Kosovo

...It was there, in the late nineteenth century, that modern Albanian nationalism was born...

...Through its on-again, off-again threats to use force—especially during the Ramboulliet negotiations on Kosovo earlier this year—Washington has destroyed its credibility...

...Nevertheless, Tito's communism produced enormous progress in literacy and development for Kosovo...

...They remain in power by insisting on the presence of external and internal threats...

...But the United States and NATO negotiated only with the KLA and with the Milosevic regime—neither of which has strong credentials to speak for most citizens on the ground in Kosovo...

...The United States was the architect of the Dayton agreement, which ended a terrible war in Bosnia with a miserable peace...

...These Serbs proudly claim that they themselves are civilized and European and that their Muslim enemies are not...

...Kosovo must be independent of Serbia and Belgrade, whether it is called a republic or not...

...This means that those Albanian forces—like the former communist leader Mahmut Bakali—who are pushing for such a solution should be strengthened...

...And to make matters worse, NATO played its hand awkwardly...

...In this winter's Ramboulliet peace negotiations (whose final resolution is still uncertain as Dissent goes to press), the United States has maintained the same pattern of empty threats...

...The Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia did not want to become minorities in the new national states...

...Serbia, and even Croatia and Bosnia, will either be democratized radically by democratic populist forces or plunged further into nationalist chaos...

...Even Vesna Pesic's Civic Alliance, the urban middle-class party most favored by do-good foundations and Western embassies, departs from its otherwise fine record of fighting for human rights and democracy by insisting that Kosovo must stay within both Yugoslavia and Serbia...

...The 1995 Dayton settlement contained provisions on the region, which provided for two thousand armed "observers," in a no way a substitute for a robust deployment of troops...

...The Albanians bitterly resisted integration into Yugoslavia and were subjugated by military force after both world wars...

...policy makers than English-speaking, welldressed, deodorant-using liberals who are devoted uncritically to privatization and the free market...

...This left the present rump Yugoslavia, composed of the Republic of Serbia with the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, now stripped of their autonomy by Belgrade, and the Republic of Montenegro...

...this is a game he understands all too well...

...30 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...

...They have been less attractive to U.S...

...Of course they have one problem— they can't attract any substantial electoral support...

...The successor states that emerged, with the possible exception of Slovenia, are poorer and less independent than authoritarian Tito's Yugoslavia had been...

...The United States, it seems, wants to be a superpower without deploying the appropriate resources...

...THE WEST needs to advance a short-range policy that gives Kosovo the status of a self-governing entity within a looser Yugoslavia...

...THE GROWING chaos convinced the leaders of Yugoslavia's most developed republic, Slovenia, to secede unilaterally in 1991...

...Nowhere has this been clearer than in Kosovo...

...After its first two decades it also produced wide political and cultural autonomy, which in effect made Kosovo a second Albanian state...

...To make sure he remains the lesser evil he has taken Vojislav Seselj's semi-fascist Radical Party as a junior partner in his government...

...It is taking over whole villages and towns in Kosovo, occupying the abandoned Serbian police bunkers and pushing aside the local Rugova leadership, often by brute force...

...In these countries, where no legitimate money was available to buy the formerly public or state property, the prescription by the United States, the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank to "marketize and above all privatize" guaranteed a gangster economy...

...Ever since Tito's death in 1980, the Kosovo Albanians have been agitating to gain the status of a republic, like the other federal units, rather than the near-republic status within Serbia they had been granted by the Constitution of 1974...

...Rump Yugoslavia remained multi-ethnic with one third of the population consisting of Albanians, Hungarians, Muslim-Bosniaks, and Croats...

...The Kosovar agitation was met by increasingly chauvinist Serbian propaganda in the state-controlled media—abetted by most of Serbia's intellectual establishment (both communist and anticommunist)— and with repression, culminating in the abolition of the province's autonomy in June of 1990...

...The paralyzing message is, "If I fall, the alternative is Seselj...

...In the meantime, despite renewed Serbian aggression, the KLA is not only surviving but prospering mightily at the expense of other political forces in the Albanian community...

...Second, Milosevic entered into an alliance with Serb nationalists, and directly encouraged the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to demand selfgovernment for their ethnic enclaves within those republics...

...The Balkan wars of 1912 against the Turks were wars of liberation for the Serbs but wars of brutal conquest to the Kosovo and Macedonian Albanians...

...The middle class has been economically destroyed and replaced by a new gangster elite...

...This autonomy would be enforced, during a three-year truce, by twenty-eight thousand NATO troops, and the Serbian regime's presence would be reduced to 1,500 border patrollers...

...POLITICS ABROAD ALAS, THE West and above all the United States continue to treat these corrupt regimes as legitimate governments and indispensable guarantors of the ramshackle peace agreements negotiated essentially by the Americans...

...Individual citizens are also much poorer and less secure...

...BOGDAN DENITCH is director of the Institute for Transitions to Democracy and is the Democratic Socialists of America's representative to the Socialist International...

...Kosovo is Yugoslavia's West Bank, with Serb nationalism confronting the reality of a huge Albanian majority, by now over 85 percent...

...The trouble is that those who need to be removed from public life and deprived of their ill-gotten property are the elected leaders of government...

...if more modest, they would be no more effective than the air strikes against the regime in Iraq...

...Two and a half to three million people became refugees, ethnically cleansed to create "pure" Croatian and Bosnian entities...

...For the Albanians, too, Kosovo is tragic ground...

...But a democratic Kosovo cannot long exist in an authoritarian Yugoslavia controlled by Milosevic and Seselj—so help must often be given to the principal Serbian oppositionists of today, even if they are not inspriring and are themselves too nationalistic...

...This is unacceptable to even the most moderate Kosovo Albanians...

...With the enthusiastic support of the Radicals he has abolished university autonomy, dismissed opposition faculty in massive numbers and passed a repressive law that has all but destroyed the independent media...

...The worst predator in the area, Milosevic, has been strengthened the most...

...The "hard" democrats tend to be independent trade unionists, nongovernmental organization activists, students and democratic leftists with populist overtones...

...It was never clear, for example, what Madeleine Albright's threats to bomb Serbia were meant to achieve: if massive enough to do real damage, there would be unacceptable civilian casualties...

...The new politicians, generals, and volunteer militia heads have devastated the land, committing atrocities that spur huge population transfers...

...In fact, they have functioned as two thousand hostages...

...Washington modernized Tudjman's army and police, which remain a constant threat to democracy in Croatia...

...Serbian claims to Kosovo, much like Israeli claims to the West Bank, are based on a mixture of strategic considerations, historical assertions, and mystical religious themes...

...Until Dayton, that is, when it became clear that without American ground troops there would be no peace agreement...

...Although the numbers are bitterly disputed, it seems that only about fifty people, mostly young Serb conscripts, were killed in the Slovenian "war" of independence...

...With this act, Milosevic accomplished three things, all of which proved disastrous for the future of Yugoslavia and even for the Serbs...

...This new class born out of the intra-ethnic wars of Yugoslav succession thrives on ethnic confrontation and relentlessly fosters ethnic chauvinism, preventing any transition to stability and democracy...

...This has strengthened these regimes and made stable peace impossible...

...However, while poor and underdeveloped Macedonia was permitted to secede peacefully, Croat and Bosnian independence led to a bitter war with the local Serb militias, which were reinforced by what remained of the Yugoslav army...

...Although the least developed part of Yugoslavia, it was far more prosperous and modern than Albania itself...

...Sadly, the political lesson drawn from this was that no agreement could be made without the Americans...

...The United States also advised the Bosnian government to reject repeated peace agreements negotiated by the Europeans, thereby prolonging the carnage by at least two years...

...This is made easier by their control of the most powerful electronic media, reinforced by a public opinion wallowing in selfpity and poisoned by a decade of nationalist propaganda...

...Bosnia's Izetbegovic has used his control over the vast aid sent into Bosnia to tighten his stranglehold on a government and army where religion is being introduced...

...In the long term, the smaller, "hard"—non-nationalist—opposition has to be supported...

...And people of all classes are less secure because of the terrible crimes that have been committed in the names of their various ethnic communities...

...That much is certain...

...The international community treated them much as it did the Kurds, and only slightly more than half of the Albanians ended up living in an independent Albania...

...DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 29 POLITICS ABROAD He has resumed his crackdown on an already weak democratic opposition...

...Something like twelve thousand people, mostly civilians, were killed in the Croatian war, while the Bosnian wars cost at least one hundred thousand lives...

...A shallow Machiavellianism led the United States and Europe to imagine that he could be a force for stability in the region...

...The immediate issue was the decision of Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia, the largest federal unit of Yugoslavia, to abolish the wide autonomy enjoyed by the province of Kosovo under the Constitution of 1974...

...In the event, Slovenia's declaration of independence was rapidly followed by those of Croatia, Bosnia ,and Macedonia...

...The low-intensity war in Kosovo in 1998 produced relatively few casualties—two 28 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 to three thousand at most—but many refugees, perhaps a quarter million...

...By purging Kosovo's established pro-Yugoslav leaders, he assured their replacement by Ibrahim Rugova, who was committed to an independent Kosovo...

...This view is held not only by supporters of the Milosevic regime, but also by many in the democratic opposition...

...Third, this in turn provoked the growth of Croatian nationalism, leading to the election of the right-wing ultranationalist Tudjman regime in Croatia...

...Ultimately the Serbs believe that the special historical suffering of their people—namely, five hundred years of "slavery" under the Turks (aided by Muslim Albanians) and huge population losses in the two world wars—gives their claims greater weight than those of the present inhabitants of Kosovo...

...For almost a decade Rugova has led a remarkable massive nonvioDISSENT / Spring 1999 • 27 POLITICS ABROAD lent struggle—in one of the most undeveloped parts of the Balkans—establishing a parallel underground "state," with its own schools, medical centers and political institutions...

...The Yugoslav army only half-heartedly tried to prevent this...

...Even the economic sanctions helped, because they provided vast opportunities for smuggling, which became a patriotic act...

...The initial peace proposal itself was not bad: it would have granted Kosovo wide, internationally guaranteed autonomy, but not independence...

...The bigotry that most Serbs feel toward the Albanians makes coexistence with mutual respect and tolerance in one state unlikely...

...Toward a Democratic Settlement The basic mistake made by the United States and Western Europe was their assumption that the governing thugs in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo would remain the only political partners available...

...One of the more successful multi-ethnic states in recent European history thus ended in ethnic carnage...

...Peace Versus the New Elites The new ruling elites in the post-Yugoslav states, sometimes with roots in the old communist nomenklaturas, have prospered mightily during the wars of Yugoslav succession, accumulating wealth and power in the old fashioned way— by robbery...

...It was Washington that built up the Croatian armed forces before 1995, making possible the single biggest case of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars of secession, in which nearly two hundred thousand Croatian Serbs were driven into an exile which still bedevils democratic politics in Croatia...

...Kosovo cannot become a squalid repressive bantustan dominated by hard men with guns...

...This makes the development of a multi-ethnic, secular, and democratic Bosnia all but impossible...

...Given the growing economic despair, there will be no comfortable "centrist" liberal solution...

...Such a settlement must have iron-clad international guarantees and firm guarantees of minority and democratic rights...

...After all, any responsible democratic government in Croatia, Bosnia, and above all in Serbia, will have to engage in the equivalent of denazification: the ousting and punishing of the butchers in the present political elites...

...The agreement left at least fifteen thousand heavily armed Serbian police and troops and Kosovo as well as an armed and encouraged Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA...

...While British, French, Italian, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Spanish soldiers lost their lives in Bosnia, the United States only provided air support...

...At first, they wanted to stay in Yugoslavia but to be as independent of Belgrade as Macedonia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Slovenia were...