Fear and Loathing in the Balkans

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.

In essence, the West’s post-war Balkan project appears to consist of laudable abstract nouns – multi-ethnicity, minority rights, reconciliation and the like – and legions of highly paid bureaucrats unable to do much with them.

It is customary among Western officials to attribute the general stagnation in Kosovo and, for that matter, Bosnia and Serbia, to the stubbornness, short-sightedness and stupidity of Balkan politicians.

If only they would wise up and get along, everything would be fine, according to this line of reasoning. A comforting thought and not without substance, but this is by no means the whole story.

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy,” George Orwell observed in his introduction to Animal Farm, “a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it.”

REWRITING HISTORY

According to NATO governments, the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was the world’s first humanitarian war and an unqualified success, averting a massacre in Kosovo and culminating in the eventual overthrow of Milosevic.

These days, the former Serbian president is restricted to fulminating against Western imperialists and Balkan separatists from the dock of a United Nations war crimes court in The Hague. But to the horror of Western officials, Milosevic plays to an avid television audience in Belgrade, where the government, a ragged coalition, relies on his old party’s votes to scrape together a parliamentary majority.

In short, Serbia does not, on the whole, consider itself a defeated country, nor does it show too many signs of doing as it is told. The Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostunica, wants Kosovo to be partitioned along ethnic lines and regards the separation of Bosnian Serbs from their kin in neighbouring Serbia as temporary, rhetorically violating the two Balkan borders that Western governments have decreed most sacred.

Albanians in Kosovo have meanwhile lost patience with the Western allies who intervened on their behalf five years ago, when NATO supported an uprising by Albanian guerrillas whom it has since failed to disarm with any degree of seriousness.

The mood of former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, who fostered a rebellion by Albanians in neighbouring Macedonia in 2001, is perhaps best gauged by a veiled threat stickered over road-signs in Pristina: “Independence for Kosovo: the only way to peace in the Balkans.”

Having intervened, NATO governments dictate the status quo, but because their magic solution has failed to materialise, the result is a quagmire poisoned by Serbian and Albanian extremists, bogging down the foreign administrators for the foreseeable future.

The United Nations Security Council has tied Kosovo’s destiny to its leaders’ ability to meet a list of “democratic standards”, but these tests are unlikely to be passed any time soon, in part because self-rule is so limited.
In the words of the Albanian-language newspaper Kosova Sot, “The international administration tried to preserve a false peace, but it was quite logical that it would suddenly shatter.”

This is not a view from the radical fringe, although this editorial from last week serves a pro-independence agenda, nor is its analysis only applicable to Kosovo. It has considerable bearing on the reality of recent Western interventions throughout the region.

The peace agreements that created international protectorates in Bosnia and Kosovo are not only apparently unworkable – they would collapse were NATO’s occupying forces to depart – they have perversely, by their very existence, become a contributing factor to Balkan instability.

This fact is taboo, unsurprisingly given the vast investment of Western taxpayers’ money in the project – tens of billions of dollars according to several independent estimates – to say nothing of the prevailing orthodoxy that intervention has not only prevented a Balkan bloodbath but also laid the foundation for peace.

A cursory glance at recent history ought to dispel this myth for what it is: wishful thinking.

The bombing was instigated in 1999 because Milosevic refused to do as he was told and call off a Serbian crackdown on Albanian separatists, whose political aspirations had found expression through the K.L.A. after Belgrade suspended Albanian self-rule in Kosovo.

Once the bombing was under way, the German Defence Ministry released evidence purporting to demonstrate a genocidal Serbian plot to expel Albanians en masse, as opposed to Belgrade’s stated aim of destroying the K.L.A. However, it later confessed to having composed the plans for “Operation Horseshoe” itself by piecing together the gist of multiple intelligence transcripts. In any case, mass expulsions of Albanians from Kosovo only began after NATO air strikes were launched.

In other countries, disturbances of this nature have frequently been regarded as an internal security problem, for example Turkey, a NATO ally. But this was not the case with Serbia, which became the first target of the post-cold war, and hence archetypically postmodern, doctrine of humanitarian intervention.

This creed was proclaimed as NATO’s new role in a new world order that had threatened to make it redundant, as it has effectively become since September 11, 2001. Interestingly, the American distaste for “war by committee” was largely a product of objections raised by several NATO governments in the run-up to the Kosovo war and during the bombing itself.
Washington was by this time fully committed to the removal of Milosevic from power and was funding and training the Serbian opposition while American military contractors provided support to the K.L.A.

The bombing, which according to Human Rights Watch killed 500 civilians compared with 2,000 deaths in Kosovo during the preceding year, could have been averted had Milosevic agreed to grant 28,000 NATO soldiers unrestricted access to Serbian territory. He refused and his compromise proposals, including a United Nations peacekeeping force, were rejected, so he elected to call NATO’s bluff and lost.

Within 18 months he had been overthrown and a new, ostensibly more democratic, government took his place, offering Serbs some grounds for optimism until it became paralysed by infighting that derailed its tentative flirtation with economic and political reforms.

Western policy therefore appears to have succeeded in its immediate goal, but failed to effect any meaningful change in Serbia. NATO never invaded; it simply made its will abundantly clear from the skies, using the projection of American airpower to enforce compliance. Very few people in Serbia, a nation with a long history of wallowing in its own self-pity, accept the humanitarian reasoning behind the exercise, which has in many cases only reinforced the widespread belief in an international conspiracy against Serbs that must be fought with united resistance.

ARMING THE ENEMY

It should not be too difficult to understand why nationalism flourishes in Serbia today. The status quo helps to feed it.

Although no longer quite the isolated pariah it was, Serbia is still being punished by the international community - a term, like the West, that is generally used as a synonym for the United States and its allies.

Overt sanctions have been lifted, but most international economic assistance is conditional on Serbian compliance with Western demands, chiefly the handover of alleged war criminals to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague. This is the sine qua non of Western policy in the Balkans and a constant source of conflict with Belgrade, where the government risks open confrontation with its own security forces if it seeks to arrest the most wanted suspect, General Ratko Mladic, who masterminded the siege of Sarajevo and is now believed to enjoy the protection of the Serbian army.

The overthrow of Milosevic was only bloodless because the opposition co-opted his security personnel and secured the backing of the criminal oligarchy he had created in Belgrade. When Zoran Djindjic, the first post-Milosevic prime minister, bowed to international pressure and challenged the alliance of gangsters and war criminals propping up his government, he was assassinated. There is little incentive for his successors to follow suit and no Western policymaker has in fact suggested that any additional incentives be provided to induce compliance with international demands; instead, Belgrade’s relations with the outside world keep deteriorating.

In the view of Misha Glenny, a British historian of the Balkans, “The obsession of Western media and governments with the war crimes tribunal and Milosevic is incredibly myopic.”

This obsession is justified by the requirement that Serbia face up to its past. Unfortunately the history of the Balkans in the 1990’s defies a black-and-white reading and even the litany of atrocities committed by Serbian forces cannot obscure the shades of grey.

The onslaught of Serbian aggression classed as genocide by the tribunal followed the secession of Slovenia, Croatia and, later, Bosnia from the Yugoslav federation. All received explicit backing from Western governments, particularly Germany, which lobbied its partners in the European Community to support a common position.

As communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, it was deemed appropriate to support the national aspirations of republics that wanted to abandon the yoke of socialist Yugoslavia, which Serbia sought to maintain in order to maximise its own influence and to prevent Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia from becoming minorities in new countries.

The paranoia that the impending showdown had clearly stirred in Belgrade and the history of inter-ethnic hostilities that preceded the post-World War II stability of Tito’s Yugoslavia were either ignored or deemed irrelevant, as were Milosevic’s lust for power and instinctive understanding of how to manipulate Serbian grievances.

In any case, once the consequences of promoting ethnic nationalism had become clear, European powers struggled to contain it, professing themselves powerless to control a conflict between tribal armies venting ancient hatreds.

It would be difficult to find academics or Balkan specialists who share this view of the wars’ principal causes. There was no history of widespread violence between Serbs and Croats, for example, until the Nazis installed a quisling fascist regime in Zagreb in 1941, unleashing atrocities of a viciousness previously unseen in the region’s significantly troubled past.

Western officials nonetheless repeatedly referred to ancient hatreds in the early 1990’s when asked why they couldn’t stop the destruction that was beamed onto their citizens’ television screens with chilling regularity.

The United States initially expressed indifference. “We don’t have a dog in this fight,” declared James Baker, the first President Bush’s Secretary of State. Eventually, after almost a quarter of a million deaths, the Clinton administration decided it did, bombing the Bosnian Serbs into submission.

It then turned its attention to prosecuting war criminals, setting its sights on the preparation of an indictment against Milosevic, in part to appease the besieged Bosnian Muslims, on whose behalf Western governments had ultimately intervened.

For reasons of political expedience, the tribunal was told to delay a similar indictment against the Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, a man who compared himself to Jesus Christ and was as complicit as Milosevic in a joint plot to carve up Bosnia by driving Muslims from territory inhabited by Serbs and Croats.

However, by the time Milosevic was eventually charged, Tudjman had already died and Croats had grown accustomed to regarding The Hague as a place where Serbs were sent to jail.

It took the tribunal six years to release an indictment relating to Operation Storm, the 1995 Croat campaign which expelled 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia with the help of American military advisors. Ante Gotovina, the general charged in connection with this case, has gone into hiding and the Croatian government pleads ignorance as to his whereabouts.

When the tribunal grew impatient in 2002 and demanded the handover of a high-ranking Croat in the person of another general, Janko Bobetko, the government in Zagreb refused, fearing a popular backlash. The 84-year-old general conveniently died while his fate was being debated.

Although Croatia has now been warned that failure to meet tribunal demands will torpedo its application to join the European Union, it is not subject to the same penalties for non-compliance as Serbia.

After wading into Bosnia blowing a metaphorical referee’s whistle, Western governments have treated the U.N. tribunal as a tool of foreign policy to be used as and when they see fit, meanwhile quashing suggestions that it investigate the legality and conduct of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign.

The result has been to undermine the credibility of the tribunal’s attempt to piece together a comprehensive picture of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and to deny it the moral authority it seeks to exert in its dealings with Balkan governments.

The opportunity to emulate South Africa’s cathartic Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been squandered.

When American officials demand the handover of alleged war criminals while at the same time ordering Serbian leaders to promise never to press charges against Americans at the new International Criminal Court, it is little wonder that most Serbs can only see the paradox and not the principle.

In this light, consider the appeal of the following statement by Vojislav Seselj, a former commander of Serbian paramilitaries, and later deputy prime minister, who last year surrendered to the tribunal for a trial he appears to relish. “Those who seceded from Yugoslavia should have lost,” he said before departing Belgrade, positing an alternative principle: namely that sovereign states should respect each other’s territorial integrity.

“Serbs will never put up with the loss of Krajina, Bosnia and Kosovo. France waited 48 years to reclaim Alsace and Lorraine from the Germans. If you want to resolve this issue definitively you’ll have to kill every Serb, otherwise we’re going to think how to get back what we had.”

Having in the past urged Bosnian Serbs to gouge out their Muslim neighbours’ eyes with rusty spoons, Seselj’s credentials as a statesman are seriously compromised. But bolstered by his rhetorical bluster from The Hague – as an oratory firebrand, Seselj runs rings round Milosevic – his party won the most votes in last December’s parliamentary elections.
Two-thirds of Serbs rejected overtly nationalist candidates, as they have done at every post-Milosevic election, yet their nation remains subject to collective punishment. And as economic and political stagnation set in, more people are likely to be seduced by the arguments of demagogic nationalists, in which case international efforts to ensure the opposite will have proved thoroughly counterproductive.

“The evolution of a new cultural pattern will require both time and the engagement not only of the small marginalized segment of the Serb elite who consistently opposed Serb nationalism, but of the international community as well,” argues Sonja Biserko, the director of the Helsinki Centre for Human Rights in Serbia. “Up till now the preference has been for simple solutions ensuring peace rather than investing in efforts to fundamentally change the cultural pattern essential for reconciliation.”

The pattern she refers to is a dark, victim mentality that discourages individuals from taking responsibility for their own actions. In many ways, this is the logical consequence of a history of autocratic government and oppression, reinforced by recent events. When Serbs imagine a brighter future, they tend to expect it to be handed to them on a plate by way of compensation for their suffering.

FAILED STATES

Across the River Drina in Bosnia’s semi-autonomous Serb Republic, a statelet carved out by the expulsion of its pre-war Muslim residents, the mood is even darker.

Somewhere in the remote mountains that skirt a porous border with Montenegro lurks Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who was America’s most wanted war criminal before Osama bin Laden took his place. There is a $5 million bounty on Karadzic’s head, but anyone expecting him to be betrayed by the simple peasants among whom he moves should expect a long wait.

Over the past 18 months, NATO has staged regular raids on Karadzic’s old haunts, but to no avail. His wife now tells journalists her husband is angry that a deal he made with President Clinton’s envoy Richard Holbrooke has not been respected.

According to the alleged terms of this “gentleman’s agreement”, Karadzic would be left alone if he vanished from the political scene after agreeing to the terms of the Dayton peace agreement, which ended the Bosnian war. Holbrooke has yet to comment on this assertion.

The Dayton Accords are an active barrier to reconciliation because they legitimise the wartime partition of Bosnia into separate entities. Enormous amounts of effort have been invested in resettling hundreds of thousands of displaced people to reverse the effects of mass expulsions, but Bosnia’s Serb Republic and Muslim-Croat Federation are only part of the same country because the international proconsul in Sarajevo commands it.

The powers vested in the Office of the High Representative of the international community in Bosnia are immense, allowing the West to impose its will by decree.

“The more you reform, the less I will have to,” the current High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, told Bosnian members of parliament last year. “The less you reform, the more I will have to.”

Under pressure to create the conditions for the abolition of his office, Ashdown has, like his predecessor Wolfgang Petritsch, resorted to government by personal fiat. This autocratic approach to democratisation has begun to alienate international officials from the people they were sent to serve, exposing them to constant carping from a political class that includes three presidents, all of them ultimately powerless.

A recent report published by the European Stability Initiative, a non-profit research and policy institute, dubbed Bosnia’s cumbersome constitutional arrangement “The European Raj”.

“Vast ambitions, the fervent belief in progress, the assumption that outsiders can best interpret the true interest of a subject people — all these are hallmarks that the international administration in Bosnia shares with the British East India Company and the Utilitarian philosophers who staffed it in the early nineteenth century,” note the report’s authors, Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin. “The international mission [in Sarajevo] has arrived at this paradoxical conclusion: What Bosnia and Herzegovina needs is not democratic domestic politics, but government by international experts.”

Anxiety about the stability of the Bosnian project conditioned Western responses to the breakdown of law and order in Kosovo between 1998 and 1999. The likely outcome of a battle for Kosovo would be partition into Serb and Albanian cantons and politicians on both sides have long debated where the line would run.

This affront to the principle of multi-ethnicity, which Western powers have sought to uphold since they intervened in Bosnia to glue it back together, was regarded as unthinkable. Were the taboo on redrawing borders to be shattered, policymakers fear, a domino effect would be set in motion throughout the region.

The concern that Serbs would renew their quest to annex the Bosnian Serb Republic to Serbia proper is well founded, as are suspicions that Albanians might seek to join north-western Macedonia, which is predominantly Albanian, to neighbouring Kosovo. This would legitimise the creation of new international boundaries at gunpoint, but might yet prove the only workable solution, assuming it could be negotiated successfully.

The omens are not auspicious for what happens when everyone sits down and pulls out their maps. The best-known example is the Congress of Berlin in 1878, where, among other arbitrary territorial carve-ups, Europe’s Great Powers agreed to dismantle the ailing Ottoman Empire. This decision effectively created the Balkans of today, ensuring that mouth-watering swathes of territory would henceforth be disputed by the rival ethnic groups scattered across them. The outcome of every subsequent crisis in the region has been dictated by the same Great Powers, which have been alternately meddling and troubleshooting in Balkan countries for much of the intervening period, barring half a century of peace during the cold war.

For now, another border conference is not on the agenda. Instead, the guessing games continue about what will happen when the international protectorates in Bosnia and Kosovo are eventually dismantled, keeping alive the twin nationalist dreams of a Greater Serbia and a Greater Albania.

The status quo in Kosovo is patently unsustainable; sitting on the problem has only inflamed it. Now, having promoted the quite incompatible doctrines of ethnic nationalism and human rights, the international community must decide what to do next.

For some time, American officials have made it clear that their over-riding priority in determining Kosovo’s final status is to find a solution acceptable to the Albanian majority. According to the Kosovo Albanian President, Ibrahim Rugova, independence is now “necessary and urgent”. Serbian leaders argue, however, that last week’s violence demonstrated a systematic disregard for minority rights that ought to give Belgrade the moral authority to retain sovereignty over the province and demand that Albanians accept autonomy in place of outright independence.

The compromise option is of course partition, which would probably cede to Serbia a narrow horseshoe of territory that includes its most prized Orthodox monasteries, leaving the rest of the province to the Albanians.

Whichever way they turn, Western policymakers face awkward dilemmas that will challenge their attempts to preserve a facade of multi-ethnicity.

“Do we cave in and accept, or do we reassert our principles?” mused Carl Bildt, a Swede who served as the first High Representative in Bosnia after the war.

A good question and one on which the international community might do well to reflect, particularly since the assertion of its principles has come to resemble the communication strategy often employed by Englishmen abroad: repeating oneself loudly and slowly in the hope something will sink in.

The experience of nation-building in the Balkans ought to deter anyone from making confident predictions about the likely success of future missions, particularly in the Middle East, where the situation on the ground is even more complex.

Yet the intervention in Kosovo is frequently cited, particularly by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as proof of the Western capacity to build a better world through military action and post-conflict reconstruction.

There are many lessons that could be learned from recent Balkan history, but this is far from the most obvious. If anything, Western policy toward Kosovo has been riddled with hypocrisies and contradictions and merely deferred the inevitable. The decision to bomb Serbia also set a precedent: the prosecution of a pre-emptive war without the backing of the United Nations Security Council. The invasion of Iraq derives whatever legitimacy it can hope to claim under international law from that precedent.

As the dissident Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed at the start of NATO’s bombing campaign five years ago: “The aggressors have kicked aside the U.N., opening a new era where might is right.”