Milosevic Murders Again

...Above all, the United States should be outraged at Milosevic for undertaking such aggression just a week after Washington announced that millions in aid would be granted his allies in the Bosnian Serb Republic...

...For the last nine years, the Albanians of Kosovo have lived in conditions worse than anything suffered by blacks in apartheid South Africa...

...As for Milosevic's motives, it is important to notice how high the stakes are...

...The Serbs professed shock that their enemies were armed with mortars...

...Indeed, the Kosovo drama is a lot like a suicide waltz: On the one hand, the Kosovar Albanians would very quickly attain mass martyrdom if they took up the gun...

...Indeed, most Kosovar Albanians remain committed to nonviolence in their quest for greater autonomy within a rump Yugoslavia...

...Then in late 1997, beefy Serb cops descended, clubs in hand, on a peaceful march of Albanian students in Prishtina demanding restoration of their university...

...Most of the dead were ethnic Albanians, as are 90 percent of the province's people...

...This approach seems intended primarily to keep Milosevic on board as a supporter of the Dayton peace agreement on Bosnia...

...Milosevic has reportedly asked Skopje for the right of hot pursuit of alleged Albanian terrorists into Macedonia...

...They set up a forward post in a factory yard, then sneaked into the village early in the morning...

...Croatian supremo Franjo Tudjman faces a similar challenge...

...Madeleine Albright was right to express indignation over the Kosovo massacres...

...All Albanian infants born in Kosovo have been delivered in private homes...

...Indeed, many Kosovar Albanians believe that the UCK (which seems to have survived the Drenica events unscathed) was created by the Serbs as a pretext for repression...

...But discontent inside Albania would seem to have a good deal in common with the rumblings among the Serbs of Belgrade and the Croats of Zagreb and hardly requires any byzantine explanation...

...The gambit failed when they were met with gunfire from the family compound of Adem Jashari, a well-known local leader...

...According to the Serbian opposition weekly Vreme, however, the violence began on January 22 when Serb police tried to enter Lower Prekaz for the first time since 1992...

...As the days go by, this suspicion seems less Balkan and more plausible...

...Milosevic is running this adventure even more directly than he ran the assaults on Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1991-92...

...It remains unclear, however, who the attackers were and whether the UCK was actually involved...

...nor was the action, in the Drenica district of Kosovo, really much like war...

...Thus, the subsequent clashes, in early March, including the destruction of Lower Prekaz, hardly came out of nowhere...

...The funerals of the two dead men—the Serb official killed on the road, mourned by 10,000 Serbs and Montenegrins, and the Albanian factory worker from Lower Prekaz, attended by 20,000 Albanians—heightened tensions...

...The Albanians of Macedonia are more prosperous than the Kosovars, with, among other strategic assets, many more cell phones and Range Rovers, and they cannot be expected to sit on their hands if pogroms continue...

...Between late February and March 9, the conflict took at least 50 lives and perhaps as many as 80, with dozens missing...

...Desperate as they are, most Kosovar Albanians simply don't see either armed resistance or independence as a realistic option...

...Albright seems to have proceeded with extraordinary caution...

...In his propaganda, Milosevic dwells on Serbia's "right to settle its own internal affairs in Kosovo," along with the familiar claims to Serbian sovereignty over a region that has been without a Slavic majority for 400 years...

...At first, the Serbian press reported that the attack on the police station had been carried out by "unidentified persons," and Serb authorities denied that any intercommunal fighting had taken place...

...Their touching hope that America will come to their rescue owes less to any confidence in Bill Clinton—or even Bob Dole, who has done yeoman's work for Albanian rights in Kosovo—than it does to the principles of Martin Luther King...

...Two major questions remain: How great is the danger of a regional conflagration, and what is driving Milosevic...

...Ever since Milosevic abolished the province's autonomy in 1989, the Albanian majority has gone without regular health or education services...

...The apparently impossible task of sorting out who owns what as the country emerges from nearly half a century of communism has, among other things, robbed millions of ex-Yugoslavs of the hard-currency savings they held before 1990...

...In January, an armed attack on a Serb police station and the killing of a Serb official on a highway followed a raid on the Kosovar Albanian village of Lower Prekaz...

...Emotional rallies have been held in its cities, and the outside world has difficulty imagining that Tirana would fail to defend the Kosovars...

...And economic difficulties, exacerbated by the absence of effective privatization and labor laws, are the topic of the hour in both the Bosnian entities...

...Unfortunately, Milosevic remains the man of the hour in the Balkans, in full control of events in Kosovo and apparently determined to use any means at hand to make his war-weary people unite once again behind him...

...Leaders even invest efforts in winning over Serbs—and have some success, amazing as that may seem...

...Feigning generosity, the Macedonians recently offered to set up a "humanitarian corridor" through their territory to allow Albanians to flee Kosovo for Albania...

...By March 9, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had prevailed on the Contact Group, comprising the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Italy, to agree on measures conveying Western concern about the violence to Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic...

...Another concern is that with the political situation in Albania unsettled and so many firearms present, the effects on Albania of any Kosovo fighting are unpredictable...

...Albanians everywhere angrily rejected this scheme as a population transfer more accurately called ethnic cleansing...

...Among the Serb minority in Kosovo, voices are raised for a peaceful solution, while across the border in Albania proper, recent demonstrations in Tirana, the capital, protesting the Kosovo atrocities, have included placards and leaflets appealing for support from the Serb nation...

...In the face of extreme provocation, they have shown extraordinary forbearance...

...If the fighting spills into Macedonia, the potential for Greek and Turkish involvement is considerable, since Athens remains unreconciled to the existence of an independent Macedonia, while Turkey has pledged to defend it...

...But Milosevic's keenest need is to distract his own restive populace from its economic woes, of which Western sanctions are a secondary cause...

...The March attack on "Albanian terrorists" was carried out mainly by heavily armed police and blackshirted paramilitaries, and Arkan was reportedly among the leaders...

...At least 50 people were killed by one side or the other in scattered incidents in Kosovo, and Balkan observers repeatedly expressed alarm about the activities in the region of the Serb extremist Arkan (Zeljko Raznjatovic), one of the worst terrorists of the Bosnian war and a favorite henchman of Milosevic...

...intended to induce submission by the Albanians and to thrill the Serbs by once more venting their frustrations, never mind if innocent people should happen to get hurt...

...Many families and villages in Kosovo have made long-standing preparations for defense...

...On the other hand, if Kosovo were to erupt, Milosevic himself could be done for...

...And in neighboring Albania, arms proliferated after the collapse of the government in Tirana in 1997...

...The Serbian media—state controlled, but parroted nonetheless by the press around the world—described the campaign as a necessary move by the government against a shadowy terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army or UCK (pronounced oo-che-ka...

...In February, the northern city of Shkoder was rocked by rioting that the politicians blamed on Serbian intrigues...

...In addition, Serb refugees from Croatia who had resettled in Kosovo were armed and sent into the streets...

...The Macedonian government, dominated by Slav nationalists but confronting its own 40 percent Albanian minority, is playing a classic Balkan game with Milosevic...

...Albania itself is different...

...In the wake of the January 22 incident, the Serbs imposed a de facto military curfew on Drenica...

...It was worse than one-sided: By all honest accounts, it was a pogrom, an orgy of killing, Stephen Schwartz, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, spent the last month in the Balkans...

...Albanian culture validates possession of firearms to an extent unknown even in Serbia...

...all schooling up through university has taken place in quasi-clandestine circumstances...

...In the end, the Contact Group agreed to little more than a weapons embargo against Belgrade (which has a major arms industry of its own) and a partial freeze on Serbian assets abroad...

...But the same Serbian Socialist apparat that supports Plavsic has played a key role in maintaining the terror in Kosovo...

...Although their homeland escaped the direct ravages of the Croatian and Bosnian wars, the impoverished Serbs of rump Yugoslavia have seen their standard of living devastated by post-Communist economic chaos and the rise of the Serbian mafia...

...Such half-measures will not satisfy those Albanians who expect the United States to save them...

...Although at least two units of the Yugoslav army participated in the Kosovo operation there are indications that the army command is reluctant to get involved...

...The threat to the countries that border on Kosovo, such as Albania and Macedonia, and to the next tier of countries, such as Greece and Turkey, is very serious...

...Rather, they said, two Albanian factions had engaged in a gun battle...

...Most of the Albanians killed in the recent massacre had little or nothing to do with the UQK, despite the Serbs' claim that the demolition of the Jashari compound had eliminated the core of the terrorist group...

...The Serbian media were filled with not-very-subtle tales of the Albanian mafia and alleged Albanian mistreatment of Serbs in Kosovo...

...Anyone who watched Belgrade TV could see that the crisis was intensifying...

...Several important facts have gone unreported in the Western press...

...That the Jasharis had mortars in their possession was not unpredictable, however, and hardly pointed to involvement with the UQK, as the Serbian authorities later claimed...

...The weekend before the Kosovo clash, some 80,000 Croats turned out to chant "Franjo-Sad-dam" and wrestle with police in Zagreb over grievances that differ remarkably little from those voiced by Belgraders...

...Milosevic has made himself indispensable to Clinton and NATO by becoming a pillar of the Dayton agreement: He has thrown his Socialist Party of Serbia (formerly the Communist party) behind Biljana Plavsic, the pro-Dayton president of the Bosnian Serb Republic...

...For all her angry speechifying, she sought to temper sanctions with diplomacy...

...Albania's leaders have problems of their own...

...Above all, the Serb in the street feels growing anger at the hopeless poverty of pensioners, whose income has never recovered from the breakup of the old Yugoslavia...

...Two women from the Jashari family were hurt, and the body of a factory worker was found later...

...yet the sad truth is that the Albanians inside Albania have done little to aid or protect their brethren outside their borders...

...During the Serb assault on Lower Prekaz, Tirana put the troops on its border with Kosovo on high alert but sent no reinforcements...

...Although their leadership under Ibrahim Rugova calls itself a national government and claims to want an independent Kosovo, its actions are moderate in the extreme...

...Against this backdrop, tensions have grown in the past two years...

...Jashari himself, although active in armed resistance, may have had the UQK label pinned on him in the same way the Bolshevik label was pinned on all Polish and Jewish resisters by the Nazis in World War II Poland...

...some of them undoubtedly found their way across the border...