Ashdown Predicts New Balkan War

["Owen Jones" <owen.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Here is a piece by Paddy Ashdown the Guardian. For those who quite
understandably have no idea who he is, he is the ex-leader of the little
British third party, the 'Liberal Democrats'. They're just like New Labour
except they're in denial that they are. They know they'll never get elected
so they snuggle in with Blair to get their hopelessly irrelevant and boring
policies implemented.

 Well, Ashdown has a rather annoying habit of screaming for the West to bomb
those "evil Serbs" once in a while, and was one of the hawks in the Kosovo
War, screaming for a ground invasion by the middle of next week. But this
article is interesting. Montenegro is on the brink of civil war - this won't
be a war a la Bosnia or Kosovo; this won't be forced relocation based on
ethnicity; this will be old-fashion, real civil war a la bloodbath. Whose to
blame? The West are, by pressuring it to declare independence from the
Federation with usual imperialist blackmail. If Montenegro descends into
civil war, you can except Serbia, Macedonia - hey, the whole region - to go
up in smoke.

 Just thought I'd cheer people up. By the way, the Guardian reported a few
days ago that they've only found evidence for a few hundred Kosovar
Albanians being killed during the bombing...as opposed to the 100,000 they
were going on about during the war.

----
The next domino is about to go

Within weeks we may be plunged into yet another Balkan crisis

Kosovo: special report

Paddy Ashdown  Friday October 22, 1999

In this century there have been four Balkan wars, two in the first years and
two in the last. And there have been two great wars. In the first, the
Balkans were a cause and in the last they were a battlefield. Surely, enough
is enough?

Most of Europe seem to think so. But they are about to be rudely
re-awakened. History might say we won the Kosovo war half by accident. We
are about to lose the ensuing peace by carelessness.

The Dayton peace agreement, which ended the Bosnian war, excluded Kosovo and
we paid the price for leaving Milosevic with unfinished business to exploit.
At the end of the Kosovo conflict, we have done the same with Montenegro.

The republic, still formally governed from Belgrade, is descending into
chaos. Its economy, now moving into hyperinflation, is in imminent danger of
collapse, stimulated by Belgrade (as one Montenegrin recently put it,
Milosevic is achieving by economic means what he achieved by ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo). The country slips daily deeper into the grips of the
mafia and smuggling fraternity which use it as a base.

Meanwhile, the tensions between the Montenegrin government and the large
numbers of Belgrade troops stationed in the country grow worse. If Belgrade
needs a pretext for military action in Montenegro, there are plenty.

The west gave, in effect, Montenegro's President Milo Djukanovic a promise
of military support if Belgrade threatens. Now war is on a hair trigger in
Montenegro and many believe it can only be a matter of weeks before we are
plunged into another Balkan crisis. As usual in the region, acting early
will make it easier in the long run and waiting will make it harder.

There are three things the west (it ought to be Europe) could do. The first
is stabilise the currency. This could be done the conventional way with
currency boards and issued notes etc. But that would be expensive and carry
severe sovereignty. Or it could be done by getting Djukanovic's agreement to
allow the Euro Deutschmark, specially created for Kosovo, to be established,
de facto, as Montenegro's currency and, after a due date, re-enforcing this
by paying government employees in the currency.

The second is to take action which, in effect, takes over Montenegro's
customs and excise. Smuggling is the source of the country's corruption and
is beginning to become a major domestic problem for nearby Italy. We cannot
counter Milosevic's attempts to destabilise Montenegro without putting a
stop to it.

And lastly, we had better make clear how we are going to deliver this, not
least so that Milosevic doesn't miscalculate again.

Preventing another war in Montenegro is, however, only half our problem in
the Balkans. The other, even more intractable problem is winning the peace
we have created after Bosnia and Kosovo. Here the portents are, if anything,
even worse. In the Balkans the race is between integration with Europe and
disintegration back to chaos. And the forces of disintegration are winning.

This is not a plea for more money (though that may be needed). It is a plea
for more coordination. We are putting very considerable resources into
Balkan reconstruction. But these are being managed by an increasingly
confusing plethora of organisations, characterised by duplication, and
overlapping competencies, with little effective coordination between them
and no common vision.

The end of the war was marked by the proliferation of useless organisations
and an increase in bi-lateral schemes, often run to a national agenda, where
our approach should be multi-national, Europe-led and closely coordinated. A
recent study has shown that, of the huge sums now being put into the region,
less than 50% reaches those for whom it is intended. Some 30% goes on
international organisations' administrative costs and 20% on corruption.

Large scale infrastructural projects are taking priority over projects to
enhance the human capital of the area and those designed to strengthen the
rule of law, encourage the growth of civil society and create the best
conditions for an export-led free-market-based economy.

The problems of the Balkans are complex, multifaceted and interconnected. To
deal with these in such a piecemeal fashion is folly. To seek to do so in a
region whose history has been about fissiparousness, conflict and
conspiracy, is madness.

What is needed is a single over-arching (it will have to be EU) body to
coordinate what the various agencies are doing, some clear political backing
and the structures to make it all happen.

Otherwise we will be faced with a scandal about the wasting of funds, or
outrage at the discovery that we have created a collection of dependent
states in the Balkans, or a spiral into criminality with an eventual return
to violence; or, more likely, all of these.

? Paddy Ashdown is MP for Yeovil and the former leader of the Liberal
Democrats