Examination of Witness (Questions 220
- 233)
THURSDAY 1 MARCH 2001
MR CHARLES
CRAWFORD
220. Is it your assessment that the Yugoslavia
Government is likely to proceed on charges against Milosevic on
what one might characterise as domestic political crimes like
rubbing people out or fraud or whatever and might then get round
to handing him over to The Hague for the actual war crimes subsequently,
in which case how are they going to deal with the American deadline
that is looming at the end of March?
(Mr Crawford) What you are saying is one interpretation
of what they are doing. I do not think it is a bad interpretation.
There are different ways in which you can look at this.
221. You do not think it is a bad interpretation?
(Mr Crawford) I do not think it is a bad interpretation
of what they are doing at the moment. It is a bit difficult to
tell where they are because different parts of the system over
there say very different things. The law on co-operation with
the Tribunal is working its way through the system now. I do not
think it will be finished for a few weeks yet but they are doing
that. The Hague office is now being opened. The Hague investigators
are coming out and there is a sense of process happening there.
You would have to ask the American Ambassador what the significance
of their deadline is. What it will take for Congress's requirements
on that to be met, I do not know. I do not think, as far as I
can see, the Americans are saying, "You have to hand over
Milosevic", the Americans are saying, "We want something
real here and not just the promise of a law a few weeks down the
road." The question is what will it take for that to be accomplished?
I am talking to people and trying to persuade them that this has
to be a real thing. Chris Patten has raised it and you can ask
him about what he said to President Kostunica when they met the
other day. They know the issue is there and in a way I think they
know they have to deal with it. They say various things on this.
You have heard some of them yourselves. First of all, is it better
for us to deal with it because that means we are facing up to
it? But what about the practical problems? There are a lot of
people out there who are afraid that The Hague will go after them
because these people could be a destabilising element. There are
strange things happening in Belgrade in the middle of the night.
One of the things that happened after you left was the attempt
apparently to kidnap or assassinate the interior minister. That
was quite a dramatic thing. There is quite a lot going on there.
They feel that they need to proceed carefully. On the other hand,
there are people who want to proceed a lot faster than is happening
at the moment. There is a lively debate about it which is happening
right under your nose.
Sir David Madel
222. I have got one supplementary on what Dr
Starkey said. Do you think they have decided what to do about
Milosevic but are finding it difficult in how to announce it,
or are they genuinely undecided?
(Mr Crawford) Personally I think they are still undecided.
Mr Mackinlay
223. Can I clarify one thing; is there any impediment
as to who the responsibility would rest with for arrest? Is it
exclusively Federal and is it seen as such, or, again, is this
one of these areas which could be blurred between two jurisdictions,
the Serbian Government and the Federal Government? Is it quite
clear and understood? It is not a matter we have to discuss and
talk about with the Federal Government, is it?
(Mr Crawford) I think you are right to say that this
is one of those issues that is a bit blurred. It would not be
fair to mention his name but a senior Serbian politician said
to me, "This is a Serbian matter. So far as we are concerned
Milosevic should go and hide on Federal territory, if he can find
any", so these are all slightly murky things. Having said
all that, the team of people looking at it are what you might
call the Belgrade leadership which include Federal and Serbian
level people. Will this issue get tangled up into personal rivalries
and ambitions of people there? Up to a point, yes, for sure; there
is a lot at stake.
Mr Maples
224. I want to ask about the Stability Pact
and the economic side of all this. I realise this is constrained
by continuing military and terrorist activity in and around Kosovo
and until recently by Milosevic being in power in Yugoslavia,
but could you give us a sketch of how you feel it is going. One
feels in one sense that progress is slow. I wonder also whether
you think that the European Union is organising itself in a way
that will maximise this effort. Again there are lots of stories
of too many Directorates, too many Commissioners being involved,
too many overlaps between Mr Patten and Mr Solana and what individual
governments are trying to do as well. Do you think that economic
effort is being managed and co-ordinated to maximum effect?
(Mr Crawford) The answer is that not everyone wants
to be co-ordinated, not all bilateral donors want to co-ordinated.
What we have done, which is a very good thing, is set up an aid
co-ordination unit within Belgrade which is trying to get some
authority so that people regard that as a one-stop shop to try
and make sure that, at least insofar as the big players in this
are concerned, they are co-ordinated. I was at a briefing with
Mr Caborn this morning for our trade task force which we set up
following the changes there, and the DFID people there gave a
good presentation as to what they are doing. It does not seem
that anyone else is doing this work which is trying to help co-ordinate
the aid very practically, by putting British people on the ground
to help achieve this, and also piling in with some technical assistance
to get the policy framework right. There is a feeling out there
that we do not want to replicate the mistakes, if we can call
them mistakes, of what happened in Bosnia where to some degree
everybody rushed in and I would not say threw money at the problem
but there was a certain real sense in which you wanted to crack
on without getting the policy framework right. With the Serb Government
you have got a team of people who by any standards, and certainly
by any transition economy standards, are extremely impressive
people.
225. Is this on the Serb side?
(Mr Crawford) The new team in Belgrade are by any
standards good. These are people capable of operating at world-class
levels. The question is what are they attached to? They themselves
are having to look at the books and find out what is going on.
To answer your question, the EU has done a good job in Kosovo,
an orders of magnitude better job in Kosovo than it did in Bosnia
in the early days; there is no comparison. They are moving to
try and replicate that success in Serbia, in FRY, and the new
agency is helping up there. It looks like a very good effort.
It is never going to be perfect but it looks like a far better
effort than it has ever been before. The big money is going to
come when you get the World Bank and IMF in and that requires
them to look at the books to work out what the best thing to do
is. The banking sector are billions of deutschmarks in debt. They
have inherited an economically awful situation. Working out exactly
how one times one's run into the assistance penalty area to make
sure you get the whole thing right is not straightforward. While
all this is going on, as I think some of your Committee members
saw, the economic situation is very bad. People are really poor.
There is always more money sloshing round than you think but people
are basically poor. The gap between Serbia and Slovenia, according
to any conceivable indicator, has widened terribly over the last
few years and it is going to take decades to put this right. It
is not going to be a matter of putting it right within months.
It is a great tragedy that it has happened. The Serb Government
is running out of money and our DFID team came back very conscious
of the fact there is going to be a need to get more money into
the system to keep the government system going in the short term
before you move into the whole big donor programme. The World
Bank is setting up a trust fund. The EU is setting aside some
money for budgetary support. You could ask Chris Patten about
that. It is okay. To answer the question, in a nutshell it looks
pretty good but it is as if you have had a tremendously bad party
where everything has gone wrong and you are waking up the next
day with the most amazing hangover. You have brought in people
who are people well-equipped to sort out the mess, but the fact
is there a spectacular mess and it is going to take a long time
to sort it out.
226. The big help rather than just keeping the
government going, is it repairing and re-establishing the infrastructure
after the bombing campaign? Is clearing the Danube an important
part of creating the conditions for economic regeneration?
(Mr Crawford) I do not know. I tend to take the view
that the real money is the private investment money and that means
you have got to get the right policy framework which means dealing
to some degree with absurd problems of inter-enterprise indebtedness
which have built up, but also making investors feel welcome and
getting the rule of law right so if you or your friends want to
invest in that part of the world (a) you feel you are going to
make a profit and (b) if something goes wrong, you can go along
to some legal system and have some recourse and know where you
are. Without that, all the assistance budgets in the world will
not change anything. They seem to understand this, which is really
encouraging compared to my time in Bosnia when I do not think
this was understood properly by what you would call the "thinking"
classes there. The big money will come from that. I have had more
British businessmen turning up in the last five weeks in Belgrade
than I had in two years in Bosnia. People coming along not looking
for aid hand-outs but looking for real deals. This is encouraging
because it shows there are traditional strengths there, it is
not all bad, but they are starting from a very bad place.
227. But this point about the infrastructure
and the Danube (which has taken a long time I understand because
the Yugoslavs wanted a Yugoslav project director and now one is
in place), do you regard that as a very important pre-condition
for economic development not just of Yugoslavia but presumably
the region; it is still unnavigable?
(Mr Crawford) The Danube will help but will the Danube
on own transform the situation? No. It is a very important thing
to go right but there are lots of other things that need to go
right as well. The big issue this year is the question of the
debt rescheduling because they are very, very massively indebted
in terms of their GDP. If you unlock that you are helping free
up the conditions for private investment to follow as well because
a lot of the debt is to private investors as well. In terms of
very very large sums of money the debt issue is, in a sense, the
key to it all and that leads to various sequencing issues as to
how quickly you can work your way through the detailed work required
to make that happen. Things like the Danube will make an enormous
difference. Things like building the roads and getting new telecoms
firms in will make a big difference. One of the comparative advantages
they have got is young people who are red hot on the Internet
and those sort of technologies. One of the things we have done
in the Foreign Office is to launch the electronic initiative for
South East Europe within the Stability Pact which I think is something
which is growing quite nicely. I will be trying to help Belgrade
empower those people and make sure that the young people who are
going to be the big magnates in 30 years' time, that their concerns
are registered with the EU, with the Government, with us, so we
can try and build upon that. But the fact is they have spent ten
years digging themselves (with our contribution through sanctions)
into a very deep hole and there is no quick way out of that hole.
Chairman
228. Could I just ask on Kosovo how long do
you think the international missions in Kosovo are going to have
to stay?
(Mr Crawford) My view on this is that fundamentally
it does not matter—this is my own view but I think it stands
up—whether you call Kosovo "independent", a "confederation"
a "Hong Kong variation" or a "pineapple",
the point is that either there is a strategic attempt by Serbians,
Albanians, and to a degree Macedonians, to agree that this has
to be sorted out nicely, peaceably and to some degree with European
support, or there is not, and then there is going to be tension
and violence and mayhem down there which is going to be very difficult
for us to walk away from because all that will happen is it will
explode again and there will be hundreds of thousands refugees
swarming backwards and forwards. The good news is that for the
first time ever—and this is what I said to Mr Covic when
the Covic plan was presented to the group of Ambassadors—not
just in ten years, but in a hundred years or a million years that
official Belgrade has presented a democratic, reasonable policy
to their Kosovar fellow citizens. You have got to start somewhere
and that is a good place to start. Given the history of the last
last 50 years, and particularly the last ten years, it is going
to a big job turning that round, but the spirit is very different
now, thank goodness. To answer the question directly my guess
would be a very long time because it is going to take a while
for the very deep—
229.—Bitterness.
(Mr Crawford) The bitterness and hatred. The thing
to understand about the Kosovo question is that it is different
from the Bosnia question because—and I do not like to be
too blunt about it—there has been a racial connotation to
this in the sense that the Serbs have looked on Albanians not
so much as people they did not like but people inferior to them.
That of course creates a different quality of resentment to what
you saw in Bosnia where there is more of an ethnic rivalry. There
is a psychological bitterness on both sides which is very, very
difficult to deal with very quickly. It has been there for years
and of course each killing simply adds to it. Yesterday a Serb
couple in Kosovo were hacked to death by an axe. This is a catastrophic
thing to be happening. On the other hand, there are probably all
sorts of acts of petty discrimination going on against Albanians
in parts of Serbia which do not reach the newspapers but nonetheless
they are fuelling the bitterness on that side. Stopping the cycle
of mutual distrust and fear and so on when the language is so
different is a jolly tough job.
230. I agree entirely with you. I think we have
to understand that when you have the position where your daughter
or your wife has been taken out and raped and murdered and your
brothers or family shot, the idea that that can be dissipated
in a matter of weeks or months or even just a few years I think
is expecting too much. It seems to me that there is going to be
a generation before one really begins to overcome some of the
great difficulties which exist in the civil strife that there
has been. I would hope it is not, but I think we have to be prepared
that it may be.
(Mr Crawford) The tragedy of the situation is that
bad behaviour has consequences and it has on the whole negative
consequences and people who promote bad behaviour are much faster
at promoting it than we are at stopping it. It would only take
a guy with a Molotov cocktail to burn down this building, if we
are not careful, and it has taken hundreds of years to build it
up. Damage can be done very fast. On the other hand, we are bigger
than them, if I can put it that way, and we have got a European
context for engaging with people and accelerating processes of
reconciliation of a sort we did not have 30 or 40 years ago, or
even frankly ten years ago. We can get some big building blocks
in place. If you could imagine a situation in which we had the
VJ and NATO having a sense of partnership that would go an awfully
long way to removing the war option and that to some degree empowers
the political option. That does not apply just in FRY, it applies
across the region.
Mr Mackinlay
231. Foreign Secretary Cook said in March 2000
that there would be judicial assistance to Kosovo and he said
he expected "shortly to see at least a dozen, perhaps more,
of the British legal profession working to help bring justice
to Kosovo. The first should arrive before the end of next month."
We have been told there have been 70 firm applications by members
of the Bar and judiciary in the last six months but none of these
applications have been taken up. Can you throw any light upon
this?
(Mr Crawford) No I cannot. I saw this was raised with
Mr Vaz and I think the office are going to prepare a reply to
you on that. Clearly this is something which we need to take up
with the UN. It is very unsatisfactory. The difficulty with Kosovo,
as compared to say Bosnia, is because of the civil disobedience
that went on there it was almost like a greenfield site in terms
of institutions when we went in there. For all the problems in
Bosnia at least at the end of the war there were three functioning
ethnic spaces where there were police, there were sorts of courts.
In Kosovo there is nothing there and it is very difficult to build
something up (with all the problems of interpreting and all the
rest of it) which is going to be sustainable. This is a tremendous
challenge. It is frustrating that these things do not work as
fast as we would like. One of the things I want to try to do is
to make sure that the UNMIK team, at least on issues of crime,
terrorism, customs and drug smuggling, starts to work closely
with the people in Serbia who are quite good on this and seem
to want as much of our help, international and bilateral as we
can possibly give them. Things like this are very disappointing,
there is no doubt about it, but on the other hand there are a
lot of things going quite well.
Chairman
232. Ambassador, before we thank you, are there
any things we ought to have asked you which we have not and that
you would like to make evident to us before you disappear?
(Mr Crawford) Can I just for the record, because we
are doing a lot, just very, very quickly run through some of the
things that are happening bilaterally. I do not necessarily want
you to ask lots of questions about them. We are adding to our
Chevening scholars list, the number of Chevening scholars will
go up significantly this year by up to five times, which will
mean something like 20 people will be able to come across. That
is an achievement. The local government links you have been briefed
on—those are working quite well. The number of people travelling
from Yugoslavia to the United Kingdom is going up. The number
of visas has almost doubled year-on-year which is very good. British
experts in Kosovo did a very good job in terms of co-operating
with the Serb side on helping identify the victims of this terrible
bomb explosion. That has gone down well. I met some of the British
people down in UNMIK dealing with crime and customs issues and
lots of other issues and the British presence there is impressive
and very, very effective. We have got a team of Home Office people
going out on Sunday for a few days to look at a whole range of
crime and co-operation issues with Belgrade. We have got a new
OSCE police adviser, Mr Monk, who is a great expert in the region.
You probably know him. We had an RUC officer out last week talking
about police reform issues. He went down very well. There are
lots of other things. This is a busy agenda; we are not sitting
there doing nothing.
233. It was quite obvious when we were with
you in Belgrade that that was not the case. May I thank you very
much for coming to the Committee and again repeat our thanks for
your hospitality when we were in Belgrade. I think we would all
wish to end by wishing you well. Thank you very much indeed.
(Mr Crawford) Can I say thank you for your interest
too.
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