Western Firmness Needed to Head Off Chaos in Kosovo

By Peter Lippman

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Ibrahim Rugova, president of the parallel government of Kosovo, met in May to discuss solutions to the conflict in Kosovo. This was the first such meeting since Milosevic, then president of Serbia, stripped Kosovo of its autonomy in 1989. The seeming breakthrough quickly broke down, however, as Serbian troops increased the level of violence against Albanian civilians in Kosovo. In the wake of the destruction of the western Kosovo town of Decani, where at least 50 people were killed and over 65,000 made refugees, Albanian representatives refused to participate in further negotiations.

After 1989, the position of the predominantly Albanian population of the autonomous province of Kosovo quickly deteriorated. In developments familiar to observers of Palestine, Albanians were expelled from their public schools and hospitals. Albanian political and enforcement structures were dissolved. Directors and workers were fired from their jobs, and repression and deprivation quickly replaced the previous order.

The Albanians responded to what essentially had become a Serbian occupation of their province by establishing parallel educational and medical systems and a shadow government. This government’s strategy for the following eight years was to advocate a passive form of nonviolent resistance. President Rugova achieved broad popularity and support for his policies. However, in the face of increasing hunger and brutality, especially in the countryside, frustration led to a sporadic armed response in the last couple of years.

Between passive nonviolent resistance and guerrilla actions, the Albanians had no middle strategy until the fall of 1997, when students began to lead the first protest demonstrations in seven years. Meanwhile, both the international press and the Yugoslav government began to sensationalize the existence of a “Kosovo Liberation Army,” described as “funded by drug dealers” and supplied over the Albanian border. What probably began as groupings of villagers determined to defend their homesteads was mythologized into an army.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), lacking a unified command or policy, became the focus of a Yugoslav government propaganda campaign that equated Albanians with terrorists. The late-February massacre in the Drenica region, where police armed with mortars, armored vehicles and helicopters surrounded over 20 villages and wiped out whole extended families, marked the beginning of a heightened level of the conflict. Since then the Serbian attacks have spread throughout Kosovo, with particular ferocity in the western area, along the border with Albania.

When I visited Kosovo in March, soon after the beginning of the Drenica atrocities, I learned that sentiment for a nonviolent solution was in fact widespread. The dramatic response in the countryside was balanced by a desire in the cities to avoid war. The fighting attracted journalists, while articles about the nonviolent tendency did not sell newspapers. However, the peaceful demonstrations against the school closures were transformed into demonstrations against the occupation and the violence, and have continued almost daily.

But if the existence of the Kosovo Liberation Army was once questionable, Milosevic’s atrocities have provided the best possible recruitment propaganda. In Drenica, the Serbian police used schoolchildren as a shield to advance across a fighting ground. In Prizren they forced demonstrators to eat parts of their protest signs. There have been several incidents where bystanders were shot and then photographed after weapons were placed near their bodies. Villages have been attacked by helicopters at midnight, and Albanians are now being killed daily.

There have been at least 200 Albanians killed this spring, and around 40,000 have been displaced. Such a campaign of violence against the entire Albanian population cannot help but propel people into the ranks of the KLA.

Meanwhile, the international reaction strongly evokes memories of missed opportunities in nearby Bosnia. There, the world stood by as over 200,000 Bosnians died, over two million became refugees, and the once multi-cultural republic was de facto partitioned. Last December, the Dayton Peace Implementation Council held one of its periodic conferences at Bonn to monitor attempts to clean up after those missed opportunities. The Serbian participants walked out when the subject of Kosovo was brought up, claiming that it was a “domestic issue.” One of the delegates stated, “There is no human rights problem in Kosovo. Human rights are observed at a European level of standards. A small minority of Albanians refuse to exercise those rights.”

In the face of such Orwellian declarations, international diplomats uttered “expressions of concern” and delivered “strongly worded statements.” They took a position against independence for Kosovo, and carried out lowest-common-denominator policies reminiscent, again, of Bosnia, such as the establishment of an arms embargo against Serbia, a country rich in weapons if nothing else.

Although Milosevic so far has gotten away with a violent crackdown on Kosovo, he may have bitten off more than he can chew. It is not necessarily true that Milosevic cares as much about Kosovo, despite Serbian rhetoric about the “cradle of the medieval Serbian empire,” as he does about his own power.

He is adept at last-minute maneuvers and at manipulation of international diplomats.

His position as a signer of the Dayton agreement is a good example of this. By signing this document, he converted himself, with the cooperation of Western negotiators, from pariah to statesman, on whom implementation of the document supposedly depended. His new position compelled international representatives to pretend that he held the key to the maintenance of peace in Bosnia. In fact the continuing existence in power of this demagogue is one of the keys to continuing instability in the entire region.

Milosevic thrives when there is instability. He began his career as a communist functionary and became a nationalist when it offered him a path to power. The wisest thing that the international community could do is to indict the man; there is no shortage of legal grounds. But that would require relinquishing the pretense of his usefulness.

Currently developments are heading in the opposite direction. On practically the same day that Milosevic spoke with Rugova, the Serbian police imposed an import blockade on Kosovo, and the shelves in food stores have been empty since late May.

Control of the situation is probably by now out of the hands of both the Serbian and Kosovar presidents. There is an increasing portion of the Kosovo population that has given up on nonviolent resistance. Given that Rugova consented to speak to Milosevic without international participation, he may soon find himself in an ineffectual position, negotiating from a position of no leverage and weakened domestic support. The current equation does not signal a promising outcome for Kosovo.

Peter Lippman is a frequent visitor to Kosovo.