Albright Defends Balkan Situation

Irked by complaints that the West is losing the peace after winning its war against the Yugoslav regime, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright launched a vigorous defense Tuesday, insisting that conditions are improving in Kosovo province and in other parts of the Balkans.

In a speech to the Bohemia Foundation in Prague, Albright said the United States and its allies should not be faulted for their failure to achieve overnight ethnic harmony in a region of long-held hatreds.

“After all that has happened, we do not expect the rival communities in Kosovo to immediately join hands and start singing folk songs,” Albright said. “We do insist that they stop killing each other.”

Last spring’s NATO war against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic pushed his forces from the separatist province, where they had waged a terror campaign against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority. But Albright acknowledged Tuesday that ethnic killing continues, especially in the divided Kosovo city of Kosovska Mitrovica.

“There are extremists on both sides,” she said. “Those in the ethnic Albanian community who perpetrate crimes against Serbs and other minorities deserve strong condemnation and are doing a profound disservice to the aspirations of their people.”

But elsewhere in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the dominant republic of the rump Yugoslavia, and in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, she said, things are improving.

“We should not allow the problems of one flash point to cause us to lose sight of progress,” she said. “The truth is that [the NATO-led peacekeeping force] has seen a steady decline in violence and crime in Kosovo. A joint administrative council has been established. The [ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army] has met its commitment to demobilize. Planning for municipal elections is underway.”

While reiterating the Clinton administration’s familiar condemnation of Milosevic as the cause of most of the region’s troubles, Albright asserted that the rest of the former Yugoslav federation is making serious progress toward a democratic future.

“To turn an old phrase right side up, lights are going on all over the Balkans,” Albright said.

“Slovenia is free,” she said. “Macedonia recently experienced a democratic transfer of power. Bosnia has held fair, competitive elections at every level. Montenegro has democratic leadership. And last month’s elections in Croatia marked a national U-turn away from extremism and toward inter-ethnic tolerance and integration with the West.”

Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia broke away from the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s. Montenegro remains in Yugoslavia but defied Milosevic during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombing campaign.

Albright’s speech marked the final stage of her three-day tour of the Czech Republic, where she was born.

Today, she flies to Bosnia, where aides say she will underline her message that NATO intervention has prevented greater disasters throughout the region. In an event heavy with symbolism, she plans a stop in Brcko, a town so bitterly contested that its status was left unresolved in the 1995 Bosnian peace accords.

Albright boasted that predictions that Brcko would eventually derail the peace agreements were wrong. Of her planned stop in the city, she said, “I will meet with Serbs, Croats and Muslims and inaugurate its new governing statute.”

In a meeting with Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kavan on Tuesday, Albright called on the Czech Republic to exploit its remaining ties with the Milosevic regime to urge him to permit free and fair elections.

Kavan told a joint news conference with Albright that his government is one of the few that can talk to all sides in Kosovo.