FEUILLETON Rambouillet - ultimatum for the bombing (16): What Kutlesic and O'Brien were doing

Writing for Kosovo Online: Dragan Bisenic

Kutlesic, who was a member of the state delegation at these peace talks, recounts how he encountered his old acquaintance Jim O'Brien there.

"Then Rambouillet begins. And they put me in the delegation. The state puts in a politically second-rate delegation. That seemed strange to me. And on one more occasion, it was even stranger to me. On the way to the airport, it was Saturday, and Gorica Gajevic called me to her place, even though I was not a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia. I go to her and she, in tears, with trembling hands hands me an envelope and says 'from friends for the family'. And she cries, she understands, but I don't understand and I realize it's money. At the airport, I'll get the same thing from the police, with a guarantee that they'll take care of my children. They don't ask for anything in return. From this, I conclude that there was fear at the top of the state about what would happen," Kutlesic says and continues:

"We were locked in the castle. Nothing is being done. The conference leadership, Petritsch and Mayorski, insist on immediate writing, but we insist on establishing principles. And nothing is done for three days. On the third day, I see Jim in the hallway. I wave to him, he waves back, and later at dinner, we approach each other. Jim says, 'Vladan, let's work, nothing is getting done here'. I tell him I don't have the authority because I'm now just a member of the delegation. He says, 'Okay, but you should know this isn't good'. Two days later, he says, 'This definitely isn't good, let's pick up where we left off in July'. I say okay. He came to my room around 10:30 PM, and the two of us started writing the agreement text without the military part by hand. The agreement text was at a level weaker than the 1974 amendments, but it implied enhanced autonomy, with parallel institutions and the Belgian model of federalism. This enhanced autonomy also envisaged the division of police tasks according to the US model: federal and provincial police. It was an acceptable model," Kutlesic explains.

He further recounts how things unfolded sequentially.

"When we finished, it was around half past three in the morning, Jim said to me, 'I like this, wake up your delegation, I'll wake up mine'. That showed me that he was actually the main person on the entire Western side. We woke them all up, and then he spoke, I remained silent. Only Ratko Markovic supported me, Sainovic and Stambuk were silent. Jim said, 'This is a solid basis for discussion, I'll send this to Washington, you send it to Belgrade, see you tonight'. I went to sleep. That evening, around half past eight, a crypto telegram arrived signed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Zika Jovanovic. It said, 'Traitor, you are removed. Milan Milutinovic is coming to take over the negotiations'. I sent a coded telegram to Milosevic, 'OK, I'm returning to Belgrade', and he returned the code telling me to stay there and that no one was allowed to touch me. But Milutinovic rejected that draft agreement. He didn't ask me anything, nor did he discuss it. And then we got into a situation that led to the bombing," Kutlesic said.

He died less than a month after this interview, so there is no one left to confirm or refute his testimony.

In a later conversation, Nikola Sainovic only partially confirmed Kutlesic's version but rejected discussions about NATO, as later confirmed by Ambassador Hill, as well as by Sainovic himself later, as we have already mentioned above.

Nikola Sainovic said, "Unfortunately, Kutlesic is not alive, there are things that did not happen. We did have a problem. Someone from our delegation, without the knowledge of the others, after we talked to Belgrade, sent some information, and there was confusion during one night. Discussions arose between Belgrade and us. The information that someone sent was not accurate. 
In the morning, Milan Milutinovic, the president of the republic, came to Rambouillet. Everything was clarified, and the delegation continued to work and worked until the end without any change in composition. The delegation was never replaced. It continued in the same composition in Paris also. God forbid you find yourself in such a hot situation. They make you nervous one night, and by morning, everything is resolved. Kutlesic attached an abnormally high importance to it as if something had changed there. And there is no such thing as the story of a NATO base in Rambouillet. I listened to Kutlesic what he was saying".

The journalist himself noticed that "Sainovic did not fully clarify what exactly happened, 'there was a problem, nervousness all night until morning, but everything was clarified,' concluding that, however, Milan Milutinovic had not just arrived in Rambouillet by express mail".

During the three-week break between the first and second parts of the conference, the head of the Albanian delegation and the leader of the KLA, Hashim Thaci, was invited to the United States for consultations, after which he announced that the Albanian side was ready to sign the agreement. However, "shuttle diplomacy" between Western capitals did not bring much new and there were disputes and dilemmas that led to the failure of the first phase of the negotiations and also to new conflicts in Kosovo and Metohija, with increasingly serious military threats from NATO. The reasons for the nervousness in NATO circles were not hard to see: in April 1999, the North Atlantic Alliance was supposed to mark half a century of existence but also to adopt a "new strategic concept" that would establish its new role, which was no longer limited by the UN Charter (the right to collective self-defense) nor would the so-called out-of-area clause from Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which limited the scope of its operations to the territory of member states, remain valid.

The hardline NATO faction gathered around US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the Kosovo crisis saw it as a prototype of new post-Cold War crises on which the "new strategic concept" was to be tested, while American politicians, unlike the skeptical Pentagon, believed that Yugoslavia would be a relatively easy opponent for the world's most powerful military alliance today.

The interests of NATO in the Kosovo crisis at that time are perhaps best illustrated by the words of Robert Hunter, former US Ambassador to the organization, "It is too late for caution and claims that Kosovo is just a 'civil war' or 'internal matter'. With its actions so far, NATO has taken responsibility for the outcome of the conflict. If fighting continues at the time of NATO's fiftieth anniversary in Washington this April, the focus will not be on its new strategic concept or grand visions. Kosovo will overshadow both the celebration of its glorious past and plans for the future".

After several meetings with the KLA, Hill could definitively report by March 8 that the KLA had definitively accepted Rambouillet.

In the meantime, the President of Serbia definitively rejected the Rambouillet agreement.

"On March 19 in Paris, the entire leadership of the Kosovo Albanians signed the agreement, while Wolfgang Petritsch and I stood behind them and others. It was a bittersweet moment because we all, especially Wolfgang and I, knew that in the absence of a Serbian signature and given the continuation of violence, war would ensue. But there was also something invigorating. After months and months of trying to encourage Albanian leadership to work together, we succeeded. I thought this could be a good sign for the future, but the meeting was mostly a rejection of Serbian propaganda – which I heard many times from Milosevic himself – that Albanian leaders could never work together," Hill said.

To be continued tomorrow: Milosevic and Holbrooke - for the last time