Strobe Talbott by Engaging India

Author:Engaging India
Language: eng
Format: epub

08 8300-0 chap8 6/29/04 5:38 PM Page 154

eight

From Kargil to Blair House

American diplomacy in South Asia went into a hiatus for the first six months of 1999 while the BJP fought to stay in power and the United States went to war in the Balkans. For more than a year, the regime of Slobodan Milošević had brutalized the ethnic Albanian Muslim majority in Kosovo, a province of southern Serbia. From mid-January, when Serb forces carried out a massacre in the village of Račak, through early June, the foreign policy apparatus of the American government was busy mobilizing an international coalition against Serbia, shepherding the necessary decisions through the NATO political and military command structures, conducting a seventy-eight-day bombing campaign, coping with a massive refugee crisis in neighboring countries, and imposing a settlement that required Milošević to pull his forces out of Kosovo so that NATO

and the United Nations could take control of the province.

My assignment was primarily to deal with the Russians. They were apoplectic over the war, but after much head knocking they agreed to use their influence to force Milošević to capitulate. For five months, I traveled to Europe on an almost weekly basis.

I was able to intersect with Jaswant only once, at the end of May. That meeting, held in the parlor of the Indian ambassador’s residence in Moscow, was both in substance and atmosphere, our worst. Mercifully, it was also one of our shortest. I was by then in a chronic state of jet lag.

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I was operating without the benefit of my usual India-Pakistan traveling team and had trouble shifting gears mentally from my negotiations with the Russians, which were, at that point, going badly.

Jaswant’s mind, like mine, was on the Balkans, although he had an entirely different set of concerns. The U.S.-led air war against Serbia, conducted without a formal authorizing resolution by the United Nations Security Council (primarily because of the threat of a Russian veto), had aroused opposition in India and elsewhere to the perceived tendency of the United States to play self-appointed sheriff in High Noon–like face-offs with villains like Milošević. Jaswant used the occasion to give me a Dutch-uncle treatment on the need for the United States to show more respect for international opinion.

I was just as glad to debate Kosovo with him, since there was not much to talk about on our usual agenda—and for the usual reason: Indian domestic politics. The BJP-led coalition had collapsed in mid-April after narrowly losing a vote of confidence engineered by the Congress Party.

Neither party had been able to form a new government, so the BJP hung on in a caretaker capacity until new elections could be held in late September. That meant parliament would not convene again until October.

So much for the possibility of Indian accession to the CTBT by September 1999, a prospect that Vajpayee had held out to the world in his statement of intent to the UN the previous year.

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