Page 194 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE KOSOVO CRISIS—THE MICRO REVIEW
they had risked their political capital. The Albanians were concerned
about demands for KLA demilitarization and insisted that a referen-
dum on the final status of Kosovo be conducted at the end of the
three-year period, knowing full well that the Albanian majority would
endorse independence. To push the Kosovo Albanians to sign,
Albright personally joined the talks at Rambouillet and made it clear
to the Albanians that failure to sign would lead to the withdrawal of
Western support for their cause. Although the majority of the delega-
tion agreed to sign, a 29-year-old KLA leader named Hashim Thaci,
who was elected as the leader of the delegation, refused. To buy time,
the Kosovar delegation asked for an extension to consult their people.
To accommodate this request, the deadline was extended to March 15,
when the conference was to reconvene in Paris. Over this time, the
West effectively pressured Thaci and the Kosovo Albanian delegation
to sign the agreement. Significantly, however, it also presented them
with a carrot that would alleviate their major concern—a promise of a
final settlement three years after the implementation of the interim
agreement. This promise was clearly a signal that the Kosovo
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With
Albanians could interpret as a future vote on independence.
this concession, the Albanian side finally signed the agreement on
March 18, three days after the conference reconvened. The Serbs, for
their part, continued to resist pressure to allow foreign troops into the
FRY and even hardened their position in the political side of the
agreement, altering 70 percent of the text in a counteroffer. 107
Table 7.5 summarizes the key changes in Western policy in phase 7,
based on an assessment by policy aspect.
Realizing that it was unlikely to risk its political capital by aban-
doning the Kosovo Albanians, as threatened, Hashim Thaci correctly
called the West’s bluff by refusing to sign the interim settlement at
Rambouillet. This move, in the end, paid a fantastic dividend for the
Kosovars in the form of a major concession tantamount to a vague
promise of Kosovo independence. Whereas the West had always
refused to entertain the idea of Kosovo independence both before and
after the start of the Kosovo civil war, it now found itself pressured to
concede this point to win Albanian’s support and prevent its credibility
from being undermined. Though subtle in form, hidden in the text of
a document, this concession represented an important change in the
West’s strategic Kosovo policy. It also showed, in line with the
findings in phase 4, that not all shifts in policy during the prelude to
the Kosovo military intervention were related to the CNN effect.
Other tactical aspects of the West’s foreign policy remained consistent
with phase 6.