NORDLAND: Do you think Milosevic wanted all along to be bombed? Or were his tactics at Rambouillet brinksmanship that went bad? HILL: One of the most irrelevant questions in Yugoslavia today is who is second in charge. There’s only one guy. So you have to crawl into his head and move around a lot of cobwebs there to figure out what decision the Yugoslav state is going to take. Milosevic has on many occasions backed down at the last minute. But predicting that he would back down is very perilous. On a number of occasions in the past we had threatened him with the use of NATO force. If we had backed down after Rambouillet we would have faced enormous consequences that would go well beyond the Balkans.

In hindsight, do you think Milosevic intended to use the airstrikes as a pretext to ethnically cleanse Kosovo? And should we have anticipated that? We knew there was a military buildup going on. We knew plans were in effect. The question was if there was going to be a decision by Milosevic to exercise the plans. In the course of negotiations last year, he once made the comment that “We could always expel Albanians from Kosovo, but we would never do that because we are not Nazis.” Well …

Can you see the airstrikes bringing Milosevic back to the negotiating table? At any given moment he’s a guy making more calculations than a supercomputer. I’m sure he is considering how to get out of this. The initial euphoria [of resistance] is going to wear off, particularly as people in Belgrade contemplate the future that he’s laying out for them. So I think at some point he’s going to look to see how to get out of this, and he’ll want to retain power in the process, and that’s going to be a challenge.

So far they’ve scoffed at any peace efforts, practically humiliating Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov when he came, and dismissing Germany’s initiative out of hand. What do you see as his game now? Milosevic doesn’t have strategy; he has a set of tactics. Like someone who is brilliant at solving a one-move chess problem, he’s never been very good at thinking three moves ahead. One move he played was to try to break the NATO alliance. Another was to threaten World War III by somehow getting the Russians involved. Another has been to take dead aim at the security and stability of the Macedonian state. I think as these moves haven’t worked that he’ll make other moves, and I think everyone in the Balkans and in the international community hopes he’ll make a move toward peace. But he’s clearly not there yet.

He’s put the Macedonian government under great pressure, hasn’t he? There’s no question that the refugee issue in Macedonia has shaken the foundations of this state. People here are extremely worried. The misbehavior of the Macedonian police on April 6 [when they forcibly bused 14,000 refugees out of the country ] is becoming for Macedonian Albanians a casus belli. So the Macedonians have to start figuring out how to patch up their relations with the Albanians. To their credit, the leadership is concerned about that.

Is there any doubt now that the Serbs are determined to completely ethnically cleanse Kosovo of Albanians? I think instead it’s part of this Serbian concept of inat–spite–which is to say, “Oh, you want to bomb us to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe? Try this, here’s a humanitarian catastrophe for you.” Or, “So you want to bomb us to prevent a wider war? Try this.” I never put the words strategy and Milosevic in the same sentence. I consider the ethnic-cleansing campaign just one of their tactics. I don’t think they have a plan to recolonize Kosovo with Serbs. The fact is, Serbs don’t want to live in Kosovo.

You know Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova well. Watching him on Serb TV, do you believe he voluntarily made those remarks criticizing the NATO strikes? He is under duress and he’s under house arrest and he should be released and given safe passage to the border. I don’t think he’s worried about himself; he’s worried about his children and his wife–he has a small daughter and a teenage son. It’s a measure of the cynicism of the Serbs that they would do this to him.

Do you see the air war having much of an impact on Serb resistance as yet? I look at the bomb-damage assessments like everyone else does. I do believe that at some point the Serbian military and everybody else in Serbia is going to run out of gas–literally and figuratively.