Nearly unreported in the American media is the imminent culmination of one of America’s modern wars: in this case, the 1999 Kosovo War, in which NATO attacked Serbia on behalf of a Kosovar Albanian guerrilla movement, and forced a de facto – though not de jure
– cession of the province to an international force under a United
Nations mandate. According to all available reports, in exactly one
week – February 17th – Kosovo will declare its independence as an Albanian-dominated statelet
under the aegis of the Western powers. Contrary to the benign apathy
with which our media and policy communities will greet it, this is a
malign development on several levels.
The 1999 war itself was a strange replay of the “cabinet wars” of
earlier centuries, commanding little popular support in any of the
participating nations, and motivated almost entirely by an elite
consensus in the West that the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic had
to go. Indeed, that regime did more than its share to solidify that
consensus with its rhetorical ineptitude and its sponsorship of the
bloody-minded Serb war in Bosnia. The Western elites, including the
Clinton Administration, were for their part embarrassed by their years
of inaction in Bosnia, and as such were hypersensitive to replays of
that situation elsewhere – and concurrently eager to show, if only to
themselves, that they had learned its lessons. Kosovo’s simmering
conflict between Serbs and Albanians struck all the right chords, down
to the main villain.
The flaw in Western thinking lay in the assumption that the Bosnian
horrors were provoked by basic Serb intolerance of ethnic minorities.
This was inaccurate. The Serbian forces in Bosnia (and, to a lesser
extent, in Croatia) did not perpetrate their barbarous cruelties simply
to erase other ethnicities per se: rather, it was done when
those other ethnicities were perceived to be equal or superior threats
to Serb communities. This is not to excuse what was done, but to
contextualize it. Serbs felt threatened by superior Croat numbers in
the Krajina and Slavonia,
and by superior Bosniak and Croat numbers in Bosnia proper. This was
not an issue within Serbia itself, where, if ethnic minorities were not
necessarily tolerated in the Western, liberal sense of the world,
neither were they dispossessed or systematically slaughtered. Even at
the nadir of the Bosnian atrocities, Muslims within Serbia were living in the Sandzak, Hungarians
were living in the Vojvodina, Montenegrans were living in, well,
Montenegro – and Muslim Albanians were living in Kosovo. (A 2002 map of
ethnicities in Serbia is available here.)
Things went awry in the latter province after the end of the Bosnian war, when the Kosovo Liberation Army
began its guerrilla campaign against Serbian authorities. The
provocation for this campaign lay in the decade-long campaign, under
Milosevic, to curb local autonomy and reassert Serbian cultural
dominance in the heartland of Serb national identity. (The province of
Kosovo contains within it the site of Kosovo Polje,
the “Field of Blackbirds” upon which Serbia lost its independence for
nearly five hundred years to the advancing Turks.) This provocation,
though, was not inherently subject to solely violent resolution, as
evidenced by the existence of “mainstream” Kosovar Albanian political
figures who pursued change through peaceful means. The KLA therefore
pursued a strategy drawing from lessons in Ireland and Palestine,
assassinating Serbs who tolerated Albanians, and Albanians who
tolerated Serbs, and innocents from both groups. The clumsy and
ham-handed Serbian authorities responded as the KLA wished, deploying
regular army units against guerrilla forces, neglecting political
amends, and progressively alienating an already suspicious and
ill-disposed West. By the time of the Račak massacre, the truth no longer mattered: all the West saw was Serbs killing non-Serbs, again, and war was inevitable.
In the two-and-a-half months of war in 1999, Serbian authorities did terrible things
to Kosovar Albanians. The war precipitated the very crisis that the
West imagined, but had not actually come to pass: the “ethnic
cleansing,” via mass expulsions,
of Kosovo of its Muslims. But in the nine years since, Kosovar
Albanians have done terrible things to their Serb neighbors — and it is
no exaggeration to state that a Serb in post-1999 Kosovo is worse off
than an Albanian in pre-1999 Kosovo. To our shame, this situation is a
direct result of our intervention — and has evolved under our watch.
The KLA and its associates in Kosovar politics, in radicalizing the
situation to provoke the 1999 war, thereby made it impossible to return
to a situation of peaceful coexistence. Whereas the intervening West
envisioned — if they envisioned anything at all — a tolerant,
multiethnic Kosovo along the lines of what was sought on Bosnia,
Kosovar Albanians envisioned their own ethnic cleansing, of Serbs from
Kosovo. What the NATO allies waded into was not a rescue of a wronged
party as such, but a party determined to wreak precisely the evils upon
its foe that its foe perpetrated upon it. Under NATO occupation and UN administration,
this goal is met with appalling thoroughness. A brief and far from
comprehensive list of crimes should suffice to illustrate the process
underway:
* In the aftermath of the Serb surrender in June 1999,
the victorious KLA seized the opportunity to drive approximately
200,000 non-Albanians — overwhelmingly Serbs, but also Roma — out of
the province. Human Rights Watch reported
that this flight was motivated largely by concrete threats and the
occasional local massacre, with a reported total of one thousand Serb
men, women and children murdered.
* In February 2001, an IED planted by Albanians destroyed a bus carrying Serbs to family gravesites at the Gračanica monastery.
* In August 2003, Serb boys swimming were machine-gunned from a riverbank.
* In March 2004, a deliberate anti-Serb pogrom claimed dozens of lives, and further ghettoized the remaining Serbs in their northern enclaves.
* Perhaps most distressing from a cultural standpoint
is the deliberate and systemic destruction of Serbian Orthodox Church
parishes, properties, monasteries, and art throughout Kosovo since
1999. Students of the 20th century will recall the Nazi efforts to
comprehensively erase Jewish culture from the Continent, which included
the demolition of synagogues and the use of Jewish headstones as
paving: since then, only the Kosovo Albanian program to exterminate
Serbian culture in Kosovo compares in European history. In the summer
following the Serbian defeat, the KLA demolished the Church of the Holy Virgin at Musutiste and St Mark’s of Korisa Monastery.
Sadly, they did not stop there. In lieu of the long list of churches
and cultural sites destroyed by the Kosovar Albanians since 1999, is it
enough to note the documentation here, here, here, here, and here.
Your tax dollars at work. What
is astonishing about these atrocities, aside from their plain
brutality, is that they are perpetrated by a segment of Kosovo’s
population that enjoys every advantage. Albanians constitute 90% of the
population; they control the politics of the province; they have
foreign sponsorship and foreign armies for protection; they are
definitive victors in the late civil conflict; and they enjoy the
overwhelming bulk of patronage from official sources. The persistence
of organized violence against the Serbs now is not the guerrilla
campaign of 1995-1999, but an actual state persecution of a minority.
Self-pity is a recurring and malevolent feature of Serbian nationalism,
and it is important to not lend credence to it — but we must
nonetheless acknowledge these facts for what they are.
With all this in mind, we return to the baleful reality of the
imminent declaration of Kosovar independence under Albanian rule.
The declaration is happening for several reasons, but the major one is
that the Kosovo Albanians feel they can get away with it with minimal
repercussions. Having tested the limits of their Western sponsors’
tolerance, they found those limits were extensive: the 2004 anti-Serb
pogroms conclusively demonstrated that little if anything could sour
their relationship with the West, and with the United States in
particular. They know that Putin’s resurgent Russia is still unable to
bring meaningful pressure to bear; and they know that a NATO embroiled
in Afghanistan, and a United States mired in Iraq, will take the path
of least resistance. Lurking behind all this is the unstated
possibility that the KLA would be willing to launch a guerrilla
campaign against a NATO unwilling to validate its aspirations. In this
light, when Kosovar Albanian leaders boast of “100 nations” willing to
recognize their new state, they are probably not exaggerating. A world
weary of conflict, and with bigger strategic headaches than the Balkans
— so 1990s, that — is almost certainly willing to sacrifice the Serb
remnant in Kosovo to the predations of their Albanian neighbors.
For all this, the United States should not accede to Kosovo’s independence. The reasons present themselves:
* Kosovo is not politically ready. A
would-be state with a pervasive internal culture of violence and
persecution is a disaster-in-waiting. Imagine, for example, granting
statehood to the Gaza Strip: its political culture would make a mockery
of the very term, and the fiction demanding co-equal status between it
and, say, France would ill-serve all concerned. Until Kosovo can
function as a reasonably inclusive democracy with reasonable guarantees
for its minorities, and have regular, peaceful transfers of
power, it does not merit statehood. The province, for many reasons, is
simply not there yet.
* Kosovo is not culturally ready.
The campaign of brutalization against non-Albanian and non-Muslim
minorities has been addressed at length here. Suffice it to say that
this is not a polity ready for just self-governance; and suffice it to
say that we ought not be a party to cultural erasure.
* Kosovar independence would generate instability elsewhere.
The old Wilsonian idea that a geographically-bounded majority
population deserves its own sovereignty dies hard. In this decade, with
American foreign policy predicated more than ever on quasi-Wilsonian
principles, it is especially formidable. It is also a recipe for
disaster: with the United States engaged in two wars in multiethnic
states, to explicitly affirm this precedent in Kosovo invites more
serious problems and bloodshed elsewhere. With Kosovo independent, what
grounds do we have for dissuading the independence aspirations of the
Kurds, the Pashtuns, the Baluchis, the Assyrians, the Arab Shi’a, et
al.? Furthermore, what prevents Russia from seizing upon this precedent
to cause trouble in the Caucasus and Moldova? (They say they won’t — for now — but why give them the leverage?) Contra
the rhetoric of some neoconservatives, we ought not be in the business
of redrawing borders, nor sponsoring particular ethnic groups for their
own sake.
* Kosovar independence would reverse progress in the Balkans. Memories are short, but in the 1990s, the Balkans were a cauldron of bloodshed and horror. If they are peaceful now, and if Sarajevo has a tourist industry,
there is nothing inherent or irreversible about this. Since the last
Balkan war in 1999, Serbia has modernized, liberalized, and moved
toward the European Union; Bosnia has been, if divided, at least
quiescent; and we’ve not seen Albanian irredentism cause an
international crisis apart from an abortive 2001 insurgency in Macedonia. Kosovo independence threatens all this: the imminent declaration of independence has already damaged Serb-EU relations; the rationale for the existence of the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina fades dramatically if the three parts believe they may simply separate; and Albanian irredentism
receives a massive boost. The history of the Balkans in the past
century has been the history of nations either pursuing irredentist
aims, or reconciling themselves to abandoning those claims. Albania,
with claims against each of its neighbors — Serbia, Montenegro, Greece,
and Macedonia — is also the only Balkan nation with a shot at making
good on significant portions of them. Kosovar independence is thus the
worst of all possible worlds for the Balkans, in reviving one source of
Balkan instability in a resentful Serbia, and with the Albanians
rewarding precisely the sort of irredentist sentiment that has
repeatedly plunged the peninsula into savage war.
* Kosovar independence would further strain the US-Russian relationship. This
relationship is already under sufficient pressure thanks to Vladimir
Putin’s decision to reclaim much of the old Soviet-era paranoia and
tension as Russia’s own. This is, to be sure, mostly Russia’s own doing
— but it defies reason to assume that the United States ought to
therefore aggravate it further. The American relationship with Russia
is self-evidently more important and enduring than the American
relationship with Albania, to say nothing of Kosovar Albanians. The
Russians have warned us repeatedly
of their profound reservations over Kosovar independence: in being
sensitive to their sensitivities, we lose nothing, and stand to gain in
the long run.
So much for what ought to happen: what
will happen? This
is regrettably easy to predict: on Sunday, February 17th, 2008, Kosovo
will declare its independence. Many if not most of the remaining Serbs
will migrate to Serbia proper. Some Serbs will stay and try to force a
partition of the province; this will swiftly degenerate into violence
as the Kosovar Albanian government seeks to extend its writ to the full
territory it now claims. The NATO forces in place will be forced to act
as the gendarmerie of a sovereign state,
or to oppose that
state in its quelling of Serb resistance. Neither are good options.
Within Serbia, the citizenry will ask themselves what exactly
rapprochement with the West has brought them and theirs. Within the
coming few years, the issue of Kosovo’s political union with Albania
will come to the fore, and this will draw in Greece at minimum, and
Turkey and Russia at worst. From benign if cruel stasis, the Balkans
will again remind us why the word is also an adjective.
And we Americans will feel quite blameless about it, no doubt.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2956
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