March 29, 2004

ERP KIM Newsletter 29-03-04
READ OUR NEWS AT WWW.KOSOVO.NET  

The Financial Times (UK), March 29, 2004

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

It is not surprising to hear Goran Svilanovic, the Serbian foreign minister, describe recent violence against the Serbs of Kosovo as "ethnic cleansing". The use of the term by Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, might also be taken with a grain of salt. But today the expression gets thrown around even by those from whom one might expect optimism about conditions in ex-Yugoslavia - Carl Bildt, former United Nations special envoy to the region, for instance, or Gregory Johnson, US admiral, Nato commander for Southern Europe. That ought to rouse the west from its complacency.

With the European Union set to take over Bosnian peacekeeping operations from Nato later this year and with the US tied up in Iraq, Europe is going to get a second chance to calm the Balkans, whether it wants it or not. But when EU foreign ministers urged a "secure and multi-ethnic Kosovo" last week, they left the impression that their continuing priority was to fend off self-doubt over the wisdom of Nato's 1999 war against Serbia. Kosovo is getting less "multi-ethnic" by the hour; on Thursday an Albanian newspaper editorialised that there is "only one ethnic group" in the province. Whether Kosovo becomes "secure " again depends on whether western governments can rethink their mission from the ground up.

"Ethnic cleansing" is indeed an appropriate description for what happened in the days after March 17. An anti-Serb rampage by ethnic Albanians left 28 dead and 900 injured (including 80 peacekeepers), made refugees of 3,500 more and destroyed 280 houses and 30 churches. And "pogrom", a term bandied about by Vojislav Kostunica, Serbian prime minister, is an appropriate metaphor for the course of the violence.

When two Albanian boys drowned in the Ibar river and one went missing, a companion who survived said they had been chased to their deaths by Serbs with a pit bull terrier. But one peacekeeper seconded to Kosovo from the Northern Ireland Police Service told the Financial Times: "We have conducted a professional investigation in the cold light of day, and there is no evidence to corroborate the story." In Svinjare, where all 136 Serbian houses were destroyed and those marked with Albanian flags were left standing, vandals wrote their names on the Serb-owned buildings that they wished to claim once the Serbs were permanently gone, according to The New York Times.

The attacks were orchestrated. On the first day of rioting, convoys of buses brought ethnic Albanian youths from Pristina to the embattled town of Mitrovica to help an assembled crowd fight its way across a bridge into the city's Serbian quarter. In Djakovica, 1,000 people with guns and grenades attacked Italian Kfor soldiers protecting a monastery, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported. Kfor vehicles travelling around the province were blocked by parked buses.

Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, on a visit to Kosovo to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Nato's war on Serbia, called the local mobs "criminals". But they are also a kind of guerrilla army, pursuing specific political aims. Albanian Kosovars are using ethnic cleansing to make independence for the province, which still belongs officially to Serbia, a fait accompli. They see that Nato has been willing to buy peace at the price of letting Kosovo Serbs melt away from their province. Since 1999, 230,000 Kosovo natives - mostly Serbs, Montenegrins and Roma - have registered as UN refugees in neighbouring countries. In Pristina and Kosovo Polje, the Serbs are almost all gone, so no one is even left to complain. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the new secretary-general of Nato, is wise to this game. He has warned that violence will not affect final-status negotiations, adding: "That goes more specifically for the ethnic Albanian community." And Mr de Hoop Scheffer has announced that Nato will reinforce its 18,500-strong contingent by 2,000 soldiers.

"A pact with the devil" - NATO Commander-in-chief gen. Wesley Clark, Gen. Jackson (UK), Bernard Kouchner of UNMIK with Agim Ceku and Hashim Taci, the leaders of the KLA. The recent events proved that the KLA has never been truly dismantled and that the UN mission onlly gave an umbrella for political and military survival of a terrorist organization - KLA. NATO has the moral obligation now towards the people in Kosovo who want to live in peace and civilization to protect their lives, property and cultural heritage and not to give up in front of terrorist methods and violence. (Photo: September 1999 when KFOR, UNMIK and KLA leaders agreed to "transform" KLA into "Kosovo Protection Corps". Since then, only a name has been changed. The Corps remained a logistic base for continuation of ethnic terror against Serbs and planning of terrorist actions under the name of shaddow terrorist organization "Albanian National Army" known as AKSH.)

But, with talks on Kosovo's final status scheduled for next spring, the EU's vision of the province is losing its purchase on reality. The countries with peacekeeping troops there continue to oppose ethnic Albanian calls for independence. But the EU's own competing vision of a "multi-ethnic" Kosovo has no demographic basis now that there are only 100,000 Serbs left there.

Mr Kostunica's calls for "cantonisation" of the province have also been resisted (and cited by Albanians as a "provocation"). It is true that altering the frontiers of Kosovo would set a bad example for neighbouring

Macedonia and Bosnia; but on what principle can Nato and the EU argue that Kosovo's borders are sacrosanct, having in effect redrawn Serbia's in 1999? Partition looks like one of only two solutions that will permit any Serbs to remain in Kosovo at all. The other is reintroducing Serbian security forces into Kosovo, a course that even Zoran Djindjic, prime minister, a westernising moderate, was suggesting before he was assassinated last year. If Europeans and Americans reject this solution out of hand, it is because, using the lens of the 1990s, they view Kosovo Serbs as the arm of an expansionist dictatorship rather than the hunted minority they increasingly are.

The EU has spoken about animating a dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. But why should Kosovo's well-armed and well-organised malefactors want dialogue? Their ethnic violence is producing exactly the "facts on the ground" that they want. Whether such citizens constitute a majority does not matter in the slightest. The "multi-ethnic Kosovo" that was trumpeted five years ago is a steadily vanishing dream, because mobs understand that the west's long-term path of least resistance is to acquiesce in the de facto independence and ethnic purging (and possible annexation to Albania) of Kosovo.

To prevent this, hard-headed alternatives will have to be put on the table - ranging from the heavy reinforcement of UN and Nato troops to the partition of Kosovo to the threat of reintroducing Serbian forces.

Otherwise, there can be only one serious subject for "dialogue": the date for the handover of Kosovo, lock, stock and barrel, to the province's criminal gangs.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard