The 1999 Yugoslav war will doubtless be reduced to one paragraph in the minds of much of the Western public: there was an obscure place in the Balkans where a brutal Serb minority tormented the ethnic Albanian majority by looting, raping, murdering and driving them from their homes. For the first time ever, the NATO military alliance acted, bombing the Serbs into submission and "liberating" Kosovo so that the Albanians could return under the protection of an international peacekeeping force called Kfor. And they lived happily ever after.
But for anyone who lived through much of the war and its immediate aftermath, the history of the past three months will never be so simple. Twelve weeks after I drove from Budapest to Belgrade under NATO bombardment on the second night of the war, I have more questions than answers. For me, the mysteries of the war are strategic, political and sociological.
1. How Did Nato Choose Its Targets?
One of the most powerful images of the end of the war was a huge field on the outskirts of the southern Serbian town of Prokuplje which I passed on my way from Pristina to Belgrade two days ago. Over several square miles, the retreating Yugoslav army had parked hundreds of battle tanks. It was, I would wager, the biggest tank farm in the world, stretching across the plateau surrounded by mountains, the blue, white and red Yugoslav tricolour streaming from many of the tank antennae. For 11 weeks, NATO claimed it was trying to find the Serb armour, and here it was out in the open, flaunting itself.
A few hours earlier, stuck in the epic refugee and military traffic jam exiting Kosovo, I had asked a British soldier by the roadside why I had not seen a single damaged tank or armoured personnel carrier. "Our targets were tactical, not military," he said. By "tactical" I assume he meant the fuel depots, factories and bridges which NATO bombed in such numbers. One of the least understood, most unpalatable truths of this war is the extent to which the real perpetrators of ethnic cleansing were left untouched. In his first public speech at the end of the war on June 10th, President Slobodan Milosevic said that 462 members of the Yugoslav army and 114 members of his cosseted interior ministry police (MUP) lost their lives. And Serb military sources say three-quarters of those were killed in Kosovo Liberation Army ambushes or by mines laid by the KLA. If the official figures are accurate - and inquiries in Kosovo and Belgrade indicate they are - approximately three times as many Serb and Albanian civilians as military forces were killed in NATO bombing.
2. Where Did The Loot Go?
Serb forces in Kosovo looted. Systematically. Massively. Every Albanian survivor speaks of it. Every burned house in Kosovo was first emptied of its possessions.
On April 15th, on a Yugoslav government organised trip to the Djakovica highway where 74 Albanians were killed in a NATO bombing, I watched two men who appeared to be gypsies loading case after case of orange soda and crisps from an Albanian shop into a lorry covered by a plastic tarpaulin. Yugoslav army officers and MUP policemen stood by while the looting was completed. This was theft carried out in an orderly fashion, and I can only assume that the looting of Kosovo was itself the subject of some master plan. Unlike the Iraqi flight from Kuwait in 1991, there were no television sets and bottles of women's perfume, no necklaces or CD players to be seen among the cars and military vehicles pulling out of Kosovo. There were, however, hundreds of civilian lorries with tarpaulin covers, and I can't help wondering what they carried.
3. What Are The Russians Up To?
For NATO, perhaps the worst surprise of the war was the arrival of Russian troops in Pristina and their seizure of Slatina airport early on the morning of June 12th. Washington, London and Brussels all said the Russians would not dispatch the armoured column from Sfor in Bosnia; Washington, London and Brussels were wrong. A week later, Western leaders are still struggling to make the Russians fit into their mould for Kfor. But the Russian army seems impervious to the political and financial pressure brought to bear on President Yeltsin.
To its cost, the West did not take Slobodan Milosevic's alliance with Russia and Belarus seriously. Mr Milosevic's own brother, Boris, is Yugoslavia's ambassador to Moscow and Russia was Mr Milosevic's only trump card. He played it dramatically - or did Moscow play with Milosevic? Serb officials say the West's mistake was to believe in the former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who did not really speak for his country. Serb military sources say they have no illusions about Moscow's sentiments. "This has nothing to do with Serbs and Kosovo," one officer said. "It's about Russia's strategic interests, and rivalry between America and Russia."
4. What's Wrong With The Serbs?
Can 10 million Serbs be held collectively responsible for the horrors perpetrated in Kosovo? Surely not - collective punishment is immoral, and it violates international law. Yet as atrocity upon atrocity is uncovered in Kosovo, the Serbs as a people are demonised. Why, I still ask myself, in 11 weeks of war did I encounter only one person - a Serb woman journalist who wept beside me in the bus on that April 15th journey through Kosovo - who expressed any regret for what was being done to the Albanians?
The information vacuum inside Yugoslavia only partially explains Serbs' reluctance to acknowledge the wickedness committed in the name of Serbia. On returning to Belgrade after nine days in Kosovo, I discussed the mass graves with one Serb official, an intelligent, well-informed person, who insisted the massacre stories were rigged. The images of Albanian bones he had seen on satellite television were too white to have come from people killed recently, he said. There were other arguments about Albanian victims' clothing and photographs that looked too clean; no matter how much I insisted that from my first-hand experience the reports were true, he didn't want to listen.
How to explain the Serb obsession with beating, which seems to transcend social class or education? Nearly every Albanian male I spoke to had been beaten by Serb police. The same official mentioned above had told me how when his cousin was drafted during the war, he and other university graduates beat up the uneducated men in their unit, to keep them in their place. On the cafe terrace of the Grand Hotel in Pristina, my husband was appalled at the reaction of a Serb colleague who on seeing an attractive Spanish journalist walk by said: "I'd really like to beat her."
This week, a female friend in Belgrade received a 1 a.m. visit from a drunk former boyfriend - a computer programmer - who beat her so badly she fled in her pyjamas to the nearest police station. "The men in this country feel humiliated by all the wars we have lost since 1991," she told me. "So they take it out on anyone weaker. Drinking is a custom here. It is considered very macho. Men feel impotent so they drink. When they are drunk they feel powerful and strong, and they start beating."
Serbian male frustration has been aggravated by nearly 50 per cent unemployment, by average wages of less than £100 for those who work, and widespread alcoholism, she said. To make matters worse, 350,000 young men - the brightest and best educated - have gone abroad over the past eight years. Somehow, Serbian society needs reconstruction. But how?
5. Could This War Have Been Avoided?
Almost without exception, the Albanians of Kosovo - who have suffered most from the war - say they are nonetheless grateful for NATO's bombardment of Serbia.
It is a powerful and persuasive argument, exploited fully by NATO propagandists. Yet when the bombing started on March 24th, most of the ethnic Albanians were in their homes. NATO admitted that the reaction to its bombing was "entirely predictable": Serbs laid waste to Kosovo and NATO now estimates as many as 10,000 Albanians may have been murdered.
It may be true that Slobodan Milosevic would never have ceded to diplomatic pressure, that the only way to prise Kosovo from his grip was through force. But if the Albanians of Kosovo were worth fighting for, why did NATO refuse to send in ground troops? Had the war started with a ground offensive, there was a reasonable chance the Serb forces would have retreated. If the Serbs had fought, NATO would have suffered casualties, but the Serbs would not have had total freedom to murder and expel ethnic Albanians.
In the end, the price of the air campaign was the devastation of Kosovo and Serbia, and the salvation of the Yugoslav army.