Kosovo: Method in Milosevic's madness

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): There's been much heavy breathing from NATO this week, as the Western alliance tries to frighten Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic into restoring peace in Serbia's Albanian-majority province of Kosovo. This time, say NATO sources in Brussels, there will be "no failure to engage early and assertively" (as there certainly was in Bosnia). But it's probably the same empty bluff as usual, and Milosevic doesn't look the least bit impressed.

The fourth Balkan war of the 1990s is now getting underway in Kosovo for the same reason as all the others: it serves Milosevic's domestic political purposes. He needs to distract the Serbs from their economic misery, and in particular he needs a crisis that will help him to impose his candidate as president in the election in Montenegro on May 31.

All that's left of Yugoslavia (thanks to Milosevic's previous wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia) is the two republics of Serbia and Montenegro. The latter has only 600,000 people to Serbia's 10 million, but it controls a big block of seats in the federal parliament, so Milosevic's own power was threatened when Momir Bulatovic, his man in Montenegro, was ousted last October.

The new Montenegrin president, Milo Djukanovic, hints at secession if Belgrade does not drop the extreme Serb nationalist policies that have brought sanctions and economic ruin to both parts of the federation. But Milosevic could not survive such a change of policy, and Montenegrins are basically 'mountain Serbs'.

So as part of Milosevic's effort to sway this month's Montenegrin election in favor of his loyal pawn, Momir Bulatovic, he has stirred up a new crisis in Kosovo. The idea is to return the Montenegrins to their old pro-Serb loyalties by emphasizing the threat to the 'sacred Serbian territory' of Kosovo.

But surely there's more to it than that. What about all the ancient ethnic hatreds that bedevil former Yugoslavia?

The 'ancient ethnic hatreds' are a myth. There was hostility between Serbs and Croats as a result of World War II, but nothing comparable between Moslems and Christians in Bosnia, nor between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo. The lie about ancient, irrepressible ethnic hatreds was fabricated in the early 1990s by European diplomats to justify their own inaction in the face of the Bosnian genocide, and swallowed wholesale by the ignorant Western media.

The 'Kosovo problem' is actually only nine years old. Serbs and Albanians lived together in peace in this southernmost bit of Serbia for a thousand years, until Milosevic discovered in 1989 that the road to power lay in appealing to the paranoid and self- pitying side of Serbian nationalism.

For some centuries Albanian-speaking Moslems have been the majority in Kosovo, now making up over 90 percent of the province's 2 million people. But few people disputed Kosovo's historic ties to Serbia, because the former communist government of Yugoslavia gave the Kosovars full autonomy within Serbia, including Albanian-language education, media, and medical services.

Relations only went bad after Milosevic won power in Belgrade in 1989 by playing up Serbs' fears about their minority status in Kosovo. The Serbs there were oppressed, he claimed, and promptly destroyed Kosovo's autonomy. Since 1989, all official institutions in Kosovo have been monopolized by the tiny Serb minority.

The Albanian majority responded with great restraint, creating their own parallel system of unofficial schools, hospitals and services while peacefully seeking the return of self-rule. But their requests, being non-violent, were ignored by everybody.

A handful of frustrated Kosovars turned to terrorism two years ago, but they were repudiated by the vast majority, and the level of violence in Kosovo was still lower than that in Spain's Basque provinces -- until March, when Milosevic sent in the Serbian special forces to massacre an entire village. Now an estimated 120,000 Albanian peasants have abandoned non-violence to enlist in the Kosovo Liberation Army, and 200 people are already dead.

This is presumably the result Milosevic wanted: after the last nine years, he cannot plead ignorance. But why did he want it?

Recently I found some old notes from a conference in Belgrade in 1977, and realized that I interviewed Slobodan Milosevic two decades ago. The point is that I forgot about it: he was a typical mid-level apparatchik without an idea in his head, and I didn't even use the interview. Whereas if I had met Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot early in their careers, I'm sure I would not have forgotten it.

All three men came to power by exploiting a paranoid streak of nationalism that saw the Germans/Cambodians/Serbs as the innocent victims of a global conspiracy. Milosevic's wars have cost perhaps a quarter-million lives, a far smaller toll than Hitler's or Pol Pot's, but that is not the real distinction between them. It is that Milosevic is an utterly amoral careerist.

Hitler and Pol Pot had an intensity of conviction that made them into forces of nature: they distilled and personified the fears and hatreds that drove their genocides. Whereas Milosevic is totally cynical about the nationalist obsessions he exploits in his fellow-Serbs. When I first met him, he was cheerfully throwing Serbian nationalists into jail for anti-communist activities.

Milosevic has never sought anybody's death as a matter of principle; genocide is only desirable if it serves the higher goal of his own political survival. None of the wars that have wrecked former Yugoslavia since he came to power were inevitable. They just seemed like good tactics at the time to a sociopath in power -- a man with no fixed ideas or values beyond his own advancement, and nothing much by way of a long-term strategy either.

The disproportion between atrocious means and petty ends in Kosovo is typical of Milosevic. Nor is he deterred by the prospect that this time the conflict may end in the partition of Serbia itself, so long as the Serbs blame somebody else: the main thing is that his own power survives. These tactics have worked before, and he has no reason to believe that they will not work again.