Knowing too much

The photograph, taken by a French news agency, was published everywhere Monday: a sun-baked beach; sparkling water; happy, splashing children; an Albanian Army tank standing guard.

The children are Kosovar refugees. Although the nationality of the tank is subject to change, the scene is tragically set. These kids will grow up, probably grow old, under the care of an armored nanny.

If they’re lucky. As the hot-to-cold talks between NATO and Yugoslavia demonstrate, the likelihood of anyone growing up or old in Kosovo is entirely dependent upon whether the world has the will to stand up to Slobodan Milosevic and the smarts to see through his bluster.

It’s no surprise that Yugoslavia’s president brought peace tantalizingly close this weekend; it’s even less of a surprise that he yanked it away at the last moment. He cannot truly believe that NATO will permit him to keep 15,000 Serb troops in Kosovo after a cease-fire. Or that NATO intends to disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army. Or that NATO will consent to the Serbian demand for a stop to the bombing until the notoriously slow United Nations Security Council approves the deployment of a peacekeeping force.

What Milosevic does believe is that the public and politicians of the NATO nations will grow weary of the enormous task of halting genocide, that Security Council members China and Russia will take his side. Above all, he believes he can buy enough time to cover the enormity of his crimes.

The known horrors of wholesale executions, gang rapes, looting and burning entire villages, erasing identities and all the other hideous details that constitute ethnic cleansing no doubt will seem tame compared to what a Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo will reveal. With his army crumbling and the KLA starting to fight back, Milosevic, the first head of state to be indicted as a war criminal, knows he must keep the world from looking into the mass graves he dug and filled.

The NATO nations could agree to the Serb-controlled peace Milosevic wants. The war would be over, the Kosovar Albanians would be returned home, NATO would have fulfilled its mission and its conscience would be clean.

But NATO knew going in that combining military and humanitarian action would be extraordinarily difficult. The problem now, of course, is that NATO knows about Milosevic. It knows what “returned home” means for ethnic Albanians under his rule. It knows that, with an indictment hanging over his head, Milosevic’s only chance for survival is to eradicate, not make peace with, his enemies. It may be tempting to declare victory and go home, but NATO must not. It simply knows too much.