Instead, coverage plays up Boris Yeltsin bickering with the G-7 in Cologne, or President Clinton bickering through the headlines with a French minister. Such tiffs are practically made for television. What's more telling is the silent consensus that by spending in the region now, the West can pull out profits in the future. Take the rebuilding infrastructure business. It's nice work if you can get it, but even more enticing for entrepreneurs is the prospect of owning the industries in Kosovo outright.
Factories are in miserable shape, of course, but disrepair only brings the price down.
The fact that these industries are still technically owned by the Yugoslav government seems to mean little to the leaders of NATO countries. To do that you build financial institutions of some sort, and perhaps a stock market. Privatization candidates include Kosovo's electric plants, which power 25 percent of Serbia, and mines worth the equivalent of a quarter of the area's total economy. As of three months ago, these operations were under Belgrade's control. Now ownership is an open question that will be answered by an interim multinational government, probably headed by a Swede with a background in banking and a steady hand.