Notes on the Kosovo Problem
and the International Community
Diana Johnstone
I - Outside Intervention
At news of violence in Kosovo, the main question immediately raised in the European
Union (EU) and the United States by editorialists, commentators and politicians has been,
"what can, what should we do about it?" Outside intervention in the Balkans is a
very old story. However, its recent revival in terms of a universal moral imperative owes
much to two recent developments:
- Television coverage focusing especially on violent manifestations of problems,
creating the impression, or illusion, that "everybody knows what is happening".
- The existence of a single world superpower, the United States, with its extensions in
NATO, "the West", the "international community", and the organizations
it dominates (usually including the United Nations, not to mention the OSCE, the World
Bank, the IMF, etc.).
Such concentration of power creates the impression that "the international
community" is potentially able, through use of primarily American military power, to
achieve by force whatever it decides to do. The corollary of this assumption is that
people, or at least governments, which fail to interfere are "guilty" of
complicity in the "crimes" being committed.
This mixture of image and power has radically devalorized the role of discreet
diplomatic mediation, which is by nature neither visible nor forceful, and is easily
portrayed as craven and lacking in moral resolve. The issue for the international
community is presented in terms of wielding "carrots" and especially
"sticks", rather than in terms of understanding and reconciling the fears,
interests and possibilities of the populations directly involved.
A third development, which follows naturally, is the deliberate political exploitation
of the first two - the media coverage and the potential of the U.S. and its subsidiary
allies to intervene militarily. It is now possible, notably, for a secessionist or
irredentist movement to hope to achieve its aims primarily, if not solely, by mobilizing
these two forces. This is a lesson of the Yugoslav situation.
Regarding Kosovo, the basic political issue is the status of the province of
Kosovo-Metohija as a part of Serbia (in turn a part of rump Yugoslavia) or as an
independent State free to become part of a Greater Albania.
The two sides in this political conflict have opposing strategies which are totally and
intimately linked to the issue of international intervention.
* The entire strategy of the ethnic Albanian side in the past decade has been based on
mobilizing international support, first political and eventually military, on behalf of
Kosovo's secession from Serbia. This is an elaborated, long-term strategy with clear aims
and clear methods of achieving them. It is vigorously supported by the Albanian diaspora,
notably in Germany, the United States and Turkey. The ethnic Albanian demand for secession
is not at all, as commonly portrayed, a reaction to repression by Slobodan Milosevic. It
was there first. It draws on a century-old nationalist movement which from its inception
has turned to outside powers for decisive support in the realization of its objectives.
This aspiration, like all the other centrifugal forces let loose in former Yugoslavia,
received major encouragement from the international community's recognition in the winter
of 1991-92 of the right of Slovenia and Croatia to unnegotiated secession as independent,
essentially ethnically defined, States (1).
In 1988 and 1989, Yugoslavia and Serbia made constitutional changes revoking the
extremely extensive autonomy accorded the Autonomous Province of Kosovo by the 1974
Constitution. The international community has uncritically condemned these changes,
accepting their characterization as an instrument of Serbian oppression. Three factors
have been commonly ignored: however unwelcome to the ethnic Albanian leaders, these
changes were widely supported in Serbia as necessary to enable the realization of the
economic liberalization reforms; they were enacted legally; and they left intact the
political rights of ethnic Albanians as well as a considerable degree of regional
autonomy. One can only speculate to what extent, without the prospect of decisive outside
intervention on their behalf, the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo might have tried to make use
of the existing legal framework. They could, for instance, have voted to fill 42 of the
250 seats in the Serbian parliament with their representatives.
Instead, boycotting participation in the institutions and political life of the Serbian
State has led the ethnic Albanian population into a sort of internal secession, denounced
to foreign sympathizers by those who have instituted it as "apartheid".
Meanwhile, the successful boycott of the Serbian schools has produced a generation of
ethnic Albanians whose educated members speak English better than Serbian and are thus
much better prepared to win international support than to communicate with Serbian
neighbors.
* The Serbian government, in contrast, has had no visible strategy other than to keep
the international community at bay by insisting that the Kosovo problem is an
"internal affair". This is too static a policy to deserve to be called a
strategy, in fact. Milosevic has used the ethnic Albanian boycott of Serbian elections to
bolster his party's parliamentary majority with the Kosovo seats, but this is no more than
a short-range political advantage. The fact that in all the other conflicts in
ex-Yugoslavia, the international community has taken the anti-Serb side, and that even
after Dayton the "outer wall of sanctions" was maintained only against Serbia,
ostensibly as pressure to "solve the Kosovo problem", is enough to convince
Serbs that however little they have to hope for from Milosevic, they have nothing to hope
for from the "international community" either.
* The nature of these conflicting strategies leads to a structural bias in favor of the
ethnic Albanians on the part of the international community, that is, of its influential
components: the United States government first of all, which is virtually invited by
ethnic Albanian leaders to come in and take over; NATO, whose new mission can be practiced
and enhanced; and all the numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations which
find in the troubles of former Yugoslavia a perfect laboratory and justification for the
extension of their own operations.
What is actually being done by the international community in regard to Kosovo
resembles very much what was done in the first stages of the wars of Slovenian and
Croatian secession. At first, the United States took the position that it opposed the
breakup of the existing nation of Yugoslavia, but rapidly added the proviso that it would
oppose any use of force by that nation's armed forces to prevent the breakup. These
contradictory signals both gave the green light to Belgrade to reject secession and
encouraged the secessionists to go ahead with their plans, while the resulting confusion,
and hesitancy, within the Yugoslav Armed Forces, hastened desertion by both officers and
soldiers and the formation of irregular armed militia along ethnic lines.
The same pattern is being repeated in regard to Kosovo. The U.S.-led international
community is officially opposed to independence for Kosovo, but is also opposed to use of
force by Belgrade to disarm the increasingly violent secessionists. While ostensibly
accepting Belgrade's sovereignty, this ambiguous position has encouraged secessionists to
provoke armed encounters which are promptly and vehemently blamed on the Serbs.
Serbia has for years been subjected to extremely severe sanctions - economic and even
cultural - continued to this day by an "outer wall" (unilaterally imposed by the
U.S. with European consent) that keeps it out of international organizations. Serbia is an
international pariah, its people largely invisible except for the glimpses selected by
unsympathetic international news media. Since compromises are most easily made from
positions of strength, the continued pressure and threats weakening Serbia are scarcely
conducive to largesse.
The occasion statements by U.S. officials reproving "violence" on the part of
Albanian Kosovo separatists are toothless and in no way balance the demands on Belgrade to
solve the Kosovo problem "or else". It takes two parties to reach a compromise.
When pressure is put only on one side to compromise, there is absolutely no incitement to
the other party to do so. At present, the Albanians can be reasonably sure that if the
situation is allowed to deteriorate, the inevitable Serbian repression will only
strengthen their position vis-…-vis the international community.
At present, the ethnic Albanian nationalist leaders are demanding international
intervention sight unseen, convinced as they are - and with good reason - that they have
won the international community to their side. Serbs reject it for essentially the same
reason.
Certainly nothing could be more welcome than a truly fair and unbiased international
mediation. An even better solution would be the emergence in Serbia of leaders from both
the Serbian and ethnic Albanian communities with the ability to reach out to each other in
the manner of a Nelson Mandela. Unfortunately, there is as yet no sign of the triumph of
such wisdom (2). If anything, the bullying pressure being applied on one
side only, combined with a deliberate impoverishment of the country which leaves no margin
for generosity, works against such a dynamic.
II - Who Belongs in Kosovo?
The presumed fact that 90% of the population of Kosovo is ethnic Albanian (3) is increasingly cited as an implicit justification of their separatist
demands by people in Europe and America who would never draw such a conclusion regarding
the presence of large ethnic concentrations in other countries, starting with their own.
The fact that Kosovo was the cradle of the medieval Serbian kingdom is noted without
sympathy as a quaint archaism by Western commentators who seem more impressed by the claim
of ethnic Albanians to be the successors of the ancient Illyrians, the first inhabitants
of the Western, and who recently have even been adopting ethnic Albanian place names and
terminology (4). Albanian nationalists cherish identification with the
unknown Illyrians because they feel it gives them a stronger right to be there than the
Slavs who settled there as farmers in the 6th century. Serbian historians regard the
Albanian claim of descent from the Illyrians as plausible but irrelevant, inasmuch as both
Serbs and Albanians have inhabited the area for many centuries (5).
Historians readily acknowledge that Albanian feudal lords, who at the time were Christians
enjoying equal rights within the Serbian medieval state, fought alongside Serbian knights
at the battle of Kosovo in 1389.
The conflict between Serbs and Albanians developed three centuries later, following the
mass exodus from Southern Serbia in 1690 of Christians (including Albanians), who were
resettled by the Habsburg monarchy in its border lands, the Krajina, as a result of wars
between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The mountaineers who resettled the plains of
Kosovo in the 18th century were actively converted to Islam by the Turks, who regarded
their Christian subjects, not without reason, as potential subversives in alliance with
the Catholic Habsburgs (6). From that time on, various outside powers
have found it in their interest to accentuate differences and conflicts between ethnic
Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
The ethnic Albanians who had converted to Islam by the 19th century gained privileges
(to bear arms, serve in the administration and collect taxes) denied the Christian
population. Such privileges stood in the way of development of an Albanian nationalism
parallel to the 19th century Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian national liberation movements.
When Albanian feudal lords did revolt, it was rather to try to retain these privileges
than to achieve an independent State of equal citizens. This historic difference has had
ideological consequences. Because they were deprived of equal rights under Ottoman rule,
the Serb leaders adopted an egalitarian political philosophy borrowed from France as
appropriate to their national liberation struggle in the 19th century. This meant advocacy
of a state of equal citizens enjoying equal rights. The practice certainly did not always
live up to the principles. But there is a significant and practical difference between a
nation that proclaims principles of equal citizenship and one that does not. The tradition
is there to be encouraged - which is not accomplished by dogmatically denying its
existence.
The coexistence of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo raises the question of the terms of a
multi-ethnic state. The Republic of Serbia defines itself, in Article 1 of its
Constitution, as "a democratic State of all the citizens who live in it",
without reference to ethnic identity, in contrast to Croatia or Macedonia. Serbia is in
fact the most multi-ethnic State in the Balkans; one third of its citizens are non-Serbs,
with rights equal to all others. Serbs from other countries cannot automatically claim
Serbian citizenship, in contrast to Croats living in Bosnia, for example, who vote in
Croatian elections. Formally at least, the ethnic Albanian residents of Kosovo have more
citizenship rights in Serbia than the many ethnic Serb refugees who have flooded into
Serbia from Croatia and Bosnia since the collapse of Yugoslavia. But they refuse to
exercise them. Rights that are spurned wither away.
The fact that Serbia is suffering from international sanctions is an incentive to leave
it. Montenegro, a country historically "more Serb than Serbia", has elected
(admittedly with votes of ethnic Albanians) a new President who is taking his distance
from Belgrade, to the applause of the "international community" which dangles
the prospect of lucrative investments before a government which might deprive Serbia of
its last access to the Mediterranean. The desire to escape from the hardships visited on
Serbia is even strengthening separatist impulses among the Serbian ethnic majority in
Voivodina. In short, the policy of punishing Belgrade is leading to the further
disintegration of the last truly multi-ethnic country in the Balkans - all in the name of
"multi-ethnicism".
This centrifugal movement can only produce endless conflict and flight from the
troubled region.
III - What is the Danger of "Ethnic Cleansing"?
Given recent precedents, international armed intervention is most likely to be drawn
into Kosovo by public perception that Serbs are engaging in "ethnic cleansing"
and must be stopped and punished.
Such a perception has been being anticipated and prepared for years. The preface to a
1993 book (7) predicted that: "One can expect that ... the Belgrade
regime, frustrated but not thoroughly defeated in Bosnia-Herzegovina, will be tempted to
open up another theatre of war, most obviously in Kosovo, which would become one more
victim of military aggression and 'ethnic cleansing'." Five years later, Madeleine
Albright was saying substantially the same thing. At the 9 March London meeting of the
"Contact Group", Ms Albright compared Serbian police actions in Kosovo to
"ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and declared: "We are not going to stand by
and watch the Serb authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in
Bosnia".
The logic of such predictions is neither political nor strategic, but psychological, of
a Manichean type: the wicked "greater Serb" will take out
"frustration" suffered in Bosnia by inflicting "ethnic cleansing" on
Kosovo. This is the type of reasoning that flows naturally from ethnic stereotypes, in
which one ethnic group is demonized, that is, is portrayed as enjoying evil action for its
own sake.
Given the widespread adoption of that stereotype concerning the Serbs, there was always
a great probability that the inevitable clashes in Kosovo would be interpreted by
international media as yet another instance of Serbian "ethnic cleansing" of
non-Serbs. Still, it was surprising to see how quickly a police action - brutal but
limited - targeting armed rebels was characterized as "ethnic cleansing" and
even "genocide" by editorialists and politicians.
Ethnic cleansing and the "Memorandum" of the Serbian
Academy
The various ethnic separatisms that have won their pieces of former Yugoslavia have
found it useful to blame the wars of secession in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina
on a supposed deliberate project to create a "Greater Serbia". Under the
leadership of Slobodan Milosevic, this "aggression" is said to have followed a
program for ethnic cleansing set out in a 1986 Memorandum written by the Serbian Academy
of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade. The notion that the "Memorandum" was a sort of
"Mein Kampf" of "Greater Serbia" has received such acceptance that it
even shows up in a French text-book for advanced high school students:
"Ethnic cleansing: theory elaborated [mise au point] by members of the Belgrade
Academy of Sciences and advocating ethnic homogenization of the territories of former
Yugoslavia inhabited by Serbs, by using terror to drive out the other populations to allow
definitive annexation of these territories by Serbia." - Pierre Milza & Serge
Berstein, Histoire terminale, Hatier, 1993, p.330.
It is therefore relevant to look at the passages in that infamous but largely unread
"Memorandum" which deal with Kosovo and which include its only references to
"ethnic cleansing". They also are the passages which go farthest in what could
be considered "Serbian national pathos", the earlier part of the document
consisting of a more prosaic analysis of Yugoslavia's economic problems.
In its most controversial section, the draft document (the Memorandum was published in
draft form by its political enemies in 1986, the better to denounce it) took up recent
complaints by the dwindling Serbian minority in Kosovo that they were being driven out of
the province by acts of hostility from the ethnic Albanian majority, which at the time
enjoyed political control. The "Memorandum" denounced what it called "the
physical, political, legal and cultural genocide of the Serbian population of Kosovo and
Metohija". It described the Albanian nationalist demonstrations which began in 1981,
a year after Tito's death, as the declaration of "a very special but total war"
against the Serbian people.
"The Albanian nationalists, the political leaders of Kosovo, with well-defined
tactics and a clear objective, have begun to destroy inter-ethnic relations founded on
equal rights, for which Serbs had fought hardest in Kosovo and Metohija. The autonomous
region, at the favorable moment, obtained the rank of autonomous province, then the status
of 'constituent part of the Federation' and benefits from greater prerogatives that the
rest of the Republic to which it formally belongs. The next step of the 'escalation', the
Albanization of Kosovo and Metohija, has been prepared in perfect legality. In the same
way, the unification of the literary language, of the name of the nation, of the flag and
of the schoolbooks with those of Albania following Tirana's instructions, was done in a
way quite as open as the border between the two countries. Plots which ordinarily are
carried out in secret were fomented in Kosovo not only openly but ostentatiously."
The "Memorandum" predicted that unless a fundamental change was made
meanwhile, in ten years there would be no more Serbs in Kosovo, but rather "an
ethnically pure Kosovo". If, it warned, "genuine security and equality under the
law for all peoples living in Kosovo and Metohija are not established, if objective and
lasting conditions are not created favoring the return of the people driven out, that part
of the Republic of Serbia will become a European problem with very grave consequences.
Kosovo represents a key point in the Balkans. Ethnic diversity in many territories of the
Balkans corresponds to the ethnic composition of the Balkan peninsula and the demand for
an ethnically pure Albanian Kosovo is not only a heavy and direct threat to all the
peoples who are in a minority there but, if achieved, it will set off a wave of expansion
threatening all the peoples of Yugoslavia..."
However excessive this description of the situation may have been, it clearly was not
the elaboration of a "theory" advocating ethnic cleansing of other peoples by
Serbs, but rather the expression of a fear that Serbs would be "ethnically
cleansed" from Kosovo by the Albanian majority there. The political conclusions that
could be and in fact were drawn from the arguments put forth in the "Memorandum"
were quite simply the constitutional changes enacted two years later to revoke the extreme
autonomy granted in 1974 (8).
Whether they are described as "terrorists", "freedom fighters" or,
more neutrally, guerrillas, it is undeniable that armed bands exist in Kosovo, have
carried out armed attacks and have declared their intention to carry out more. There is no
government in the world that could stand back and allow such groups to operate unhindered.
Sympathizers with the ethnic Albanian movement commonly present it as an exemplary
non-violent resistance to oppression, in the tradition of Gandhi, and explain the recent
turn to violence by impatience resulting from the failure of the international community
to reward the peaceful leadership of Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosova (LDK).
This is of course an idealized over-simplification of a more complex and ambiguous
situation. It is indeed true that Mr. Rugova has opted for non-violence, as a part of his
strategy of winning international support. However, it is not true that the turn to
violence is only a recent development. First of all, in a region prone to violence, the
Albanians have traditionally been even more associated with recourse to arms than any of
their neighbors, excepting perhaps the Montenegrins. Non-violence is thus perhaps too
recent an innovation to be totally credible, especially since the contemporary movement
itself, before producing Rugova's LDK, had already begun in a more militant mould. The
guerrillas of the "Kosova Liberation Army", the UCK (Ushtria Clirimtare e
Kosoves), are a continuation of a decades-long underground movement.
"The roots of the underground groups reach far back to the sixties and
seventies", according to an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by Stephan
Lipsius (9). "The oldest of the organizations currently active both
in Kosovo and abroad is the 'Kosova People's Movement' (LPK). It was founded in Germany on
17 February 1982 as the 'People's Movement for a Kosova Republic' (LPRK). This was not a
new founding, but rather a merger of the following four previously independent underground
organizations: the 'National Liberation Movement of Kosova and of the Other Albanian
Regions of Yugoslavia' (LNCKVSHJ), the 'Marxist-Leninist Organization of Kosova' (OMLK),
the 'Communist Marxist-Leninist Party of the Albanians in Yugoslavia' (PKMLSHJ) as well as
the 'Red Popular Front' (FKB)."
"The political goals of the LPK include unification of all Albanians in former
Yugoslavia, that is in Kosovo, Macedonian, Montenegro and South Serbia, in a common State.
Contrary to the non-conspiratorially active Kosovar parties headed by the LDK, the LPK
does not basically reject violence as a means of political conflict. The LPK calls for
political and financial support to the UCK, but so far does not take part in armed
ambushes or bomb attacks." UCK communiques and announcements are published in the LPK
paper Zeri i Kosoves, leading to speculation that the LPK is the political arm of the UCK,
according to Lipsius.
Next to the LPK and the UCK is a third underground organization in Kosovo. Least is
known about this one. It is the 'National Movement for the Liberation of Kosova' (LKCK).
It was founded on 25 May 1993 in Pristina. Some founding members of the LKCK had left the
LPK out of political differences or personal animosities with the LPK party leadership.
Officially the reason for the split was the growing programmatic rapprochement between the
LPK and the LDK. Contrary to the strictly non-violent policy of the LDK, the LKCK demanded
militant action against the Serbian rulers. In addition the LCKC is for a State unifying
all Albanian-inhabited regions of former Yugoslavia with Albania, that is for construction
of a Greater Albania. The LKCK does not support the existence of the self-designated
'Kosova Republic'.
The LKCK has a political and a military arm, the so-called 'LKCK Guerrilla'. Contrary
to the UCK, the LCKC Guerrilla has not yet undertaken military actions or attacks. The
reason is that for the LKCK, the time for application of the entire Kosovar military
potential has not yet come. The second general assembly of the LCKC proposed a Four-Phase
Model for the 'Liberation of the occupied areas'. The first phase is marked by political
education work in the population and structural preparation. In the second phase begin
armed individual actions, while the third phase will see the unification of the LCKC, the
LPK and the UCK as the 'National Front for the Liberation of Kosova'. The joint military
actions undertaken in the third phase should lead in the fourth phase to popular uprising
and total mobilization of all forces. According to information from LCKC circles, we are
now in the second phase.
And meanwhile, thanks in part to the collapse of order in Albania last year, the
Kosovar rebels are better armed than ever. There are unconfirmed rumors that the
guerrillas of the "Kosovo Liberation Army" (UCK) in the Drenica region are
threatening aircraft with stinger missiles, and that this is why the police undertook to
try to recapture control of the region in the first days of March. If the UCK do not yet
have "stinger" missiles, put into general circulation by the US via Afghan
Muslim guerrillas in the 1980s, they soon will have. It is well-known that the Albanian
irredentist movement is financed not only by taxing its own people but also by
drug-smuggling through the Balkans, notoriously in the hands of ethnic Albanian clans (10). Buying light arms is no problem.
While Rugova traveled freely between his Pristina headquarters and Western capitals
winning support for his non-violent struggle, the violent phase of the struggle got
underway. In 1996, there were 31 political assassinations in Kosovo. The targets were Serb
officials but also ethnic Albanians condemned as "collaborators" - the better to
destroy the last bridges between the two communities. The pace quickened in 1997, with 55
assassinations. While Rugova was claiming that the UCK was a figment of Serb propaganda,
guerrillas raided eleven police stations in coordinated attacks in September 1997 before
making a first public appearance, armed, uniformed and masked, before a crowd of 20,000 at
a funeral on 28 November 1997. In January 1998, a UCK statement issued in Pristina
announced that the battle for unification of Kosovo with Albania had begun. The number of
killings escalated, with 66 killed before the massive Serbian police operation against
guerrilla bases in the Drenica region in early March 1998.
No government on earth could be expected to remain passive in the face of armed bands
that have claimed 152 lives in a little over two years - least of all the government in
Washington. It would be hard to find a precedent for the United States' threat to impose
heavy sanctions and freeze the foreign assets of the legitimate government of a country
faced with such an armed insurgency unless it withdraws its police forces and leaves the
rebels unmolested.
What is "ethnic cleansing"? While everybody is against it, few seem
interested in understanding its real meaning and causes as the basis for combatting it.
The prevalent attitude, in the depoliticized public consciousness of the 1990s, is to see
it as a sort of pure evil, an expression of racist or ethnic hatred which surges from
"the darkness of the human soul" (rhetoric of a speech by U.S. Vice President
Albert Gore) for no reason. The only remedy envisaged is punishment.
In the Balkans, "ethnic cleansing" is rarely a proclaimed policy. A notable
exception is the Croatian Ustasha movement's deliberate policy of eliminating Serbs and
other minorities from the lands of Croatian "historic rights" which it
controlled during World War II. Croatian extremists in the Ustasha tradition have taken up
both the theory and the practice in Tudjman's Croatia. The Tudjman regime has not openly
adopted the theory but has tolerated the practice, with the result that Croatia has in
fact been "ethnically cleansed" of the vast majority of its Serbian population
in the most thorough and successful operation of the kind in the former Yugoslavia. The
international community has not punished Croatia. On the contrary, the Zagreb government
has been substantially rewarded by membership in international organizations and foreign
investment, both denied Serbia.
In general, ethnic cleansing, that is, the expulsion of members of a different ethnic
group from a disputed area, arises from fear that their presence will serve to justify
rival claims for political control of that territory. Nothing is better designed to
stimulate such fears than the prospect that from now on, an ethnic group claiming a local
majority represents a threat of secession from the country in which it finds itself.
Once the international community gave its assent to the unnegotiated disintegration of
multi-ethnic Yugoslavia into ethnically-defined States, the struggle was on for control of
territory along ethnic lines. In this struggle, Serbs, Croats, Muslims, and Albanians have
all accused their territorial rivals of "genocide". These accusations reflect
both genuine fears and political calculation, and outsiders should be prudent in echoing
such inflammatory terms. In the West, emphasis on "genocide" by analogy with
totally different historic situations has obscured the primary political cause of
"ethnic cleansing": fear that the presence of members of a politically organized
ethnic group will be used to support territorial claims.
The presence on the small territory of Kosovo of two armed camps indeed threatens to
lead to a bloody and terrible conflict. In the propaganda skirmishes leading up to such a
conflict, the Serbs have once again lost the labelling battle. Their label for their armed
adversaries, "terrorist", has been reluctantly endorsed by US proconsul Robert
Gelbard, before being dropped as soon as Serbian authorities acted accordingly. On the
other hand, the ethnic Albanian label for Serbian actions, "ethnic cleansing",
has been taken up at the highest level of the international community, as well as by a
chorus of commentators and petition signers.
The notion that early denunciation of ethnic cleansing will help to prevent massacres
is probably dead wrong. On the contrary, such highly-charged overstatement contributes to
emotional polarization, to mutual fear and suspicion, to suppositions about NATO
intervention, and above all to the sort of desperation on both sides that can lead people
to commit desperate and terrible acts.
Leaders of both the Serbian state and the ethnic Albanian nationalists have proclaimed
their willingness to accept cohabitation between the Serbs and ethnic Albanians. The wiser
course is to accept this declaration of principle on its face value and to consider any
acts contrary to this principle as deviations from mutually accepted principles.
IV - Are the Serbs Willing to Compromise?
Dobrica Cosic, Serbia's leading novelist, often characterized as the spiritual
father of the national revival, proposed partition of Kosovo-Metohija as a way of solving
the conflict between Serbs and Albanians (11). As President of
Yugoslavia in 1992 and 1993, Cosic raised the possibility on various occasions, such as
when speaking to the foreign affairs committee of the European Parliament in Brussels on
March 30, 1993, without arousing any interest.
Cosic described (12) Kosovo as "a European question of the first
rank. Nevertheless, up to now, neither the European Community nor the CSCE have found the
right way of helping to resolve the Albanian-Yugoslav and the Albanian-Serb problem."
He attributed this to "the fact that the problem of Serbo-Albanian relations has been
misrepresented and reduced to a problem of human rights."
This meant that "the central factor" was being "studiously overlooked:
the aspiration of Yugoslav Albanians to unite with Albania and create a 'Greater
Albania'." The secessionist ambition of the Albanian nationalist movement is the very
essence of their human rights demands. From that ambition flows a behavior of obstruction
in every sphere of social live: politics, culture, public education, the economy, media.
For the problem is not that the Albanians are deprived of cultural, political or other
rights; the problem is that they have these rights but refuse to exercise them. They
boycott en bloc the society in which they live; they do not recognize it. The issue is not
about opening the schools: they are open. The issue is that they insist that the
curriculum in those schools be borrowed from the Albanian State and that they issue
diplomas in the name of the 'Republic of Kosovo'.
"I consider as a great misfortune the fact that the Albanians have excluded
themselves from political life and that they do not take advantage of their autonomy. They
have all the civil and political rights needed for constituting themselves as an
autonomous community. That is officially guaranteed.
"The whole world, all the human rights champions are saying that the Albanians
have been banned from the schools. That is a pure lie! They are the ones who refuse to
attend the schools governed by the program of the Serbian state, which nevertheless
guarantees them courses in Albanian history and culture and the use of their language.
They insist on schools paid and maintained by the Republic of Serbia but where the
curriculum and schoolbooks come from Albania and the diplomas would bear the heading,
'Republic of Kosovo'!"
"The human rights argument is no longer anything but an ideological weapon used by
the secessionists and their foreign protectors in view of realizing their national
ambition: the union of all Albanians in a single State. And so long as they will not have
achieved that end, the question of human rights in Kosovo-Metohija will continue to be
heated up and Serbia will remain indicted by the international community. It will not do
us a bit of good to point out that the Albanians benefit from national and human rights
such as no other national minority enjoys. [...]Kosovo will be Serbia's malignant tumor
which will exhaust her economically, block her development and threaten her territorially
by demographic expansion."
The military dangers were clear five years ago. Cosic was aware of "precise
information on the existence of 60 to 70,000 Albanians organized in paramilitary units in
Kosovo. This is an army ready to go to war the day when Mr. Rugova, Mr. Berisha or some
other Albanian is through with the soothing rhetoric that they serve up to the CSCE."
Yugoslavia was even then being isolated and crushed by sanctions, and even threatened with
military intervention if they "commit aggression" in Kosovo - that is, on their
own territory. If the Serbian army should move to oppose secession, Cosic wondered:
"will they send missiles to raze our cities and airports?"
In such a dilemma, Cosic concluded it was necessary to satisfy the national aspirations
of both the Serbian and Albanian peoples by a "peaceful and fair territorial
division".
This offer having found no takers on the Albanian side, there is no present sign of its
being actively pursued by the Serbs either. In itself, it may well be a fair proposal.
However, it encounters two types of objections.
* The Western "international community", starting with the United States,
has vetoed it for reasons of analogy and precedent. Partitioning Kosovo would go contrary
to the policy adopted to justify recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, considering
ex-Yugoslavia's internal boundaries as inviolable. This policy is the very basis for
branding Serbia as the "aggressor" in Croatia and in Bosnia and therefore cannot
be easily abandoned. Moreover, if Kosovo were partitioned, why not Macedonia, where
Albanians are concentrated in the Western areas and would also demand to join
"Greater Albania"?
* The danger of setting such a precedent also worries Serbs. Suppose ethnic Albanians,
thanks to their much higher birthrate, attained a majority in some other part of Serbia.
Would they demand secession there too? The "Greater Albania" project includes
more than Kosovo. Where if ever would it all end?
Privately, a number of Serbs would welcome some sort of negotiation which would
"save the monasteries" and cut losses. But how?
Various compromise proposals have been put forth by independent Serbian intellectuals.
One such proposal is published in this issue of DIALOGUE. In another, Professor Predrag
Simic of the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade has suggested
that the Autonomy Statute of Trentino-South Tyrol in Northern Italy, long a scene of
irredentist unrest among the German-speaking, formerly Austrian inhabitants, could serve
as a European model for resolving the Kosovo crisis.
This and other independent proposals could be considered "trial balloons"
which could be taken up at the official level should they ever meet with the slightest
sign of interest on the Albanian side. So far, however, this has not been the case.
Encouraged by their image as victims of Serbian oppression, enjoying strong support from
Western governments and human rights organizations, Kosovo's ethnic Albanian nationalists
have no incentive to settle for anything less than their ultimate goal: Greater Albania.
V - Human Rights
The attitude of the international community toward the Yugoslav disaster has been
characterized throughout by confusion between national rights and human rights. It is
unclear to what extent this confusion is accidental or deliberate in Western countries,
where the concept of "national rights" is variously appreciated according to
political tradition (with significant differences between the United States and Germany,
for instance). The readiness in the United States, in particular, to consider denial of
separatist ethnic rights as violation of human rights represents a mutation that may not
be unrelated to the confusion in the American left, in particular, resulting from the
critique of universal values and the rise of "identity politics".
Regarding the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, what sort of civil society is being built in
the context of the long militant nationalist struggle? Some positive effects may be
assumed. Literacy has certainly been vigorously encouraged by a movement which, since its
inception in the late 19th century, has been led by literature professors looking for a
country to go with a language only recently transposed from the oral tradition. The rise
in general literacy must also be beneficial to the status of women. On the other hand,
this is a society closed in on itself, obsessed with its own identity. Its human rights
organizations are concerned with the human rights of ethnic Albanians. All questions of
democratization and political direction are put off in expectation of the
"independence" that is supposed to solve them all.
The political modernization and democratization of the Albanian people in the Balkans
remains a legitimate and unfulfilled aspiration. Had they used their political rights
under the Serbian Constitution, they could have elected an important number of
representatives to the Serbian Parliament, and altered the political balance of power in
Belgrade. Instead, they have missed out on contributing to the beginnings of multi-party
democracy in Serbia and seriously crippled its development. Massive ethnic Albanian
abstention has ensured Milosevic's party of a majority it might otherwise have lost. It is
highly doubtful that holding parallel elections for ethnic Albanians only, resulting in
unanimous election of an unchallenged leader, Ibrahim Rugova, and of election of a
"parliament" which has never functioned, provides a better initiation into
democratic political practice than could have been gained by using the official elections
to further the interests of the Albanian people of Kosovo within the Serbian Republic (13).
The situation of ongoing ethnic hostility is bad for all sides. Each is likely to care
less and less about what happens to the "others".
In early March, the Serbian raid on the rebel base at Prekaz had not ended before the
Clinton administration announced measures to "punish" Belgrade for its
"violence" and began to pressure other governments to join in imposing new
economic and diplomatic penalties on Yugoslavia. Given the absence of similar reaction to,
for instance, Turkey's use of "disproportionate force" in its raids against
Kurdish rebels, such reprimands can carry little moral weight with Serbs. How many
innocents perished in Panama in the United States extraterritorial raid to arrest a
foreign head of state in his own country? How many women and children died in Waco, Texas,
in a police raid on a group which was armed, but which had not - in contrast to the ethnic
Albanian guerrillas in Prekaz - claimed dozens of assassinations?
The double standard employed is so blatant, that the uniquely severe reaction of the
international community cannot appear to most Serbs as an expression of genuine deep
concern for human rights, but rather as part of a longstanding political campaign to
isolate and fragment their country.
Nevertheless, regardless of any and all hypocrisy and ulterior motives on the part of
outside accusers, it is more than likely that acts of police brutality occurred in the
course of that and related raids on guerrilla bases, if only because acts of brutality are
all too usual in such circumstances.
Unfortunately the chorus of indignation and calls for punishment led by Madeleine
Albright can only make it harder for Yugoslavs who are concerned about high standards of
respect for human rights to demand an accounting from their government. Nevertheless, some
have done so.
Following its own investigations in the Drenica region in early March, the
Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) reported that its findings "contradict
Serbian police reports on the number of dead and the locations and circumstances in which
they were killed" and urged the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs to give
reporters and representatives of humanitarian and human rights organizations access to the
area and thereby enable the public to be provided with full, accurate and timely
information. "The indications that the persons killed, wounded or arrested were
connected with the attacks on police must be presented to the public", the HLC stated
in a communiqu‚, pointing out that it is "in Serbia's best interest to
immediately institute an inquiry" into the circumstances of the death of Kosovo
Albanians in police actions, including exhumation of the remains for forensic examination.
It would be in keeping with traditional practices for human rights advocacy groups in
other countries to support such demands from local Serbian organizations, as a means of
strengthening democratic civil society and the rule of law.
This is in fact the sort of work done by Amnesty International, whose own reports from
Kosovo in early March 1998 were reasonably precise, factual and balanced, relating charges
made by both sides and noting which had not been substantiated or confirmed.
The reactions to events in Yugoslavia display a major difference of approach to human
rights questions, of considerable political significance.
What can be considered the traditional Amnesty International approach consists broadly
in trying to encourage governments to enact and abide by humanitarian legal standards. It
does so by calling attention to particular cases of injustice, excessive severity or
violation of legal norms. It thereby participates, through outside moral support, in
various internal struggles for the advancement of humanitarian legal standards, in
alliance with whatever local forces are engaged in such combat.
The approach of Human Rights Watch and above all of its affiliate, the Vienna-based
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, is quite different. Aaron Rhodes,
executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, displays
none of the scrupulous concern for facts which is the hallmark of Amnesty International.
He deals in sweeping generalities. In a column for the International Herald Tribune (14),
he wrote that Albanians in Kosovo "have lived for years under conditions similar to
those suffered by Jews in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just before World War II. They
have been ghettoized. They are not free, but politically disenfranchised and deprived of
basic civil liberties". The comparison could hardly be more incendiary, but the
specific facts to back it up are absent.
At least in the case of Yugoslavia, the Helsinki and Human Rights Watch approach
differs fundamentally from that of Amnesty International in that it clearly aims not at
calling attention to specific abuses that might be corrected, not at reforming but at
discrediting the targeted State. By the excessive nature of its accusations, it does not
ally with reformist forces in the targeted country so much as it undermines them. Its lack
of balance, its rejection of any effort at remaining neutral between conflicting parties,
contributes to a disintegrative polarization rather than to reconciliation and mutual
understanding. It therefore contributes, deliberately or inadvertently, to a deepening
cycle of repression and chaos that eventually may justify, or require, outside
intervention.
This is an approach which, like its partner, economic globalization, breaks down the
defenses and authority of weaker States. Rather than helping to enforce democratic
institutions at the national level, it carries the notion of democracy to the largely
abstract level of the "international community", whose sporadic and partial
interest in the region is dictated by Great Power interests, lobbies, media attention and
the institutional ambitions of "non-governmental organizations" - often linked
to powerful governments - whose competition with each other for donations provides
motivation for exaggeration of the abuses they specialize in denouncing.
The readiness of distant observers to accept the most extreme allegations serves to
discredit and ultimately disempower all State authority in former Yugoslavia. This
"international community" may indeed be serious when it warns Ibrahim Rugova and
his followers that it does not want an independent Kosovo, much less a "Greater
Albania". The logic of its actions is to reduce the entire region to an ungovernable
chaos, from which can emerge no independent States, but rather a new type of joint
colonial rule by the international community.
________________________________________________
(1) "Ethnically defined" because, despite
the argument accepted by the international community that it was the Republics that could
invoke the right to secede, all the political argument surrounding recognition of
independent Slovenia and Croatia dwelt on the right of Slovenes and Croats as such to
self-determination. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in Yugoslavia because the
Serbs were so oppressive was the popular pretext for the nationalist leaders in power in
the Republics to set up their own statelets. Recognition of the administrative borders was
a de facto support for the non-Serbian nationalisms - in the name of anti-nationalism. No
other single act has been more decisive in determining the subsequent fate of the region.
Countless books, articles and declarations blaming the wars in Yugoslavia solely or
primarily on one nationalism, Serbian nationalism, and on one man, Slobodan Milosevic,
have deflected attention from the responsibilities of all the other internal and external
actors, not to mention crucial economic and constitutional factors. An outstanding
exception to this chorus is the careful account of these factors by Susan Woodward in
Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War, Brookings, Washington, 1995.
(2) The separatist positions of Adem Demaqi
are proof that it takes more than years in prison to make a "Mandela".
(3) The fact is "presumed" because
ethnic Albanians boycotted the most recent census in 1991.
(4) The generally well-documented 1998
Spring Report of the influential International Crisis Group (ICG) comments on its decision
to refer throughout to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo as "Kosovars" as follows:
"Serbs living in Kosovo are also sometimes called Kosovars. In this report, however,
'Kosovar' always means ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Serbs use for ethnic Albanians,
either 'Albanci' or the derogatory term 'Siptar'..." First, by giving the ethnic
Albanians, and not the Serbs, a name attached to the region, the implication is
established that the ethnic Albanians really belong in Kosovo, whereas the Serbs are
outsiders. The same was done earlier by adopting the terms "Bosniak" and even
"Bosnian" exclusively for Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Kosovo
the appropriation of the place name is even more questionable, in view of the circumstance
that a large but undetermined number of Albanian "Kosovars" have immigrated into
Kosovo quite recently, whether during the wartime fascist occupation or afterwards, when
the ethnic Albanian Party leaders tolerated illegal immigration from Albania itself. There
is no mention in the long ICG Report of this clandestine immigration from Albania into
Kosovo.
The statement that "Serbs use... the derogatory term
Siptar" is equally biased. The Albanian word for Albanian is precisely Shqiptar,
written in Serbian as Siptar. That is how the Albanians have alway called themselves; it
means "eagle men" and is scarcely derogatory. No mention is made of derogatory
terms used by the Albanians to designate the Serbs...
At the very start of the ICG report, mention is made of the
importance of Kosovo for Serbs and for "Kosovars". Speaking of the importance
for Serbs, the paragraph begins:
"According to Serb mythology, Kosovo is the cradle of
their nation..."
Speaking of the importance for Kosovars (i.e., Albanians),
it begins:
"As descendants of the ancient Illyrians..."
Thus the thoroughly documented history of the Serbian
kingdom is described as "mythology" while the Albanian supposition is accepted
as fact.
With a board of directors including George Soros and
prestigious political figures including Shimon Peres and the crown prince of Jordan,
financed by both governments and private sources, the ICG is the perfect "think
tank" for the "International community" at its highest levels.
(5) Radovan Samardzic et al, Le
Kosovo-Metohija dans l'Histoire Serbe, published by L'Age d'Homme in Lausanne in 1990; and
Dimitrije Bogdanovic, Knjiga o Kosovu, Serbian Academy of Sciences and the Arts, Belgrade,
1985. Serbian historians point out that the two ethnic populations co-habited the region
in the Middle Ages, but were differentiated in their economic activities. Place names,
legal texts and tax documents indicate that in the thirteen century, the Serbs were
tillers of the soil, centered in the plains, whereas Albanians (and Vlachs) were herdsmen
who moved through the mountains according to grazing seasons. Another interesting instance
of ethnic specialization is the immigration of Germans from Saxony to work the important
gold and silver mines at Novo Brdo near Pristina during the height of the Serbian Kingdom.
Such occupational distinctions have of course been lost in modern times. See Samardzic,
1990, p.30. See also Georges Castellan, Histoire des Balkans, Fayard, 1991, p.66.
(6) Castellan, pp 211-214.
(7) Branka Magas, in the introduction to The
Destruction of Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 1993.
(8) Susan Woodward points out that the same
Serbian liberal leaders who attempted to denounce the intellectuals' nationalism by
leaking the incomplete "Memorandum" wanted to reduce Kosovo's autonomy for
purely economic reasons but saw no way to do it. The ex-banker Slobodan Milosevic found
the political excuse to do so by defending the Kosovo Serbs: the political trick that
built his power base. Ibid, p. 78.
(9) "Bewaffneter Widerstand formiert
sich", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 March 1998. It may be noted that the FAZ is
the last newspaper in the world that could be accused of being pro-Serb.
(10) "Minorit‚s albanaises et
g‚opolitique de l'h‚ro‹ne", La D‚pˆche Internationale des
Drogues, Paris, No 57, Juillet 1996.
(11) "While he was president of
Yugoslavia in 1992 and 1993, Dobrica Cosic made discreet contact with Kosovo Albanian
leaders. He wanted to discuss the territorial division of the province, with the Albanian
part, except for a number of Serbian enclaves, leaving Serbia. This was rejected by
Albanian leaders." Tim Judah, The Serbs, Yale University Press, 1997, p.307.
(12) Cosic's analysis of the Kosovo
situation, as expressed before and during his term as President of Yugoslavia (cut short
in mid-1993 by Milosevic, who perhaps concluded that his domestic prestige was not
exportable and thus of no use), is to be found in a 1994 collection of his writings
published by L'Age d'Homme under the title L'Effondrement de la Yougoslavie.
(13) Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic
League of Kosova (LDK) are described as follows by Tim Judah in The Serbs, Yale University
Press, 1997: "The party is led by Ibrahim Rugova whose father was executed by the
communists when they restored the region to Yugoslav control. His trademark is a scarf
worn at all times. The LDK brooks little dissent and those that challenge it are howled
down in LDK publications and can even be ostracised in the tight-knit Albanian community.
Kosovo is odd because, despite constant police repression, Albanian politicians have held
semi-underground polls, have declared Kosovo 'independent', have set up a parallel
education system, and have hailed Rugova as president of the Republic of Kosova. Woe
betide any Albanian family or shop or businessman who will not pay his dues to Kosova's
tax collectors. In his capacity as president, Rugova sweeps out of his headquarters, a
ramshackle wooden building, hops into a limousine surrounded by aides and bodyguards and
drives about Pristina just like a real Balkan president. A government-in-exile complete
with ministers commutes between Tirana, Germany and Skopje. Rugova travels abroad to lobby
for international recognition for his phantom state, but despite the odd hassle over his
passport he has not been arrested since challenging Serbian power in such a blatant
fashion."
(14) International Herald Tribune, 18 March
1998. Two months earlier, Mr. Rhodes hastened to address a letter to the same newspaper
vehemently attacking Jonathan Clarke, who had had the temerity to write a balanced
columned entitled "Don't Encourage Separatist Aims of Kosovo Albanians". Mr.
Rhodes accused Mr. Clarke of echoing Belgrade propaganda and of seeming to "favor
appeasement in the face of murder, torture and the total denial of the human rights of
Kosovo Albanians".
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein