Strife in Kosovo Reverberates Far Beyond the Province’s Borders

Here in the southern Balkans, an ethnic crazy quilt tearing at the seams, it’s been an awful month to be an Albanian.

First came the police crackdown that left at least 80 ethnic Albanians dead in Serbia’s separatist-minded Kosovo province. Then fear spread south to neighboring Macedonia that its own restive Albanian minority would be drawn into the fray.

In Albania itself, a people healing the wounds of their own anarchic civil strife of a year ago have stood by, pained and helpless, knowing there’s little they can do to defend their brethren against Slavic majorities in either country should push come to shove.

And now hundreds of Albanians are being rounded up by Greek police fighting a crime wave that the police blame on armed illegal immigrants. A string of murders and assaults has set off the panic buying of alarm systems, steel doors, hunting rifles and attack dogs in this country. At least one Greek town has formed a vigilante squad.

“I don’t want any more Albanians coming here,” said Nikos Mavrakis, an Athens taxi driver whose colleagues keep getting robbed at gunpoint. “Otherwise, in another 20, 30 years they’ll create a minority problem just like in Kosovo.”

As the United States and its allies struggle to defuse the Kosovo conflict, the countries of the southern Balkans are entangled in problems posed by an Albanian diaspora that feels ignored by the West. Voices across the region warn that the problems hold the seeds of new Balkan unrest even more contagious than Bosnia-Herzegovina’s.

“The Bosnian crisis was clearly confined within the former Yugoslavia, while the Kosovo crisis involves, by its nature, all neighboring countries,” political commentator Stavros Lygeros wrote in the Athens newspaper Kathimerini.

The Yugoslav federation, which once comprised six republics, split apart in 1991 when Slovenia, Croatia and then Bosnia declared independence, triggering a northern Balkan war that raged through 1995.

Diaspora Dreams of a Greater Albania

Kosovo, which was stripped of its autonomous status by Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 1989, has a population that is 90% Albanian. It is surrounded on three sides by sympathetic diaspora communities in Macedonia, Albania proper and the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro. This corner of the Balkans, including Greece, is home to about 7 million Albanians.

Many of them dream of reviving the Greater Albania that existed in the Ottoman Empire until the Ottomans’ defeat early this century. Albanians then saw their homeland carved up by a victorious alliance that included Serbia, Montenegro and Greece.

During the Yugoslav federation’s post-Cold War breakup, Albanians pressed to regather their lands but were rebuffed. Kosovo, calm at the time, was excluded as an issue in the U.S.-sponsored peace talks that ended the northern Balkan war.

“From a historical viewpoint, the situation in Kosovo is one of the injustices imposed on the Albanian nation at the beginning of the century and which, at the end of it, remains unresolved,” Albanian Prime Minister Fatos Nano said during a recent visit to Athens.

On Wednesday, the Albanian Embassy here lashed out at the Greek mass media, accusing it of cultivating racist feelings by attributing the rise in crime rates to Albanian immigrants.

“This creates an unrealistic opinion about Albanians in general that sometimes leads to racist, extremist and xenophobic reactions toward them,” an embassy statement said.

‘Nobody Is Prepared Yet for a Showdown’

Since the crackdown early this month in Kosovo, officials from the Balkans and beyond have been crisscrossing the region trying to make sure the fighting does not spread. So far it hasn’t.

“There are people all over the Balkans who are willing to use violence to achieve any [purpose], but part of the calculation is that nobody is prepared yet for a showdown,” a Western diplomat in Athens said. “There’s a strong current of pessimism about Kosovo, but not necessarily alarm.”

Still, he added, “everyone knows that the security situation is inherently unstable and could change in no time flat.”

The nightmare scenario Balkan leaders are struggling to avoid goes like this:

Kosovo erupts again. As fighting drags on, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians flee to northwest Macedonia and to Albania, stirring ethnic brethren there to go help stop the Serbs. The surge of refugees upsets a fragile ethnic peace in Macedonia; elements of the fledgling Kosovo Liberation Army stage attacks on Macedonia’s Slavic leadership, which then allies with Serbia.

Macedonia plunges into ethnic warfare, according to the scenario, and breaks in two. Refugees move south into Greece. Alarmed by the prospect of more crime, Greece sends troops to the Macedonian border and bloodshed erupts. Turkey, which tends to counter Greece’s every move in the Balkans, sides with the Albanians, setting up a conflict between the two North Atlantic Treaty Organization members.

What makes this scenario somewhat plausible, diplomats say, is Macedonia’s fragility as a multiethnic state and the huge quantity of assault rifles--at least 100,000, by some estimates--looted from Albania’s arsenals during its own civil upheaval a year ago.

AK-47 rifles have been sold for less than $35 at street markets in Macedonia, and last year police seized 3,000 of them from Albanians trying to enter the country, according to Macedonian press reports. Many of the looted weapons ended up in the hands of Kosovo’s guerrillas.

Ethnic Tensions Flare in Macedonia

Albanians, who make up at least 25% of Macedonia’s population, want autonomy for their region and a fairer share of government jobs. Tensions rose in July when the mayor of the town of Gostivar defied the law and hoisted an Albanian flag over City Hall; police tore it down, three Albanians died in the ensuing riot, and the mayor was sentenced to seven years in prison. Since then, two police stations have been bombed.

“We are a small country with little economic and military power, and we can do little to maintain peace if logic does not prevail over nationalist aspirations for a Greater Albania,” said Macedonian government spokesman Zoran Ivanov.

Despite nervousness over Kosovo, however, no refugees have poured into Macedonia or Albania. And although Albanians in both countries took to the streets by the thousands to demonstrate moral support for Kosovo, no one is openly advocating armed assistance.

“The main question Albanians are asking themselves is, ‘Where am I going to find a good job and money?’ ” said Remzi Lani, director of the Albanian Media Institute in Tirana, Albania’s capital. “Nobody wants to get mixed up in Kosovo.”

Even Sali Berisha, the Albanian president who was voted out of office after last year’s unrest, has refrained from backing Kosovo’s demand for independence--even though he speaks of “one Albanian nation” and criticizes his successor, Rexhep Mejdani, for not doing enough to help the residents of Kosovo.

Addressing Problems With Diplomacy

Another encouraging sign is a flurry of diplomatic activity far more active than in the early days of the Bosnian war. Macedonia and Albania have lined up with the United States and its allies in the six-nation Contact Group in backing autonomy, not independence, for Kosovo and condemning violence on both sides.

In return, NATO has promised Albania’s beleaguered army some vehicles for patrolling the border with Kosovo, and the United Nations is moving to extend the mandate of 700 U.N. troops from the United States and Scandinavia who watch the mountainous frontier in Macedonia near the border with Kosovo.

Greece has taken a balanced position in the conflict, hoping to emerge as the commercial powerhouse in a pacified Balkan region. “Our long-term strategy is for all these countries to be integrated in one big family,” Deputy Foreign Minister Yannos Kranidiotis said.

But Greece’s credibility as a would-be mediator is still damaged by its support for Milosevic, now Yugoslavia’s president, during the Bosnian war and the trade blockade Athens imposed on Macedonia in a bitter feud over the former Yugoslav republic’s name--a dispute partially settled less than three years ago.

“The most credible player in the region is still the United States,” said Thanos Veremis, president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, an Athens think tank. “The Americans hold all the cards and the sanctions, and that, in the end, is what will make a difference for the Serbs and decide the Albanians’ fate.”