Kosovo: Win the war, lose the peace

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): It is getting very bad for Kosovo's remaining Serbs -- so bad that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is evacuating some of them to Serbia.

K-For, the mainly North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military force that is now the only source of law and order in the former Serb province, doesn't want the remaining Serbs to be evacuated, since it looks embarrassingly like the ethnic cleansing the war was fought to stop. But if NATO cannot or will not protect the Serbs, then how else can they be saved?

"Do we allow (the Serbs) to remain and be attacked, in some cases killed?" asked Dennis McNamara, UNHCR's top official in the Balkans. "Some people we haven't evacuated and who wanted it have been killed in the last weeks."

By the end of July, less than two months after the war's end, there had been 198 murders in Kosovo. Most of the victims were Serbs -- and while some of the killings were individual acts of vengeance, most were meant to frighten the rest of the Serb population into fleeing. It is working: the UNHCR estimates that 170,000 of the region's 200,000 Serbs have fled .

True, most of these Serbian civilians fled right after the ceasefire, some because they were guilty of atrocities against their Albanian neighbors, others because they feared that the returning Albanian refugees would not be making fine distinctions. But some 30,000 Serbs stayed in their homes -- and are now being targeted for terror.

"First a warning letter is received ordering (the Serbs) to leave their homes," explained Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesperson. "Then the threat is delivered in person, followed a few days later by physical assault, in some cases even murder...." And it's obvious who's doing it.

"The most serious incidents of violence," said a recent Human Rights Watch report, "...have been carried out by members of the KLA. It remains unclear whether these beatings and killings were committed by local KLA units acting without official sanction, or whether they represent a coordinated KLA policy." But the KLA leadership could clearly stop them if it wanted, and it is K- For's responsibility to bring the KLA to heel if it doesn't.

Why hasn't it done so? Because "concerns about the safety of K-For's troops, a lack of experience in law enforcement and, above all, a shortage of available personnel have frequently rendered K-For units unable and unwilling to take the initiatives necessary...," according to Human Rights Watch.

In mid-August, two months after war's end, there were just 65 UN police officers available to patrol Kosovo's capital, Pristina, one of the most heavily armed and deeply traumatized cities on the planet. So the number of Serbs remaining in Pristina has dropped to a couple of thousand, and in Kosovo as a whole Serbs are down from ten percent of the population to little more than one percent.

The NATO countries have over 600 million people and most of the world's money: it is not for lack of resources that they are failing in Kosovo. It is simply a short attention span.

Having mounted a huge military operation and taken great political risks to reverse the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and return the Albanian majority to their homes, NATO's leaders then all drifted off for their summer holidays and assumed that somebody else would tidy up. Nobody has, and so three disasters are being prepared in Kosovo.

The first, already largely complete, is the intimidation and expulsion of the Serbian minority. Obviously it's hard for the two groups to live together again after the years of oppression and months of terror that Serbs inflicted on Albanians in Kosovo, but good policing could make it possible.

The second disaster will be the discrediting of an important new precedent in international affairs. The Kosovo war's sole justification -- but a good one -- was that it was necessary action in defense of human rights, in a situation where all else had failed. But it is only justifiable if it is in defense of human rights, not just Albanian rights. Serbs are human beings too.

The final disaster is that Kosovo is being handed over by default to the worst elements of the KLA, people who have no mercy for Serbs and no love for democracy. Every guerrilla movement contains such elements, but they only prosper if their vicious methods are seen to succeed.

They are prospering now in Kosovo. If K-For does not quickly get a grip on the situation, then KLA extremists will establish complete control over the rural Albanian population -- and then, when NATO belatedly tries to dislodge them, they will turn their guns on K-For.

It was Kim Sengupta, writing a few weeks ago for The Independent, who captured the authentic voice of the soldiers who can see the peace being lost in Kosovo. A squad of British paratroopers had just chased a crowd of young Albanians away from a Serbian residential area in Pristina, disarming five of them, but the Para sergeant was not happy. "They'll be back," he said, "they always are."

Then the sergeant added: "Six months from now we will be at war with the KLA. It will be just like Northern Ireland, you go in to protect a people and end up by fighting them." We are not there yet, but at the present rate he is likely to be right.