=================================================================================== .................................................................................... ON THE RECORD CORRESPONDENTS INTERVIEW RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONE DATE: 25.4.99
.................................................................................... JOHN HUMPHRYS: Let's discuss some of what Mr Robertson said now with some of what's been discussed at NATO over the past couple of days with three of our correspondents: Mark Laity, who's in Washington; Andrew Harding, who's in Moscow and John Simpson who is in Belgrade. John, let me come to you first. Is there any sign as we are being told endlessly now by various sources attached to NATO that Milosevic is beginning to crack? That he's under great pressure from within, indeed within his own armed forces? JOHN SIMPSON: Well I think we can take it that even if he's not under obvious pressure, visible pressure, and I must say there's no sign of that, but then I don't know really how I'd recognise the signs that there were, but even if it isn't true I think we've got to accept two things: One is that it's very likely, the other thing is that even if it isn't precisely happening at this moment President Milosevic is going to be watching out for it, and he's going to be half expecting it, so in a sense regardless of whether we know it's there or not, the fact is that it's bound to be playing quite a serious part on him. But there must be an awful lot of people very very high up in the military and in the political life who don't want to be here, don't want to be in this position and would like to get out of it in some way. He's reshuffled a lot of his senior military people already, and it may well be that those who are left are not that enthusiastic. HUMPHRYS: What about evidence that his military infrastructure is seriously damaged. Have you got any way at all of assessing that? SIMPSON: The one thing that you can't do here in Belgrade is see into Kosovo in any way except on the just very occasional trips they take you down on. I've been on one, and although I saw lots of signs of ethnic cleansing and all sorts of barbarities that had gone on there I wasn't able really to get any idea I'm afraid. That's something which is hidden from us up here in Belgrade. HUMPHRYS: They're likely presumably to be a bit concerned if the oil embargo does work. I mean clearly they rely, obviously they rely on getting oil in from outside? SIMPSON: Yes they do, and Texaco brought in a large consignment of oil I think as late as the tenth of April, so what's that, just a fortnight ago. The supplies are not too bad here I'm told that on quite good authority. The fact is you see that this is precisely the kind of war that President Tito in the old days planned to fight, it's precisely the kind of war that the military here are trained to fight, and so they've been squirreling away large quantities of oil and all other necessary supplies for quite some time. HUMPHRYS: Mark Laity in Washington. Is NATO as far as you can tell solidly behind the prospect of an oil embargo, the reality of an oil embargo? MARK LAITY: Yes, I think, I mean they are generally agreed on the principle. What there is concerns about, and it's not just not restricted if you like, the faint hearts who don't want to take risks, there is genuine concerns about the legalities of it, and the UN resolution does not specifically mention oil, it talks about war-related products, and is oil a war-related product rather than merely one that can be used by tanks? And the answer is probably no, so the legality of it makes it difficult. So I think it's a genuine debate rather than a split between people about exactly what they can get away with. I think in practice if the Russians decided to send a tanker with oil into the Montenegrin port of Bar it's going to get in there. I just don't think NATO wants to do that, but I think NATO generally believes privately that the Russians don't want to get involved in that game either. They are emotionally supporting the Serbs but privately they think they're a damn nuisance to be honest, and they don't really want to get involved more than they have to. So the public rhetoric is not being matched by some of the private actions. HUMPHRYS: Andrew Harding, do you share that analysis of the Russians' view of all this? ANDREW HARDING: Yes, I think as far as the oil is concerned the Kremlin would probably talk aggressively about its determination not to knuckle under with this embargo, but at the same time there's very very little chance that Russia would like to provoke a real conflict by sending a ship in or resuming oil supplies. We gather at the moment that they have been suspended. So this is not something that the Kremlin would risk going to war on at the moment. If ground forces go in, NATO ground forces, then I think we're in a very different situation. HUMPHRYS: Ah, well now this is the question. Let's go back to Mark Laity for your analysis about what is going on here. I mean we're told aren't we that NATO - the politicians have now instructed the military people to go away and look at all these options. Is that the position? MARK LAITY: Yes, I mean it is as simple as that because there is genuinely not a consensus for ground forces other than to move in as a peace-keeping force. I mean this is coalition warfare, warfare by the lowest common denominator. An analogy I like to use it's like a convoy that goes at the speed of the slowest ship. There is not support for it. Now NATO knows that however long it takes if it stays united it'll grind out a victory. They can agree on air power, they can't agree on ground forces, so they're going to leave ground forces to sort themselves out further down the road. I think you know, earlier we've seen similar things over the escalation of the air campaign. NATO spend months arguing over individual targets, but once the war started, when the crisis was there the decisions that before had not been agreed after three weeks were suddenly being taken in three hours. And I think that there's a feeling that if ground forces are needed in a mopping up role then they'll make that decision when it becomes obvious, but they're not going to threaten the unity of the alliance which is genuinely there by grasping that particular nettle when it's quite clear they don't agree on it. HUMPHRYS: You would never under any circumstances would you, get unanimous support within NATO for ground forces. I mean the idea of Greece for instance agreeing to that is simply preposterous isn't it? LAITY: Oh yes. But I mean Greece is a classic example of how the alliance works. I mean it's disagreed with a huge percentage of the decisions that the Alliance has made over fifty years but it just keeps its head down and says nothing and I think in the end the countries that don't like it or the countries that are least worried about it will just become distinctly uninvolved with it but at the end of the day they know that if the only way they can win the war is by putting in ground forces say for a mopping up and it would never be any more than that I honestly believe that, then people will eventually go along with it. There's certainly going to be no full scale invasion, there is just this belief on the part of most of the military that air power can do almost all of it but it can't do absolutely everything and that's where the debate is going to be, exactly what the mopping up operation is. Is it going to be moving in forces against very light opposition or virtually no opposition as the Serbs get pushed out the other end? HUMPHRYS: Yeah well exactly, I was going to say to you what is mopping up? When we talk about this sort of semi-belligerent attitude that they may or may not have, the circumstance..... semi-permissive I think is the phrase that they're now using or a permissive environment. Now I mean it's baffling language but presumably it means that they have knocked out most of their tanks and most of the soldiers have turned tail or something or does it mean...well, I mean I've no idea..... who knows what it means? Isn't this a bit worrying? This is where you get creep, mission creep isn't it? LAITY: Well I think to be honest a lot of people here don't quite know what it means and I think it.... you know, the other phrase it is is 'operating in the grey zone' is another phrase that's come up and I think it just reflects that they think it's a decision that they don't need yet to make because one of the problems with a ground invasion is that there are formidable obstacles to it. Macedonia will simply not allow it and it's a sovereign country. You can only push the Macedonians so far. So they're not going to launch any large scale invasion. Albania is a nightmare of a place practically to form up and launch a proper invasion force so they really don't want to do it. What it is a question of is if President Milosevic is in his bunker literally and metaphorically, his forces are starved of fuel, a lot of their tanks are gone, there's desertion, they're breaking up, people are beginning to retreat anyway and really all you need is the ground force to just kind of...... the giant is dead on its feet and all you need to do is just give him a tap and over he goes then I think that's the point at which they start looking at the ground forces and the British I think are in the vanguard of this when they talk about not waiting for.... not giving.... waiting for President Milosevic's permission any more and I think other people will come around to that but it's still got a way to go. People like Germany, Italy, Greece, Czech Republic, I just don't think they could stomach it at the moment....... The whole theme is unity, they're going to stick with it. HUMPHRYS: The German Coalition would fall apart would it not if .....the German government coalition would fall apart if they talked about, if they seriously talked about ground forces. LAITY: Well I think they fear it would. I mean Chancellor Schroder is emerging as a real.... as a really tough guy as far as this is concerned but he can only go so far. He doesn't have the cross party support that say Tony Blair has. So I think that's right and they can only push their public so far. So they're stuck with it. What they believe is that they will do what they can do and it has been, even outside observers have been quite surprised at the toughness of the tone of a lot of people but that toughness of the tone is based on what they know they can agree on and leaving to one side to some weeks ahead what they really don't want to grasp yet. HUMPHRYS: And Andrew Harding, given that analysis of the sort of ground forces operation that might be carried out what do you think the Russian attitude would be in that event? HARDING: The Russians are very very worried that NATO is seriously considering ground troops and Russia looks to its own recent experience in Chechnya and when it hears talk of mopping up operations people here go - 'That simply won't happen, you'll be bogged down in a long bloody war', which is why the Russians are so worried and particularly because there are fears that if ground troops went in the Kremlin wouldn't be able to contain its own military and you wouldn't perhaps see large tank, columns of tanks going from Moscow straight to Serbia of course but what you would see are more war ships in the Adriatic, intelligence information being passed to the Serbs by the Russian military, attempts to smuggle in arms and lots and lots of individual instances where NATO is going to have to wonder whether or not on that particular occasion it wants to risk a major confrontation with Russia. The opportunities for a conflict will rise dramatically. HUMPHRYS: John Simpson, to what extent do you think Milosevic is relying at this stage on the Russians? SIMPSON: Well I don't think he's relying on them very much. I think it was quite clear from what I could gather from Russian sources when Victor Chernomyrdn was here last week that they really weren't expecting anything to come out of that meeting, they didn't bring very much to it. I think it's all really just in terms of the sort of public perception of Russian support. If you ask people in the street of course here, they'll tell you that the Russians will sort it all out and they'll protect them and in the end the Russians will help them but I certainly don't think that's what the message that Victor Chernomyrdn was bringing, on the contrary, his officials were saying that on the one hand they didn't see how there was any movement in the situation, on the other hand they were saying to me they quite liked the idea of watching NATO wriggling on the hook. They weren't particularly interested in helping NATO off that hook and so it was just kind of keeping the lines open really. I don't think that in the short run the Russians have got anything whatever to offer this place I just think that in the longer run they are clearly going to be part of whatever solution is going to come out of it. HUMPHRYS: What about..... obviously we talked earlier about you trying to analyse the position as far as the infrastructure's concerned and the military and it's impossible for you to do that but as far as the people themselves are concerned in Belgrade and indeed in other parts of Yugoslavia, to what extent has their attitude changed since things got even nastier than they were at the beginning? SIMPSON: Well, the bombing of the Television Station I think on Friday morning was the kind of instance that had quite a serious effect on people here and I have, you know these things of course are so completely subjective and it just depends who you talk to and what mood the people that you talk to happen to be in that day, but it was, did seem to me, towards the end of last week that there is starting to be a terrible weariness with the whole thing here and that again changed with the bombing of the Television Station, that was immediately regarded as a sort of, an anti-civilian, an anti-humanitarian act, I was threatened for instance by one official here that I would be thrown out of the country and she was screaming at me and at my report on it because I hadn't used words like barbarism and fascist and neo-Nazi aggression and all the kind of things that they just sling into every kind of report on this and I was told that I would really have to watch it from now on because I didn't reflect sufficiently the mood of people here, well that's just too bad of course, but the fact is that it has had quite a serious effect and I think that if there are more cases like this of people who are regarded primarily as just ordinary civilians being killed I think it will retard that feeling of being sick of it. That comes only with a sort of continual grind of daily and nightly bombing, it doesn't, these other instances rather set that feeling aside I think. HUMPHRYS: And how do you think they would react if ground forces were to move into Kosovo? SIMPSON: Well, I think then we are in such a different situation that I just think it's impossible to think what the position would be like here by that stage. I mean, to be absolutely honest, I think that it will be sorted out without that, I mean, I think that there would be some sort of movement eventually which will lead to some kind of sudden change in the situation. HUMPHRYS: What, you think that Milosevic will sue for peace? SIMPSON: Sorry, what? HUMPHRYS: You think Milosevic will sue for peace? SIMPSON: Yes, I'm choosing my words carefully here John, but you may say this and I couldn't possibly comment from this, I've been, I'm under sufficient pressure here not to want to get thrown out for doing things but, who knows, what an interesting suggestion, yes. HUMPHRYS: Quite. Mark Laity, is that the assumption in NATO that he is now on the point of suing for peace. MARK LAITY: Not on the point of it, but there, I mean I think there is a feeling that two things happened at the beginning of this campaign, the Serbs thought that NATO would fall apart and a lot of NATO thought that after a couple of days of bombing the Serbs would sue for peace having made their point. Neither has happened so you come back down to a game of mutual will and power. In the end, NATO has far more power, so it's only got to hang together for long enough and it will win, it knows it and it believes that the Serbs are getting to know it and I would think it's President Milosevic's thinking about so much as that the Serb Military who are seeing their forces gradually dismantled that we now know that are apparently quite a lot of Senior Generals who are under house arrest and there are apparently rumours...... HUMPHRYS: We didn't know that, do we? LAITY: ....that Serb businessmen are very worried about. Well I think that NATO is pretty convinced about it from my own private soundings as well as what they've said publicly that there is a lot of rumblings in the Serb Military, so I think that these are the kind of things we're seeing that the pressure is gradually mounting. It is a war of attrition and it's in the nature of wars of attritions they can take a long time but often you suddenly get to the point where the thing crumbles but that could be one week, it could be two or three months, I mean certainly NATO is now gearing up to go through the summer. HUMPHRYS: And Andrew Harding, a final thought from you, the talk of a Third World War that we heard from Mr. Yeltsin, we heard it again didn't we yesterday from Chernomyrdn is that just bluster, is that just words?. ANDREW HARDING: Well it's funny, I asked a group of Russians this the other day, suggesting that they would say yes, this is just our politicians sounding off, but they all said no, no, we are genuinely terrified about the Third World War. Obviously, I mean, one could have one's own views on that, but I think Russians really are very paranoid about this at the moment, they are in a very anti-Western mood, they are very frightened. I think in terms of Boris Yeltsin though, what he's trying to do in a sense is frighten the West into backing down or backing away from a ground offensive, if you like it's really a sign of Russian weakness that so quickly they move to this apocalyptic sort of vocabulary. HUMPHRYS: Andrew Harding, Mark Laity, John Simpson, thank you all very much indeed. ...oooOOOooo... 6 FoLdEd