Kosovo a Microcosm of ‘Wars of Identity’

From a crammed bookshelf in his grim and tiny high-rise apartment, ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova pulled down a well-read copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

“This book,” he pronounced, “is what our struggle is all about.

“One of the great moments in my life was finding more than a hundred words of Albanian origin in ‘Ulysses,’ ” Rugova told a visitor to his home in Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, long before North Atlantic Treaty Organization warplanes were dispatched to the Balkans. “Our struggle is to preserve the culture that introduced those words to the world.”

The current crisis, which has triggered round-the-clock allied airstrikes and a brutal Serbian campaign to rid Kosovo of ethnic Albanians like Rugova, has its roots in something far more fundamental than the politics of power or control of land.

Much like the traces of Albania that Rugova discovered in “Ulysses,” the Kosovo crisis is about the very essence of cultural identity--the words and ways and symbols and myths that make a people unique. In that respect, Kosovo is a microcosm of many of the world’s unresolved conflicts, from tiny Chechnya to giant Sudan, from exotic Kashmir to chaotic Congo, according to U.S. analysts. And it is also a harbinger of what lies ahead.

In contrast to the apocalyptic dangers of the Cold War, most battles of today and tomorrow are within states--Liberia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Angola, to name a few--rather than between them. Even the Ethiopia-Eritrea dispute represents a holdover from the pre-1993 period when they were one nation. Most conflicts pit different ethnic or religious groups against each other rather than countries.

“Kosovo is just one of a whole pattern of internal wars going on,” said Pauline Baker, president of the Fund for Peace in Washington. “What we’re seeing now in many places is an attempt to preserve cultural identity through political means. And when those political means are unavailable, it degenerates into violence.”

The ethnic problems of the late 1900s are not, however, simply the latest explosions of age-old differences. They are very much products of contemporary and changing times, experts say.

In a world moving fitfully toward democracy, a handful of leaders have invoked nationalist passions as a last-ditch means of mobilizing support and retaining the reins of autocratic power. There is perhaps no better example than Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“There’s raw material for ethnic conflict in many countries, but there’s nothing inevitable about them today. They have to be deliberately provoked,” said Alan Kassof, chairman of the Project on Ethnic Relations at Princeton University.

“Conflicts that could have been resolved without violence became violent due to the way leaders radicalized relations among groups,” Kassof said. “With better leadership, every contemporary case of ethnic conflict could have been prevented. Despite some tensions, Macedonia has been relatively successful in dealing with its Albanians. They’re participants in government.”

In the case of Kosovo, Milosevic was the only leader in Europe who decided to opt for nationalism rather than democracy in the late 1980s as the answer to the political crises that swept socialist Eastern Europe, according to Ivo Daalder, a Balkans expert with the Brookings Institution and a former staffer on the National Security Council.

“All the others decided Western systems were better models and means to transition. The fundamental cause of this conflict was Milosevic’s use of nationalism to retain power in a world rapidly disintegrating around him,” Daalder said. “And the way you generate nationalism is to be exclusionary--to say the Serbs are better than Albanians, and then to deny the Albanians their identity.”

At the outset, the majority of Kosovars weren’t seeking anything more than what they had--autonomy. From Serbia’s suspension of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989 through early 1998, Rugova and other ethnic Albanian leaders were willing to work out a political compromise with Yugoslavia.

Throughout that period, the Kosovo Albanians’ nonviolent resistance centered on building a separate society--their own schools, health system, parliament and presidency. But Serbian repression eventually spawned the more radical Kosovo Liberation Army, the first armed counterattacks in early 1998 and, finally, the Serbian crackdown that has escalated in waves ever since.

“These wars of identity are rooted in history but ignited by bad leadership,” Baker said. “Milosevic is not a real Serb nationalist. He abandoned Bosnia when it suited his purposes. He’s an opportunist, one of the new ethnic dictators who manipulates public feelings to serve his own ends.”

To varying degrees, the current roster of “ethnic dictators” includes Laurent Kabila in Congo, Cambodia’s Hun Sen, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and President Charles Taylor of Liberia.

Contributing to the new ethnic tensions are demographics--when the birthrate of one group is greater than another’s and changes the population balance, as in the case of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo--and the unprecedented magnitude and speed of human migrations as the 20th century draws to a close.

“The numbers of people moving and brushing up against each other as never before triggers xenophobia and defensive responses,” Kassof said.

Another key factor in contemporary ethnic tensions is the emergence of a common global culture.

Rugova--the wiry, long-haired former literary critic who last year won an underground election for Kosovo’s presidency that Serbs do not recognize--took a visitor to the room shared by his two sons. The walls were decorated with magazine cutouts of Roger Rabbit, Madonna, Rambo, Michael Jackson and a scantily clad group dancing the lambada.

“I don’t feel threatened by this,” he said with a chuckle. “I accept that we’re part of the world too. But language, culture and religious traditions have been the three pillars of every nation in Europe since the French Revolution. The Albanians, being a small people, want to preserve the traditions they have too. I don’t want the next generation to forget its rich roots.”

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World’s Ethnic Crises

The Kosovo crisis is not the only ethnic conflict that has created waves of refugees and claimed large numbers of victims over the past year.

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Country Uprooted Killed AFGHANISTAN 6.2 million 105,000 ALGERIA *105,000+ 80,000-100,000 COLOMBIA 1 million+ 40,000-250,000 INDIA/KASHMIR 213,000 30,000-50,000 IRAQ 1.5 million+ 100,000-250,000 KOSOVO **459,000 2,000 MYANMAR 1 million+ 130,000-500,000 RWANDA 3.5 million+ 500,000-800,000 SIERRA LEONE 1.45 million 15,000-20,000 SRI LANKA 900,000+ 55,000-70,000 SUDAN 4.3 million+ 1.5 million

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* Algeria: Refugees only; no estimate of those displaced internally.

** Kosovo: Does not include refugees and displaced persons since the beginning of Operation Allied Force.

Sources: The Carter Center; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; State of the World Conflict Report, 1999; U.S. State Department; Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.