The New York
Times of Saturday, March 27, quotes Laura Leslie, a senior from Miramonte High
School, San Francisco: "I don't want to see another thing like what
happened with Hitler, with a terrible person taking over countries". Laura
reads the newspaper and listens to the news, and in her innocent way sums up
the message of the propaganda war-supporting machine. She is not to be blamed
for oversimplifying what is going on in Kosovo and why her country is at war again.
The media and the President try to convince you that this is true and that you
should support the men and women of your armed forces for the sake of your
values and your children's future. But I would like to offer you a less
simplistic explanation.
To begin with,
the rebellion in Kosovo is not the result of the last 10 years. Albanian
separatism is the oldest nationalistic movement in what used to be Tito's
Yugoslavia, and it has started the circle of mutual mistrust, hatred and
eventually war in there. At the beginning of this century, Albanians made only
one third of the Kosovo population. At the beginning of the fifties, after
somewhat prolonged fight with the remains of what used to be the Albanian
quisling state established by Mussolini's Italy, Tito's regime decided to give
this part of Serbia a political, cultural, economical and juridical autonomy,
as well as generous subventions from the federal budget.
At the
beginning of sixties, Albanian population made 2/3 of the Kosovo population. At
that time the first public demand for independence was raised during the riots
in 1968 and again in 1981, several months after Tito's death. None of us had at
that time heard anything about Milosevic, who was a banker with no political
influence whatsoever. Their demand for independence had nothing to do with
repression, for if there was any repression at that time, it could only have
been an Albanian repression against the Serbs in Kosovo. The New York Times,
which can hardly be said to be in favor of the Serbs, wrote at that time:
"Serbs have been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the
region. The Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform, first to establish
what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then to merge with
Albania to form a greater Albania. Some 57.000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the
last decade" (NYT, July 12, 1982). Rape, murder, threats, the destruction
of property were the instruments of such a platform, and with the police and
courts in Albanian hands, nobody could get protection from the state.
Milosevic rose
to power and gained popular support in 1988 with the promise that he would put
an end to the violence against Serbs in Kosovo. The autonomy of the region was
abolished in 1990, several months before the dismembering of Yugoslavia
started, just as the regional parliament declared Kosovo's independence from
Serbia. At that moment Albanians started to organize parallel state
institutions, such as schools, a tax collecting system, courts and the police.
There is no doubt that during the nineties Albanians in Kosovo were exposed to
repression. The police searched their houses looking for arms, arrested them
without warrant and often avoided the legal procedure. However, at the same
time, Serbs were exposed to the same police harassment by the same regime in
Serbia.
All political
forces among Albanians have publicly acknowledged that their aim was not the
democratization of Kosovo, but independence, which means secession form Serbia,
and joining Albania. They differ as to what means should be most appropriate
for achieving this goal, but they have never made a secret that the creation of
Great Albania, and not democracy in Serbia or autonomy in it, is their aim.
Refusing to take part in Serbia's political life, especially in elections,
Albanians helped Milosevic stay in power. Instead of Albanian elected political
representatives, Kosovo was represented in Serbia's parliament by
representatives of the tiny Serbian population from Kosovo, who were all,
needless to say, Milosevics supporters. If Albanians had decided to vote for
their representatives only once, and they had a chance four times in the last
ten years, Milosevic would have lost the power. The Serbian democratic
opposition and independent intellectuals close to the opposition have tried to
organize meetings with leading Albanian politicians several times during this period in order to
convince them to vote, to take part in Serbia's political life, which would
immediately mean the fall of the Milosevic regime, the protection of Albanian
political rights and the end of repression, but Albanian leaders declined any
such proposal, with the answer that the only thing they were interested in
would be independence for Kosovo. Thus Milosevic and Albanian leaders helped one another: he ruled Serbia by using
their votes, and, on the other hand, with repression helped them radicalize the
political situation in Kosovo. Last year the Kosovo Liberation Army emerged as
an important player in Kosovo's political game. Reading The New York Times or
listening to NATO leaders, one might get the impression that the KLA is
something like The Red Cross, or a group of peaceful old ladies who every day
bring flowers to Serbian houses. But it is not so. It is an armed paramilitary
formation which last summer had two thirds of Kosovo under its control. The KLA
has ethnically pure and independent Kosovo as its only aim. It struggles for it
not with political, but with violent means: attacking police patrols, Serbian
civilians and their houses, forcing them to leave Kosovo, and bombing
coffee-shops in which Serbian kids gather. I would like to stress the fact that
what they do is ethnic cleansing as well. Killing civilians is killing
civilians, and I expect your indignation to be the same in any criminal case of
this sort. Not a single day has passed in the year and a half without a report
that at least three people were killed by the KLA, Serbs as well as Albanians
loyal to the state. It would be highly hypocritical to refer to the KLA as to
"unarmed civilians", when it calls itself an Army.
Last October a
peace agreement between the Serbian authorities and the leaders of the KLA was
reached. According to it, the Serbian government would withdraw all the special
police and some of the military units, and the KLA would cease its operations
until the final peace agreement was reached. Only the first part of this deal
was fulfilled. The KLA never stopped the killings, the excuse being that it had
no central command and that the local units cannot be controlled by anyone.
After the Serbian police and military units withdrew from Kosovo, the K.L.A.
simply walked into the empty space and gained control over a large part of
Kosovo and continued the violence.
As you can see,
the demand for Kosovo's independence led to the repression, the repression led
to KLA and terrorism, terrorism led to Serbian military and police
intervention, and it led to NATO's assault on Yugoslavia. None of the steps I
have listed was unavoidable. Nevertheless, everything eventually comes down to
the question of Kosovo's independence. As I was never tempted to support the
idea of Great Serbia, I do not understand why anyone should think that Great
Albania is a noble aim. This aim can be achieved only at the cost of changing borders
and by ethnically cleansing Kosovo of Serbs in the first phase, and then by
repeating the same procedure in Macedonia, which also has a numerous Albanian
minority.
Not Milosevic,
but Yugoslavia is being bombed today for the failure of its representatives to
sign the document offered in Rambouillet. This document is not the result of
negotiations and peace talks, and it meets all the demands of only one side in
the conflict. According to it, Kosovo will stay in Serbia as a self-governed
region only for the next three years, after which period it may declare its
independence. The Albanian delegation has signed the document, but they have
enclosed a written statement which says that they do not give up their central
aim, the independence or Kosovo. The Serbian side accepts a broad autonomy, but
declines both the possibility of independence, and the occupation by some 28000
NATO solders.
As the leaders
of the NATO countries say, the bombing will stop the moment
"Milosevic", who has become a general name for 10 million Serbs,
their state and their president, agrees with the Rambouillet document. This
means that the bombing will last as long as there is anything in Serbia left.
Neither Milosevic, nor anybody in Serbia can sign such a document, for it would
mean signing that part of our country will become part of Albania in three
years. Even though I think that Serbia would be better off without Kosovo, I
wouldn't sign it either. This is neither a matter of Serbian sentimentality,
nor has it anything to do with the battle of Kosovo in 1389, as some
crash-course experts would have it. It has to do with the principles and with
the right of any country to protect its borders and its integrity. In spite of
repeated claims that the NATO countries are not in favor of Kosovo's
independence, this is exactly what they are supporting by their military
intervention. In Rambouillet Serbia was confronted with the alternatives to
agree with the secession, or to be bombed and thus forced to agree with it; not
much of a choice, as you see.
If the term
ethnic cleansing is to be used, it has been committed by both Albanians and
Serbs over the last 20 years, but a genocide has not taken place, and the
killings happen on a much smaller scale than in Algeria or Ethiopia, to name
only two current crises in the world. Yugoslavia is a sovereign state and
Kosovo is a part of it; Yugoslavia has not committed an aggression against any
neighboring state. On the contrary: it is being threatened by Albania as a KLA
base and by Macedonia as a NATO base. (Leaving the Yugoslav territory the other
day U.S. diplomat William Walker said "Next time I will not need a visa to
enter Yugoslavia", a sentence which, as you might assume, does not mean
that the visa regime between our countries will be suspended.) The assault on
Yugoslavia is a clear case of violating the UN Charter, and no rhetoric can
change this fact. If Serbia refuses to allow a province to secede, outsiders
have no right to label such defense of its national borders an "aggression"
and to support the rebels. Great Britain fought for the Folkland Islands, the
small leftover of its colonial empire, and nobody bombed London for that.
The ongoing
bombing of Serbian cities has taken its first victims. As I write this text,
the number of civilian casualties among Serbs is 1000, and I invite you to
compare it with the number of Albanian casualties in the village of Racak in
January this year, which was 40. Among other things, NATO bombs have destroyed
or damaged 50 schools, the printing facilities of Koha Ditore, the leading
Albanian daily newspaper, the ice cream factory in Sombor, the 600 year old
monastery Gracanica in Kosovo and the monastery Rakovica in Belgrade. Recalling
high human values and morality, the NATO leaders do exactly the same thing of
which they accuse the Serbs.
The bombing of
Yugoslavia has produced exactly what NATO claims to have tried to prevent: more
destruction, more dead bodies, more violence. While the KLA is in offensive,
rightly understanding the NATO missiles and planes as its own airforce, Serbian
extremists can be expected to try to take their revenge, and thus take into the
conflict the parts of Kosovo spared killings and destruction so far. Contrary
to the media reports I hear and read in the U.S., French intelligence sources
from Kosovo do not confirm that the Serbian counter-offensive has taken place
yet, which does not mean that such a possibility is improbable in the future.
The further
result of NATO's aggression on Yugoslavia seems to me easy to foresee. A new
era of insecurity has begun, for nobody knows when the NATO leaders are going
to invoke values and principles, moral imperatives and, last but not least,
American geopolitical interests, as a pretext of attacking some other country
without the authorization of the UN. It can be Macedonia when Albanians take
arms, or Romania, with its huge Hungarian minority, or any other multi-ethnic
state in the world. I am pretty sure it will not be Turkey, even if a new Kurd
upsurge breaks out, and you probably do not need my help to understand why not.
Second: from now on no argument can prevent Bosnian Serbs to secede stating the
very same arguments the NATO leaders used in case of Kosovo, - to be able to
live in their own country- and that means the end of the Dayton peace
agreement. Thirdly: it doesn't take much to predict that Yugoslavia cannot
defend itself against the overwhelming power of NATO. It is only a matter of
time when NATO accomplishes its goal of seceding Kosovo from Serbia. The new,
greater Albania will not be a democratic and peaceful state, but aggressive and
violent, and the region will be shaken with violence and conflicts even more
than so far. As far as Serbia is concerned, Milosevic will emerge from this
crisis even stronger than before, but no Western oriented and democratic Serb
will be able to say aloud words like democracy, the rule of law, and justice.
If the states usually identified with these values were able to violate
international laws and the UN Charter, hypocritically recalling the values that
were renounced by their deeds at the same moment, in order to help dismember
Yugoslavia, then we in the opposition are left without any argument. The same
applies to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, established to
investigate war crimes against the civilians committed in last ten years in the
former Yugoslavia, for there is no difference between Serbian officers who
planned and executed the bombing of the Croatian city of Vukovar, and people
who plan and execute the bombing of Serbian cities and villages today. They can
both list their reasons endlessly, and the words like "moral
imperative", "defenseless people", "our children", as
well as the sentence "the enemy understands only the language of
force" can be heard from them very often. Moreover, this will give a
perfect justification for all those who during the wars in the former
Yugoslavia supported or took part in assaults on civilians, and a perfect
excuse for further crimes.
What are the
rules in the game of dismembering the former Yugoslavia? Addressing the nation
President Clinton made a hardly understandable analogy with the holocaust,
which would suppose that the Jews in Germany had a Jewish Liberation Army, that
they controlled part of, say, Bavaria and intended to join it with Israel.
However, the real analogy with Albanians in Kosovo can be found in comparison
with Serbs in Croatia. As Albanians in Kosovo, Serbs in Krajina, Croatia, were
the majority. As Albanians in Kosovo, Serbs in Krajina were repressed and frightened
by President Tudjman's resurrection of Ustasa-Nazi ideology and its symbols. As
Albanians were deprived of their autonomy, Serbs in Krajina were deprived of
their constitutional rights. And, finally, as Albanians now, Serbs then took
arms and started to fight. In August 1995 the Croatian forces attacked Krajina,
bombed cities and villages and killed civilians, even fleeing refugees. In only
three days 250 000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Croatia and made to join
other 200 000 who came to Serbia from other parts of Croatia, without being so
far allowed to return to their homes. NATO was silent and nobody said a word
about bombing Croatia. On the contrary: Warren Christopher, who was the State
secretary at that time, said: Let us wait and see, maybe there is something
good for us in it. Consequently, the U.S. did not cooperate in this matter with
The Hague Tribunal, which investigated it as a case of large-scale ethnic
cleansing, by refusing to give the satelite photos taken during the action of
the Croatian army.
What were the
principles and the values defended by the U.S. in 1995? The principle was that
no border in the former Yugoslavia could be changed, and that no national
minority had the right to form a new state on other state territories. Four
years later, the principle has been changed, new values defended, and we
witness the U.S. pushing Kosovo towards independence, helping Albanians change
the borders within three years and form a new state on Yugoslavia's territory.
This is what happened in Rambouillet, and no high-flown rhetoric can make it
look better, as no rhetoric can diminish the fact that the number of refugees,
according to NATO sources, was 40 000, and six days after the assault on
Yugoslavia the same sources claim almost half a million. If this is not just a
belated justification for the assault like the case of the Kuwaits ambassadors
daughter, who appeared in the Security Counsel during the Golf War to testify
that she has been raped by the Iraqi solders in Kuwait, although she was safely
in Washington all the time then somebody must be able to recognize the fact
that the number of refugees increased during the assault, and that the assault
produces the result NATO leaders say they want to prevent. Smart bombs fall on
Albanian heads as well.
If
the U.S. are really interested in the peace in the region, then their policy is
totally counterproductive. Instead of supporting non-nationalist and democratic
forces, the U.S. keep supporting one nationalistic and anti-democratic group
against the other. Robert Gelbard, the U.S. diplomat and former Clinton's
special envoy to the Balkans, was the first to understand that. He publicly
said that the KLA was a terrorist organization, and promised moral support for
democratic forces in Serbia, thus isolating extremists on both sides and
announcing the only solution for this part of Europe: Kosovo without terrorism
and Serbia without autocracy. The current U.S. policy towards Yugoslavia took
another turn: supporting terrorism and antagonizing even democrats among Serbs.