Examination of Witness (Questions 196
- 199)
THURSDAY 1 MARCH 2001
MR CHARLES
CRAWFORD
Sir Peter Emery: Ambassador, welcome. Our Chairman
would ask me to apologise to you that he is off for another meeting
outside this country, so I have the great pleasure of being able
to take the Chair with you present.
Mr Mackinlay: It is a principality, is it not?
Sir Peter Emery
196. The first thing I know we would like to
do is to thank you for the way that you arranged the programme,
provided hospitality, provided a number of guests we could see
during our visit to Belgrade just recently. I would like it recorded
that the Committee were most pleased and, indeed, we told Mr Vaz
when he was in front of us earlier how well you had done. I hope
that does not hurt your service record but we did it to try to
assist, not to hinder. Might I start by asking you whether there
is anything that you would like to tell us that has happened since
our visit because we are trying to stay up-to-date as much as
we can and that would be helpful.
(Mr Crawford) Thank you very much, it is a pleasure
to see you all again, and Mr Maples who did not come out to Belgrade
before. Thank you for inviting me. It has given me an opportunity
to come over with the visit of Mr Svilanovic yesterday, which
is one of the things which has happened. This is, if you like,
the first friendly visit at that level in ten years as far as
we can tell, for a very long time. It is a good week actually
to be over here looking at these bilateral issues. In terms of
things which have happened since you left, clearly there has been
movement on the Presevo Valley, which we can talk about in detail
if you are interested. There has been movement on the arrest of
Markovic and some of these people closely associated with Milosevic.
It seems like a long time since you were there actually so I have
to try to work out what has happened since then. We had a tremendous
performance of Hamlet, which was a very good bilateral
event. It seems just another cultural event but it was very well
received actually and certainly the cast who came back were moved
by the reception they had. That was a big success. This is a small
thing again, but I went down to Kragujevac, which is an industrial
town in the Serbian heartland really, to commemorate the wonderful
Scottish nurses. I do not know whether you know this story but
in the First World War some Scottish nurses went down there from
the Russian Front to help out with this tremendous typhoid epidemic
which had swept the area and unfortunately they died as part of
their procedure of helping down there. So every year in Kragujevac
there is a ceremony to remember this really rather remarkable
expedition by our British nurses. I went down there with my military
adviser, John Crosland, who you met. This was a town which was
bombed by NATO and is in a very bad state economically. It is
in a terrible state really. They claim their production now is
something like three per cent of what it was ten years ago. It
is in a very bad way and yet we, as the British, were given a
very, very warm welcome. I think on the whole I am reassured with
the way things are moving although in a sense the longer you are
there—I have only been there now six weeks I think—you
are struck by the sheer scale of the problems they face on the
economic side, I am sure you saw a bit of that, and by the complexity
of the issues they are facing, but they do seem to be cracking
on.
197. The Foreign Minister was with us yesterday
and very favourably I think he was grateful for what we were trying
to do. Do you consider, however, that there is any more formal
thought in Belgrade about the future structure of the area generally?
(Mr Crawford) This is something Mr Svilanovic is keen
on and I have to say personally I rather agree with his general
thesis that one needs to look at issues like Kosovo as a regional
approach, it is not just a Serb or Albanian issue. It is always
a bit hard to ascertain how far there is what you might call collective
thinking in Belgrade. I think one of the striking things about
the Covic plan for the Presevo Valley is that in a way it seems
to me at least to epitomise the thought that the FRY, the Serbs—you
have got to be a bit careful about the nomenclature—let
us call it Belgrade for the sake of argument, after ten years
of effectively being isolated are starting to realise that if
they play the game with the international community, if they have
a dialogue with NATO, they present their case reasonably, they
can get quite good results, which is in fact the case. In that
sense I think you are seeing a dawning realisation on the part
of the new people in Belgrade, a lot of whom as personalities
have been extremely isolated, that they need to be quite proactive
in working with their neighbours, with us, with NATO, with the
Americans, the Russians, or whoever, and if they are energetic
and proactive they do get results. This is not something which
comes to them in purely institutional terms after what has happened,
but I think there is that feeling growing there and basically
we ought to be encouraging that because the spirit of the Zagreb
Summit is the spirit of everything that we have been trying to
do.
Dr Starkey
198. Can I ask you to extend a bit on the Presevo
Valley and on what has actually happened in response to the initiative
put forward by the Serbian Deputy Prime Minister?
(Mr Crawford) I went down there last week, I think
it was, and then I went over into Kosovo to have a compare and
contrast. We have got another diplomat, David Slinn, who was the
head of our office in Pristina, a former member of the embassy
in Belgrade, he has now come out to help the embassy and he is
going down there today so we are, as it were, following it closely.
We are going back down there next week. Alan Charlton, who you
met the other day, will be going down there. Basically what has
happened is—I do not want to say Serbs—Belgrade, by
which I mean both the Federal level and the Serb level, have decided
that they need to deal with this thing in a very measured way
as far as one can tell. This has led to them putting forward this
Covic programme which is overdetailed in lots of ways and we would
not do it that way if we were doing it, but nonetheless it is
a comprehensive and impressive piece of work. It talks about confidence
building measures, it talks about economic regeneration, it talks
about democracy, all the right buttons are there and in some detail.
Since you were over there they have been going out talking to
NATO, talking to the EU, talking to lots of different people,
the OSCE, trying to sell the general principles of this plan and
I think basically they have been successful in selling the principles
of the plan. While all that has been going on there have been
some incidents down there in the zone. On the Serb side down there,
if you call it that, I went right up to a sniper point on the
front line and peered through a hole and you could see just a
couple of hundred yards away these bunkers which are there with
people apparently peering back at us. This has reached a sort
of First World War style stand-off. One of the issues for us in
terms of helping the situation is how far we try and defuse tensions
there and the Serb side, FRY side, made a strong pitch to me that
they should not just be expected to pull back unilaterally because
all that would happen is the trenches on the other side would
just move forward, and there is clearly some force in that. What
is happening now is that NATO have appointed a special representative
of the Secretary General who is a Dutch diplomat who I know from
before in Bosnia, he is a good guy and he knows the region, he
is going back down there to help. NATO is trying to discuss now
at this moment with the Yugoslav side the combination of confidence
building measures required to allow NATO to redefine and scale
back the zone in that area, especially on the Macedonia/FRY border
and in other areas. Those discussions are continuing. Having met
at least one representative of the Albanian side, Mr Halimi, who
is the prominent local leader down there, and David Slinn has
had discussions with some of these rather harder core characters
quietly as well, when you listen to Mr Halimi you are aware of
the long history of the repression and bad behaviour and police
brutality and all sorts of other things which have happened down
there for a long time. The electoral laws and the municipal boundaries
and these sorts of things were stacked so that the Albanians were,
at least this is what he said, discriminated against, and he gave
very convincing evidence of that.
199. Can I just clarify, Mr Halimi is an Albanian
Serbian citizen, is he?
(Mr Crawford) He is the Mayor of Presevo, I think
that is his formal title. On the border down there you have got
ethnic Albanians living on the Serbia side of the border, as it
were, on the Narrow Serbia side of the border, as they call it,
he is part of that community. One of the things that both he and
the Serbs I met down there said was this area, even though it
is only a few miles from Kosovo, has not had the history of the
bad relations between people which were there in Kosovo. Part
of the problem with this region is there are little micro-pockets
of differences depending upon which valley you are in. It was
not as if there was a tradition of ethnic tension there but there
was a tradition of repression and bad behaviour, certainly in
the Milosevic period. When the Albanians talk about confidence
building measures I think one has to respect that, we should not
simply take the fact there are Albanian extremists or terrorists
down there as something which means that the Serbs are necessarily
right. The Albanian side down there have got genuine concerns
which, to be fair to the Covic plan, they are trying to address.
That is where that is. Mr Halimi claimed, and I think this is
an important point, that the local commanders of the so-called
UCPMB had accepted the proposition that a settlement to the Presevo
Valley story had to be within the boundaries of Serbia. In other
words, as far as I could tell, there was no question of some sort
of special autonomous status. When I went over to Kosovo and met
Mr Ceku and Mr Thaqi, who were two of the senior ethnic Albanian
leaders there, they were in a way supporting that because they
were worried, of course, that if you get special status for Presevo
that will lead to the Serbs asking for special status for their
enclaves in Kosovo and all of a sudden special statuses will be
popping up like mushrooms and their charters would get even more
complicated. Fundamentally, the very big picture here is that
Belgrade and NATO, in a way which has really accelerated action
in the last few weeks, and certainly since you were there, are
having a very intense dialogue now about all these issues. This
is basically a good thing.
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