Kosovo Will Never Be One With Serbia

In the name of human rights, all reason is easily lost. The intensive bombing of Yugoslavia and the foreign occupation of one of that nation’s provinces is now widely acclaimed as an act of uncomplicated decency. As British-led Nepalese Gurkhas join German commandos to put Albanian Yugoslavs under the rule of a Brazilian agent of the U.N., one wonders if those creating the new world order are not drunk on their own power.

The media are so slavish to official propaganda that it’s no longer a stretch to compare the entrance of NATO “peacekeepers” into Kosovo with the Allies’ liberation of Europe in World War II. Or to treat a dangerously flawed peace agreement, after 78 days of bombing that leveled the Yugoslav economic infrastructure and uprooted a million people, as a victory of good over evil.

There was no such victory because terms of the peace most likely could have been obtained by reasonable diplomatic negotiation without the bombing. At Rambouillet, NATO offered Slobodan Milosevic a deal they knew he couldn’t accept and still remain in power. In the end, NATO made concessions on the crucial points to which Milosevic had objected at Rambouillet last February.

NATO gave up the right to deploy forces beyond Kosovo throughout Yugoslavia, and the United Nations, not NATO, is to be in charge, paving the way for a major Russian political as well as military role. Most important, Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo will not be challenged by a referendum on independence, as specified in the Rambouillet accord.

But it’s too late for words. The bombing by the “peacekeepers” was not some minor footnote but rather an obliterating event, crude and destructive like the blockbuster bombs themselves that forever shattered the remaining slim possibility of a peaceful multiethnic Yugoslavia. Of course Milosevic bears the prime responsibility for fanning the fires of ethnic discontent in the Balkans. But it was the NATO bombing that forced the departure of the neutral observers and gave him his excuse for a brutal attempt to keep Kosovo part of Yugoslavia.

The NATO bombing and Milosevic’s attacks on the Albanian Kosovars that followed have fatally poisoned the well, turning the area into an arena for endless guerrilla war. Even now, the Kosovo Liberation Army is brazenly seizing key economic assets, like the coal mine that supplies Serbia with power, while frightening remaining Serbs into flight. NATO has claimed to be against the further balkanization of the Balkans, but its actions have made it impossible for Kosovo to ever be one with Serbia again.

The depth of bitterness on all sides is such that even the faintest semblance of democracy in Kosovo will lead to a vote for independence. But even without an election, our recently acquired allies--the KLA--will do whatever it takes to win independence and eventually make good on uniting it with a Greater Albania.

That goal has an unsavory past. Imagine the shock of a Serb who fought against Hitler reading this account in the Los Angeles Times of German troops entering Kosovo: “Still, it seemed the Germans could do no wrong in the eyes of ethnic Albanians, many of whom not only welcomed them as a part of the NATO force but remembered them fondly from World War II. While Hitler razed much of Europe and slaughtered Jews, he allowed Kosovo to unite with Albania, briefly creating the Greater Albania that many of them continue to dream of.” The KLA is the inheritor of the dreams of a Greater Albania and has been waging a guerrilla war toward that end. The Serbs are the protectors of their dream of the historic Serbia and have been brutalizing the Albanian population with a ferocity that rivals the French in Algeria, the British in India and the U.S. in Vietnam.

Why are we Americans so shocked? Don’t we have our own history of “ethnic cleansing,” first of the Native American population and later in Vietnam, when U.S. troops herded loyal, mostly Catholic villagers into so-called “strategic hamlets” for safety while turning the mostly Buddhist countryside of South Vietnam into a saturation bombing zone?

What now? Will we further foster Serb nationalism by pouring billions to rebuild Kosovo while leaving bombed out Yugoslavia a festering economic mess? As to that Greater Albania goal of our KLA partners, is the model Afghanistan, another place we helped liberate before walking away? Or will we and our NATO allies engage in endless skirmishing with an emboldened KLA on one side and Serb partisans on the other fighting endlessly over their separate but equally fervent obsessions with national patrimony?