[PEN-L:4628] Shining Path of the Balkans?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

March 28, 1999

Victims Not Quite Innocent

By CHRIS HEDGES

President Clinton's argument, enticing in its simplicity, packages the
bombing of Yugoslavia's armed forces as a humanitarian mission: It is
meant, he says, to halt a murderous campaign against innocent ethnic
Albanians who make up 90 percent of the 2 million people living in the
Serbian province of Kosovo.

But in trying to bring the Serbs to heel, NATO has unwittingly married
itself to a new partner. It is the Kosovo Liberation Army, an armed group
whose goals include not only independence but the expulsion of Serbs from
the province. A little more than a year ago it was dismissed by a senior
U.S. diplomat, Robert Gelbard, as a "terrorist group" and its insistence on
armed resistance has deepened the crisis and propelled Kosovo into warfare.

In the catalog of horrors that have befallen Yugoslavia, the Kosovo
Liberation Army is one of the lesser plagues. The danger to stability
presented by President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia is far greater than
anything within its power.

But the fact that this group has emerged to speak for Kosovo's Albanians,
and the bombing by NATO of Serbian targets on their behalf, reveals a great
deal about the moral ambiguities confronting outsiders who wade into the
Balkans to halt the killing and ethnic cleansing begun a decade ago by
Milosevic.

The KLA began on the radical fringe of Kosovar Albanian politics,
originally made up of diehard Marxist-Leninists (who were bankrolled in the
old days by the Stalinist dictatorship next door in Albania) as well as by
descendants of the fascist militias raised by the Italians in World War II.

It has no ideology beyond a drive to liberate Kosovo from Serb rule, but
its leaders have long championed the quixotic goal of a "Greater Albania"
reaching into Albania, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro.

Though its atrocities pale next to the rampages of the Serbs, it has shown
little tolerance for its ethnic rivals, carrying out random kidnappings and
executions and burning Serb villages.

Milosevic embarked on his nationalist drive, stoking hatreds between Serbs
and other ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia, in Kosovo in 1987. Yet it
took a decade, with the Serbs running Kosovo like a colonial outpost,
before Kosovar Albanians turned to violence.

Even after Milosevic revoked the province's autonomy in 1989, a moderate
leadership under a self-styled president, Ibrahim Rugova, maintained a
fragile peace. It did so by pretending to exercise autonomy, delivering
some services and forbidding street protests, while the Serbian government
pretended to have full control.

The Kosovo Liberation Army, whose very existence was in dispute among U.S.
diplomats until the uprising last year, consisted of a few ragtag bands
that walked around remote villages in motley uniforms and shot the odd
police officer.

Then, a year ago, Milosevic set out to eradicate the armed bands, and his
security forces surrounded Prekaz, a town where Adam and Hamza Jashari,
founding members of the KLA, were holed up with dozens of armed supporters.

Double-barreled 20-mm anti-aircraft guns and .50-caliber machine guns
pounded the stucco and brick homes for three days. More than 50 people were
killed, nearly half of them women and children.

The authorities in Belgrade naively assumed they had wiped out the
resistance group. In fact, the raid triggered a province-wide rebellion.
Suddenly, it seemed, everyone in Kosovo was a charter member of the KLA.
Most of Rugova's local officials, tired of international indifference to
Serb repression and abuse, became village commanders. His party
disintegrated.

Commanders seemed to sprout like mushrooms and nominal leaders had no
control over forces acting in the name of the guerrilla group in the next
village. The chaos was aggravated by a flood of weapons that poured over
the border from northern Albania, where armories had been looted after an
economic meltdown in 1997.

Volunteers from among the 600,000 ethnic Albanians who send home money from
abroad left their menial jobs as dishwashers and construction workers in
Germany and Switzerland and flocked to northern Albania. They were handed
uniforms and weapons and sent over the mountains to join the fight.

There are now an estimated 30,000 automatic weapons in the hands of the
force of several thousand fighters, plus anti-tank weapons and light
mortars. But while some special fighting units have been set up, there
remains no central command. The Kosovo Liberation Army is a state of mind,
not a tight organization.

In fact, this is not simply a rebellion by Albanians against Serbs, but by
a new generation of Kosovar Albanians against the intellectuals and urban
elite in Pristina. Kosovo has the highest birth rate in Europe, and 70
percent of the population is under 30. Couple this with the 70 percent
unemployment rate and the result is a vast pool of disenchanted youth from
which the guerrilla army can recruit.

These fighters, by and large, differ from their elders in that they do not
speak Serbo-Croatian, have no loyalties to the Serbian state and have
contact with Serbs only at checkpoints or jails.

Last winter, when international negotiators sought a peace agreement
between Milosevic's government and the Kosovar Albanians, they turned to
the Kosovo Liberation Army, hoping to blunt its drive for independence.

Eventually it signed on to the terms, which include a three-year period for
Kosovo to be a NATO protectorate. But it has not given up its central goal
of eventual independence -- a goal the Clinton administration has
steadfastly said it does not agree with.

And while the group accepted a phased plan to disarm once NATO forces can
be deployed to safeguard a truce, it is unlikely that after three years of
preparation for war, many weapons would be turned over.

One reason the international community had to turn to the Kosovo Liberation
Army was that by the time the world woke up to the conflict in Kosovo,
there was no political center left.

So U.S. officials have been left trying to portray the Albanians as
innocents, when in fact their leaders are nationalists who have retreated
very little from positions once described as extreme. In the long history
of Balkan nationalist movements, pressure has sometimes nudged such
militants from more extreme tactics, but it has rarely if ever extinguished
their goals of building nationalist states.

So, as happened in Croatia and Bosnia before, the West now has no choice
but to make common cause with one such nationalist group to oppose another
nationalist group, Milosevic's government, that is clearly more destructive.

President Clinton has argued that at least the Kosovo Liberation Army has
put its signature on the draft truce accords, something Milosevic has
refused to do, and that this merits protecting the Albanian side. He has
also argued that it is Milosevic whose strategy ignited and has fed the
wars of hatred that have consumed the Balkans now for nearly 10 years,
producing slaughter that the world cannot tolerate.

Those are all powerful arguments. Still, they leave unanswered the question
of how tricky it may be to work with the Kosovo Liberation Army to build
peace after the bombing stops. In fact, the situation recalls another
maneuver by Washington four years ago, the last time it decided to bring
Milosevic to heel.

Then the fighting was in Bosnia with Serb forces shelling cities like
Sarajevo and executing some 7,000 Muslims in the fields around Srebrenica.
Before Milosevic agreed to negotiate, the West did two things: It bombed
the Bosnian Serb forces for 20 days, crippling its military machine, and it
applauded as President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, a rabid nationalist whose
fondness for ethnic cleansing is outdone only by Milosevic's, launched a
pitiless military campaign that drove some 200,000 Serbs out of Croatia
and, in coalition with Muslim forces, tens of thousands more out of central
Bosnia.

Today, some of Tudjman's generals stand accused of war crimes in these
campaigns. But at the time, the West looked the other way because the
battlefield victories forced Milosevic to sue for peace.

Today in Kosovo, the West is gambling that by allying with the Kosovo
Liberation Army and bombing Milosevic's forces it will avert, or at least
limit, a slaughter of Kosovo's Albanian civilians.

How to deal with the Kosovo Liberation Army after all this is over remains
unanswered. But if past forays into the Balkans are any guide, the United
States could find itself struggling to contain new nationalist groups that
have no more interest in achieving reconciliation than the butchers who
preceded them.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)