The Forgotten War
Remember Kosovo?
With our modern-day communications systems of radio, television, and the internet, we tend to forget many important things, even when it comes to crucial issues such as war and peace. Most had already started to forget about Afghanistan, and would have done so, if it were not for the recent spate of attacks which saw one Canadian, one British, and seven American soldiers killed in one week, leading to talk of a spring offensive against a „Taliban rebellion“. The Taliban? Weren’t they already defeated long ago, with a new Afghanistan rising from the ashes?
Sadly, the same holds true much closer to home, and our blindness is all the more unforgiving considering that wars within Europe, which cost over tens of thousands of lives, have promptly been forgotten. There was a time when almost everyone in the western world knew where Kosovo was, and journalists were falling over each other to cover what was happening. Even on the internet, hip and over-hyped intellectuals like Richard Barbrook would tag the end of each e-mail message with „Victory to the KLA!“
But for those intent on pursuing a programme of perpetual war for perpetual peace, it would do no good to dwell on the past. Thus, Kosovo is to this day trumpeted as a victory for the concept of humanitarian warfare. Everyone is happy, and the mission was accomplished; been there, done that, time to move on to the next target.
Yet Kosovo is anything but the happy and prosperous place that it was supposed to be. Nor has peace been brought to region. Crime, terror, ethnic cleansing, and smuggling is rampant — this time under the ćgis of the UN and not Belgrade.
Four years after it was „liberated“ by a NATO bombing campaign, Kosovo has deteriorated into a hotbed of organized crime, anti-ethnic violence, and even al-Qćda sympathizers. Though nominally still under UN control, this southern province of Serbia is today dominated by a triumvirate of Albanian paramilitaries, mafia gangs, and terrorists. They control a host of smuggling operations and are implementing what many observers call their own brutal ethnic cleansing of minority groups, namely Serbs, Roma and Jews. This, despite an 18,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force and an international police force of more than 4,000.
Typically, the response by the international community to this is to look the other way, for it’s far easier to do this than explain why NATO should go against the ones they „liberated“ just a few years ago. Furthermore, it would distract the west from other „nation-building“ projects that are currently underway around the world.
So as to not have an uncomfortable news item suddenly hit the headlines of the western media, a fortified concrete barrier around the UN compound on the outskirts of the provincial capital Pristina was constructed recently — just in case. The barrier is supposed to protect the UN against terrorist strikes by „Muslim extremists“ who have set up bases of operation in what has become a largely outlaw province.
Meanwhile, minority Serbs, who were supposed to have been guaranteed protection by the international community after the 78-day NATO bombing campaign ended in the spring of 1999, have abandoned the province en masse. The last straw for many was the recent round of attacks by ethnic Albanian paramilitaries bent on gaining independence through violence. Last summer saw one of the more grisly massacres, in where two Serb children were killed and four others wounded by ethnic Albanian militants while swimming in the Bistrica River, near Pec.
Attacks on Serbs in Kosovo, a province of two million people, have risen sharply over the past year. Serbs, who now make up 5% of the population of Kosovo, down from 10% before the NATO campaign, are the main targets of the paramilitary groups. According to statistics collected by the UN criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, 1,192 Serbs have been killed, 1,303 kidnapped and 1,305 wounded in Kosovo in 2003 alone. In June, 1999, just after the NATO bombing, 547 Serbs were killed and 932 were kidnapped.
The bombing campaign was partly launched by NATO countries to end what was viewed as a systematic ethnic cleansing program of Albanians by Serb security forces in the region. In its immediate aftermath, many Serbs left Kosovo to settle in other parts of Serbia and Montenegro.
While NATO was at war against Milosevic, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an insurgent group that emerged in the late 1980s to fight Serb security forces, were seen as allies. Soon after, they were regarded as guerrillas that were an obstacle to peace. Now they are viewed by many as outright terrorists.
While the KLA was supposed to be officially disbanded, it has carried on as a mafia organisation involved in the smuggling of both drugs and people. Some former members of the KLA joined the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), a civilian defence organization which is supposed to help local residents.
But far from helping local residents, the KPC has continued to do the work of the KLA — to clear the province of all non-Albanian ethnic groups, with the ultimate goal of a union with Albania and the establishment of a Greater Albania, which also includes parts of Macedonia, Montenegro, and even Greece.
The situation with the KPC has become so bad that even the UN has had to step in. Harri Holkeri, the province’s UN leader, suspended two generals and 10 other officers in late 2003, all members of an ethnic Albanian offshoot of the KLA. A UN inquiry into the KPC found that its mostly ethnic Albanian military officials have been involved in violent confrontations with Serbs, including a bomb attack last April on a Kosovo railway.
As the western world preoccupies itself with the Middle East, the situation in Kosovo is deteriorating rapidly. There is no question that the whole process of rebuilding Kosovo as a democratic, multi-ethnic society has failed, this primarily due to both the inability of the UN mission and NATO forces to protect Serbs and other non-Albanians from large-scale ethnic cleansing.
Some are even more harsh in their assessment. James Bissett, a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, remarked recently that NATO forces made a real mess of Kosovo. „The bombing of Yugoslavia was a dreadful failure on humanitarian grounds,“ he said. „It failed to stop ethnic cleansing, which has continued after the so-called peace treaty.“
Much of the ethnic cleansing presently underway in Kosovo is the work of Muslim ethnic Albanian paramilitary groups who have come to be known as the „Balkan Taliban“. In addition to murder and kidnapping, they have vandalized Serb cemeteries and destroyed many of the region’s Orthodox Christian monasteries and churches. Serbs complain that it’s a strategy of cutting Kosovo Serbs off from their historical and religious traditions.
In addition to the their ethnic cleansing activities, these groups have turned Kosovo into one of Europe’s biggest hubs for drug trafficking and terrorism. The province has become an important center for heroin, cigarette, gasoline and people smuggling. More than 80% of Western Europe’s heroin comes through Kosovo, where several leading drug laboratories have also been set up.
During the decade that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia, drugs and other commodities were usually smuggled through Bulgaria and Turkey to Western Europe. Now, more than 5,000 tonnes of heroin pass directly through Kosovo every month. In a recent article in Serbia’s Vreme magazine, Kosovo was referred to as the „republic of heroin.“
In addition to this, the Albanian mafia also controls trafficking in cigarettes, weapons, gasoline and women. Dozens of young women from impoverished towns and villages in the region are forced into prostitution rings centered in Kosovo, security officials say. Many of these women are then taken to work in Western European countries.
Compounding the problem of Kosovo is that there is little consensus on what to do next. Many Serbs and moderate ethnic Albanian politicians first would like a decision from the international community on Kosovo’s legal status; that is, will it remain a province of Serbia or become an independent entity. Most ethnic Albanians are calling for independence, but their more extremist elements would like to fold the province into a Greater Albania that would see ethnic Albanians take over the mostly Albanian regions of neighbouring states as well.
Yet the Serb government in Belgrade wants Kosovo to continue as part of Serbia. And the UN is at a loss of what to do, preferring instead to sit on the fence and send mixed signals to all sides hoping that somehow the situation will solve itself.
Although the NATO war with Yugoslavia took place five years ago, talks on Kosovo’s future began only recently. Serb and ethnic Albanian leaders met in Vienna in October 2003 to discuss transportation and the return of Serb refugees to Kosovo.
Most Serbs realise that the chances for Kosovo remaining in Serbia are slim. There is a powerful Albanian lobby in the United States that is determined to make Kosovo independent. Moreover, many Serb leaders know that to attract much-needed aid and investment, they will need to give way on Kosovo.
In the meantime, the situation is expected to only get worse, with renewed threats of violence against both the UN and Serbs in the province. Unless the international community takes a good, hard look at Kosovo and comes down from its fence-sitting position, Kosovo may yet explode into the headlines, thereby debunking NATO’s self-proclaimed success in the region. Moreover, it would start to raise some very uncomfortable questions concerning about the concept of humanitarian warfare and nation building. After all, if the west can’t handle Kosovo, then how are they are going to bring peace and stability to places like Afghanistan or Iraq?
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