there with the top few again. Unfortunately, this realisation has come in such a way that the Russians, or at least the Russian leaders, can still blame someone else for their misfortunes. It is all the perfidious westerners' fault that Russia has no influence in the Balkans. Why else would Mr Yeltsin's special envoy Victor Chernomyrdin be shuffling endlessly from Belgrade to Moscow and back again, fruitlessly trying to assert some kind of authority?

In the meantime Yugoslavia (that is effectively Serbia) has announced that it wants to join a Soviet style Slav alliance with Russia and Belarus. This idea was received enthusiastically by the loons in the Duma, where only Mr Yavlinsky's liberal grouping Yabloko voted against it. Not that it makes any difference. Russia does not even want a union with Belarus, never mind Serbia. A defence pact was signed a few days ago by Russia and Belarus but the latter's President, Lukashenko was visibly disappointed. A union, as Izvestiya pointed out, would indicate that Russia had decided to follow Yugoslav foreign policies and Belarussian economic ones. Not, they thought, a happy prospect.

The final scene in the Russian farce was the sight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn calling down imprecations on the West for the destruction of a "beautiful European city" and a Slav nation. Mr Solzhenitsyn has become a kind of Russian version of Michael Foot - completely mad, of no interest to anyone except a few journalists, but anxious to have as much publicity for his views, however wacky, as possible. His horror at Western interference would have been somewhat more acceptable if he had not spent many years of his exile in the United States excoriating the West for not carrying out the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with greater effect and getting rid of the Bolsheviks. Apparently he does not think that what happened in 1918 was an unjustified interference in another country's internal affairs.

Apparently not many others think so either, judging by the number of times I have been told by people of all sorts of political views that this is the first time Britain has interfered in somebody else's internal affairs. The Russian Civil War, the Crimean War, endless interferences in the Ottoman Empire's handling of its subject people and so on? Come to think of it was the fate of Poland that important to Britain? Clearly not, since after six years of fighting and many millions of lives lost (especially Polish ones of one kind of another) the country was cheerfully handed over to another imperialistic power with a monstrous regime. Ah yes, but all these different events happened because British interests were involved in however a distant fashion. Well, of course, if we had a real government that could develop a real foreign policy instead of bleating on about human rights and ethical foreign policy (both very dangerous concepts as many of us pointed out at the time) they would make out a case for the fact that a determined destabilisation of the Balkans, as carried out by Mr Milosevic's government for the last ten years is likely to affect British interests and that of its allies in NATO. But that would involve having to look seriously at what is really going on in the Balkans and in other post-Communist states. It would involve accepting that some people cannot be negotiated with and that there is a right and a wrong in most conflicts regardless of the personality of those involved.

One of the most puzzling articles that have appeared during this conflict was that in Newsweek, written allegedly by our beloved leader (or much more likely Alistair Campbell and re-written by a hack on Newsweek). In it we were treated to a nauseatingly self-righteous discussion of how right it is to do what we are doing because the alternative would have meant appeasement such as was carried out in the thirties. The only problem with that argument is that the reason we are in this mess is because the West has been appeasing Mr Milosevic for the last ten years and is still doing it by its ridiculous insistence that the borders of Yugoslavia are inviolate, except, presumably, by NATO bombers. But what are the borders of Yugoslavia? According to Western politicians (take a bow Douglas Hurd and Jacques Santer) and international civil servants who want to keep the world in large, easily manageable chunks, the borders of Yugoslavia were to be treated as sacred when Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia started their fight for independence. Yugoslavia has changed and so have its borders. But they are still to be treated as sacred. Well, if that is so, if Mr Milosevic is right in his claims on Kossovo, then what are we doing bombing the place?

The sad truth is that the Yugoslav Federation is no more. What we are witnessing is the last spasm of that self-destruction. In a few years' time both Kossovo and Montenegro will be independent. What will happen then will depend very much on our behaviour and understanding of the situation in the intervening period. On past record, we shall make every mistake in the book, and then some. A combination of purposeless bombing of just about every country in the Balkans (a rather gruesome variation on the various appalling peace-keepers' favourite saying of the mid-nineties: "Well, they are all Serbs really."), with persistent appeasement of Mr Milosevic is not going to give us many advantages. The fact that the Russians are also at a loss is no excuse.