Playing the China card

Spectator, The, May 15, 1999 by Manyon, Julian

Julian Manyon describes the night Nato hit Beijing's embassy, and how Milosevic is exploiting it

Belgrade

I AM unfortunately old enough to remember the `Five o'Clock Follies' in Vietnam and even to have sat in that dingy room in the centre of Saigon, while the ceiling fans creaked and US military spokesmen wove optimism and lies into a seductive web. It took the shock of the Tet offensive to deflate their myth-making, just as this time it has taken the bombing of the Chinese embassy fully to alert journalists to the embarrassing pitfalls of computer-guided warfare.

In both cases the explanation offered by Washington officials was `faulty intelligence'. In 1968 it was, of course, remarkable that entire regiments of communist troops could infiltrate the major cities of South Vietnam virtually undetected. But the Chinese embassy fiasco is, in some ways, even more extraordinary. For, while the CIA director, George Tenet, suggests in his statement that his agency did not know where the Chinese embassy was, believing the building to be Yugoslavia's military procurement department, it is nonetheless an embarrassing fact that as recently as 1 October last year US diplomats, including no doubt some responsible to Mr Tenet, attended a banquet to celebrate the Republic of China's national day in the very same building.

After a long and harrowing day inspecting the aftermath of another Nato blunder -- the dropping of two cluster bombs in the centre of the southern city of Nis, leaving the shrapnel-ridden corpses of elderly shoppers sprawled in the street - I had donned my pyjamas in my blacked-out room and was making a determined effort to go to sleep when a series of massive explosions shook the hotel. Five minutes later, while I stood blearily at the window looking for some evidence of what might have been the target, there was a pounding at my door. I have taken to jamming a table knife in the locking mechanism to try to make it more secure during the night, when rogue Serbs may be wandering the hotel corridors, and it was only after a few minutes of fumbling that I managed to release it. The door opened and my friend Renaud Girard, the correspondent of Le Figaro, burst into the room and announced, a little theatrically, `The Chinees embassy ees burning.'

Renaud, the possessor of a splendid, almost Gaullist profile, is a man of great erudition whose qualifications as a graduate of ENA, the institution that still trains the great majority of French hierarchs, should by now have entitled him to the comfortable life of Prefect of Martinique or chef de departement in the ministry of something or other. Instead, his love of adventure and undisguised taste for the raffish have led him to make his living as a journalist in the Balkans, where he has an unerring instinct for the grisly fiascos that have been a regular feature of this region since the start of the Yugoslav wars. This time, as ever, he was well informed and half an hour later we stood in front of the shattered embassy as firemen carried stunned Chinese survivors down ladders while their country's red flag flapped vainly from its pole. `C'est sans precedent,' said Renaud, magisterially.

Unprecedented it may be, but how much damage it will inflict on Nato's cause is not yet clear, though it is certain to be considerable. What has emerged from this night and its aftermath is a better picture of President Milosevic's increasingly desperate playing of a card game longer than he ever imagined he would, for the stake of his own survival.

Friday night's attack on Belgrade was the heaviest of the campaign so far and contained its own unmistakable meaning. Such a pounding was thought necessary because Nato's chiefs believed that the Yugoslav leader was still not ready to concede their central demands that the `civil and security presence' for Kosovo include combat-- equipped US and British troops and be led by a US general. But, for Milosevic, that would represent a surrender in circumstances for which every significant sector of Yugoslav society, including most of his own supporters, would be unforgiving. For all the stubbornness Serbs continue to display, there is also growing bitterness over the misjudgments that led them into this enormous and quite possibly futile sacrifice. For Milosevic, the destruction of the embassy is the sudden arrival of an ace in what was starting to look like a poor hand.

True to his gambler's instincts, he has immediately tried to make use of it. Less than 72 hours after the bombing, while ranks of Chinese demonstrators were still stoning Nato embassies in Beijing, Milosevic authorised the Tanjug news agency to announce a partial troop withdrawal from Kosovo, a move that at this stage is certainly more symbolic than real but which still contains risks for Milosevic in the encouragement it gives to the bombing hawks in Britain and the United States. But the Yugoslav leader is following a strategy, the outlines of which can now be discerned. Milosevic is hoping to exploit widespread international dismay over the Chinese embassy to wrest control of events away from the alliance and place it in the reassuringly divided hands of the UN Security Council.