By Raoul Djukanovic,
Why Do They Hate Us Correspondent
Ethnic cleansing is back.
Last week, for the first time in five years, NATO deployed its shorthand for the orchestrated torching of homes and places of worship by which mobs drive families from their Balkan villages.
Depending on whom you believe, the worst violence in Kosovo since the 1999 war may have been started by the discovery of two Albanian corpses in the River Ibar. How they came to be there is under dispute, but what happened next is clear: after a couple of days of shooting and arson, 28 people were dead, hundreds more injured and 3,600 Serbs had been driven from their homes.
“This kind of activity, which essentially amounts to ethnic cleansing, cannot go on,” fumed Admiral Gregory Johnson, the commander of NATO forces in southern Europe.
Back in March 1999, when the world’s most powerful military alliance announced it was bombing Belgrade to put a stop to this sort of thing, NATO accused Slobodan Milosevic of mounting a campaign to purge Kosovo of its majority Albanian population.
Now, the tables are turned and Albanians have been kicking out Serbs to create ethnically pure territory, apparently unhindered by the presence of more than 18,000 NATO peacekeepers.
So what’s going wrong? The reality is that very little has gone right since NATO occupied Serbia’s southernmost province and put it under the control of a neo-colonial United Nations administration tainted by persistent corruption scandals.
Forget nation-building, the most notable achievement has been to enforce an absence of war and even that can be shaky.
A pattern appears to be emerging from the history of Western intervention in the Balkans: nobody wants to follow the script. On closer inspection, it is hardly surprising. There isn’t one, beyond hoping for the best.
