Christopher Lord is the editor in chief of Perspectives - the Central European Review of International Affairs, published by the Institute of International Relations in Prague. His recent books include Politics (Prague, 1999) and Family Values (2000), a collection of fiction published in the United States.

The further you get from the Balkans, the more difficult it is to understand what is happening there. I realized that during the Kosovo war, when by chance I happened to visit five NATO capitals -- Prague, Budapest, London, Paris and Copenhagen -- and talk to policymakers, academics and ordinary people.

It was quite clear to me that in Prague and Budapest, where, apart from anything else, there are plenty of people from Yugoslavia in its various incarnations, there was a good understanding of the whole situation. The same, I am sure, could have been said for other neighboring countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, where, despite widespread support for NATO and its works on general principles, the Kosovo air campaign was unpopular.

In Paris, London and especially for some reason Copenhagen, on the other hand, people tended to talk about events in the Balkans as if they were happening in Western countries. That, I think, is why people found the ethnic cleansing and other atrocities so outrageous. They could understand such things happening in Rwanda or places like that but not in dear old Europe.

More than Europeans

That is a bad mistake. The Balkans has a fundamentally different kind of society, as people in the region realize quite well. The Yugoslavs (or Romanians, or Albanians, or Bulgarians, or whoever it might be) that you meet seem just like Western Europeans, because they are, but that does not mean everybody is like that.

The people you are likely to meet as a foreigner, even if you go to the Balkans on a short visit, will be the educated ones who speak English. They are just like Western Europeans because the Balkans is in a stage of transition to a Western-type society, and the educated people are the vanguard of the change. In particular, young educated people are pretty much identical to their opposite numbers in the West.

However, important social change is occurring against the background of a peasant society that is different from anything in the West. With its ethnic divisions, and especially its religious divisions, it presents quite a different picture. The existence of Muslims -- European Muslims, that is, not immigrants from the Middle East -- is a unique Balkans feature, and when you remember that they are there as a result of centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Turks, who treated Christians more or less as slaves, you begin to understand just how deep the changes go.

Western policy, though, is driven by the sensibilities of people in the West, and if the French or the British or the Danes for some reason have the idea that the Serbs and Albanians are just like them, then policy will be constructed to reflect that. But even these misguided people are closer to the truth than the Americans. At least they are still thinking in European terms.

It is not anyone's fault that the American public finds it difficult to grasp the realities of Balkan society. How many Europeans understand what is happening in Central America, for instance? But with American leaders calling the global shots, there is cause for concern at the depth of ignorance about the Balkans.

American values vs. Balkan values

To be specific, there seems to be an assumption that the people of Yugoslavia share American values. Americans see their values as the only alternative to the values of the hated Slobodan Milosevic, and now that people in Yugoslavia have been freed from Milosevic's evil regime, they naturally must think in terms of American democracy. More, they must automatically support the wise and good policies that the benevolent Americans have constructed for them.

That assumption is far from the truth. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov could go and negotiate with both sides as Milosevic's regime crumbled, but the reality is that the United States just would not have been welcomed in such a role.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright seems keen to present the failure of the Milosevic regime as a vindication of U.S. policy throughout the Clinton years, and to argue that at last the NATO bombing of targets in Kosovo and Serbia last year has paid off, with the failure of repression and the triumph of democracy.

In Copenhagen or Paris or London, some people will think that sounds reasonable but maybe have a few reservations. In Prague or Budapest, few would actively support the idea. But in the Balkans itself, no one who would accept Albright's glowing version of events.

That creates a policy paradox for Washington. Announcing that the Kosovo bombing was a mistake is clearly not an option. No one is going to force the administration to eat crow over that point in public, and so they are just not going to do it. Not now, not ever.

Unfortunately, we see that despite having made it on to world front pages and TV screens with the revolution, Serbia is ultimately too small and too far away to stay there. So it seems that it probably is not going to matter what the Serbs think. The Washington view will acquire the status of the official reality.

The view from the scene of the crime

That will be difficult to sustain diplomatically. Serbia as a whole still feels enraged about the NATO bombs, and if there is a Washington consensus on one side, the emerging Belgrade consensus seems to be that the NATO action actually kept Milosevic in power for another year by providing a way for him to rally the Serbs around the flag.

But will NATO or the State Department or anyone in a position of responsibility in the West ever acknowledge even the possibility of that interpretation being admitted? Not likely.

And so Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica and his colleagues are likely to find themselves in a new kind of ideological quarantine. The European Union, the United States and the world generally will be glad to listen when the talk is of democracy and reconstruction. But what is at stake is the essential political identity of the Serbian people, and in particular their collective attitude to their own recent past.

Maybe there is some magic by which the State Department can convince the people of Yugoslavia that they were bombed for their own good. But the closer you get to the scene of the crime, the less likely that view of reality seems.