Making A Deal: Why Milosevic Blinked

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Compared with that marathon, the talks in Belgrade were swift and matter-of-fact. On Wednesday night the envoys and Milosevic talked for 4 1/2 hours. Chernomyrdin never veered as he read from the prepared script. Ahtisaari went over it in detail, explaining why each demand was not negotiable. "Can we make improvements in the text?" Milosevic asked. "Absolutely not," Ahtisaari shot back. This was NATO's best offer, and not a comma could be changed. Hoping to soften the Finn, Milosevic invited him to dinner. "Let's not have dinner," answered Ahtisaari. Instead, the Serbian leader should go back to his advisers and consult them on accepting NATO's ultimatum.

In hindsight, Serbia's calculating boss had probably already made up his mind to take the next offer. By 9:30 p.m. he summoned his rubber-stamp parliament to a special session Thursday morning to provide some political cover for his capitulation. Lawmakers approved the deal overwhelmingly the next day.

Milosevic has emerged with his skin intact, as well as his uncanny knack for turning defeat into personal victory. NATO, he felt, had flinched at the ground war needed to drive him from power. He could brag how his "little nation" had stood up to the world's most powerful military alliance and nurse Serbian victimhood.

Yet even if there is no real political opposition to challenge him now, he cannot rest easy. He will try to put a worth-it-all face on defeat by claiming this peace agreement is more favorable than the Rambouillet plan, since it gives Serbia uncontested sovereignty over Kosovo. But with no troops there to enforce it, his legal ownership is a sham. And he was forced to swallow the humiliation of admitting foreign soldiers onto Yugoslav soil. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party voted against a deal it denounced as a total sellout. Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj, idol of the hard-liners, could quit the government. Ultimately, Milosevic will have to deal with the dawning realization among his suffering citizenry that after he let Serbia be ruined, he handed over Kosovo. "He betrayed us with war," said Croatian Serb Dragan Miljanic, 62, idling in a Belgrade street. "Milosevic only cares for his own skin."

This war has burned nearly everyone it touched. Washington's uneasy relations with China and Russia have been poisoned. Beijing will take a long while to get over the insult of errant bombs dropping on its Belgrade embassy, and lingering resentment could hamper the peace plan as it moves into the U.N. Security Council. Washington feels heartened that it managed to draw an angry Russia back to NATO's side. Moscow, says a senior French official, "made a difficult and courageous choice" in choosing pragmatic cooperation with the West over emotional solidarity with Serbia. Though Chernomyrdin is reviled at home for kowtowing to the West, Russian diplomacy gained considerable credibility in allied capitals, where officials hope the process will strengthen wavering ties. But there is still a lot of fence mending to be done. Russians in the policy elite and on the street now regard the alliance as a sinister force bent on aggression: "Who is next after Yugoslavia?" is not just a rhetorical question.