Kosovo*

Vilmos Tehenészfiú wrote:Tako je to radio Milosevic sa americkim ambasadorom, davne 1990. Hoce Amerikanac da preda akreditive al Sloba bio nesto zauzet. I tako 6 meseci. Posle je Sloba malo najebao, ali mnogo je bilo lepo dok je drzao do sebe i ponizavao Amerikanca.

A ima i ona prica kada je MIPa u vladi Helmuta Kola 1991 dolazio u BG pa je na Surcinu morao da pokaze diplomatski pasos jer jbg nezavisna zemlja koja drzi do sebe. I to nam je isto izaslo na nos jer smo se nameracili na sujetnijeg od sebe. 

Tako ce i sa ovim da bude. Pitanje je koliko ce da upropasti svoje sugradjane dok ga ne skinu sa vlasti.

Q: Well, when you arrived there, I mean he was your person to deal with in this country
wasn't he?

ZIMMERMANN: Well, no, he wasn't because of course, I was accredited to the
government of Yugoslavia. The President of Yugoslavia was an eight person hydra
headed institution called the Yugoslav presidency. It was composed of representatives of
all six Yugoslav republics plus representatives from Kosovo and Voyvodina. Every year,
the president of the presidency would rotate from one of these republics to another. I don't
think that Kosovo or Voyvodina which were not republics got the president of the
presidency. But the republics did. When I presented my credentials to the president of the
presidency, it was a Bosnian Muslim, Raif Dizdarevic. He was the man to whom I first
used my instructions in expressing concern over what was going on in Kosovo. After that,
I called on other members of the Yugoslav government including the new prime minister,
Ante Markovic, who was a reform minded westernizing Croatian. The foreign minister
Budimir Loncar, who was a Croat and an old communist but one who was very willing to
modernize and reform, and other cabinet level people in the Yugoslav government. That
was what I did first. After that I would go around and talk to the republican presidents in
the republican governments because that is where the power in Yugoslavia lay. So, I put
in requests to see all six of those, and the requests came back quite promptly from five of
them that they would be very glad to see me. The sixth was Serbia. I put in a request to
see Milosevic who was the president of Serbia, and the answer was that Serbian
government does not deal with foreign ambassadors; that was for the Yugoslav
government to do. I think it became clear that this was not a very tenable position for the
Serbs to take since I was talking to the Slovenes and the Croats and all the others. But
then a major event intervened. It was the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo which
had taken place in 1389, June 28, which was a Serbian defeat at the hands of the Turks.
But it has always been celebrated in Serbia as the Serbian national day. Milosevic was
going to make a major speech in Kosovo in front of one million people on the actual
battlefield. The Serbian foreign ministry, every republic had a foreign ministry, the
Serbian foreign ministry invited the diplomatic corps, all of the members of the
diplomatic corps, to go down and sit as honored guests to listen to Milosevic's speech.
We were to be given a special train to go from Belgrade to Kosovo to do that. I discussed
this invitation with my staff and it didn't take us more than a few seconds to reach the
conclusion that it would be a bad idea for the American Ambassador to go to this speech
because in the first place we had no idea what Milosevic was going to say. He might have
been insulting to the Albanians and we would have been captive bit players in his theater
for whatever he wanted to do with regard to his nationalist aims in Kosovo. So we
decided I would not go. We didn't even bother to ask Washington for instructions because
we knew that they would agree with us as they did. Other embassies, other ambassadors
called me up to ask what I was doing. We all got the invitation on the same day, and I
said I wasn't going and I would give my reasons. It turned out that the European
Community which met as a body reached a decision not to go. As I remember it, the only
European ambassador who went was the Turkish Ambassador who said he went because
he had a different view of the battle since his country had won it. Milosevic was very
upset, I learned later. He blamed me for the fact that almost none of the western
embassies had gone, and he decided simply to refuse to see me. That was a boycott that
lasted until January of 1990, so I had been in the country almost a year before I got to see
the primary politician in it.

since his country had won it