Massacre and bluff as nightmare continues in Kosovo

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "The international community is not prepared to accept the brutal persecution and murder of civilians," said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on Sunday -- and not one of the assembled journalists laughed out loud. Journalists can be quite polite.

"The (Serbian) police told us to run," said one of the few survivors of the massacre in the Kosovo village of Racak that Fischer was deploring. "As soon as we started to run, they started to shoot us." But most didn't even get to run.

When William Walker, the American head of the international Kosovo Verification Mission, saw the bodies of 45 ethnic Albanian victims in Racak on Saturday, he was overwhelmed: "I don't have the words to express my revulsion at this unspeakable atrocity: to see bodies like this, with their faces blown away by what was obviously (weapons) held close to their heads." Walker said plainly that the Serbs were to blame -- so Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic ordered him to leave the country within 48 hours.

Milosevic also ordered the border closed to Chief War Crimes Prosecutor Louise Arbour of the International Criminal Tribunal, who tried to enter Kosovo to investigate the slaughter. The Yugoslav army shot up the deserted village again and moved 40 bodies to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo province, presumably to destroy the evidence. And North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which threatened air strikes in late September to make Milosevic stop the previous round of massacres in Kosovo, tried to look really stern and impatient.

But for all its huffing and puffing, NATO is unlikely to use its aircraft against the Serbian forces in Kosovo, let alone against Belgrade. And it is certainly not going to commit its own troops to Kosovo to stop the killing.

Why not? NATO did finally use its aircraft against the Serbs in Bosnia, after all, and thereby ended three years of genocide. Why will it not at least do the same service for Kosovo?

NATO has accepted the independence of Slovenia, of Croatia, of Bosnia, of Macedonia, of all the former republics of federal Yugoslavia except Serbia itself and tiny Montenegro. It has tacitly backed the Croats, and used force to support the legal government of Bosnia in its resistance to Serbian attacks. But Kosovo (it says here) is different.

Fully 90 percent of Kosovo's 2 million inhabitants are Albanian-speaking Muslims, and less than 10 percent are Serbian. When Yugoslavia really was a federal state where Serbs were merely the largest single group, not the rulers, under the Communist dictator Josip Tito, Kosovo's Albanians ran their own affairs, and were mostly loyal to the ideal of a multi-national Yugoslavia.

But Kosovo was never formally a 'republic' like the others. In deference to the sensitivities of Serbs, who regard the area as the mystical cradle of their nation, Kosovo legally remained an 'autonomous province' of Serbia. And that was fine too, so long as the rights of the Albanian majority were respected.

Even Tito's successors kept the deal -- until Slobodan Milosevic, who began his climb to absolute power in Serbia in 1989 by abolishing Kosovo's autonomy and turning it into a place run by and for the tiny Serb minority. The Kosovars (as the Muslim majority call themselves) were outraged, but mounted a purely non-violent resistance to Serbian tyranny for nine years.

Being non-violent, they were therefore ignored by the outside powers that were busy fighting the fires that Milosevic started in Croatia, Bosnia, etc. Inevitably, some frustrated Kosovars eventually turned to military resistance. The response of Milosevic's regime was mass terror and massacre, which drove practically all of the majority into the arms of the rebels.

The Serbs killed at least 2,000 civilians and made a quarter of the population homeless last August and September before NATO threats forced them to accept a cease-fire. Now, with an unseasonably mild winter making military operations possible, the killing in Kosovo has started again. So why won't NATO stop it?

The public answer is that it cannot permit the independence of Kosovo no matter how badly Serbia behaves because the 'province' is legally a part of Serbia. But that is mere sophistry: nobody in NATO really fears that Kosovo's secession from Serbia would be used as a precedent by Basque nationalists in Spain or Quebec separatists in Canada.

The private answer is different. It is that an independent Kosovo would unite with Albania to form a large, mostly Muslim country -- and that, in turn, would destabilize Montenegro and Greece by attracting the Albanian minorities in those countries.

This is nonsense. There is no reason to believe that the well- educated and (relatively) prosperous Albanians of an independent Kosovo would tie themselves to the anarchic and destitute nation of Albania -- and if they did, so what? Macedonia (which is ethnically 25 percent Albanian) might experience a little instability; Greece (which is two percent Albanian) would experience none.

On one hand, low-level risks of 'destabilization'. On the other, ongoing massacres. So why, finally, does NATO go on making hollow threats that can only undermine its own credibility, while shirking the actions that would put a stop to the murder?

I'll let you in on the secret. It's because it's afraid of casualties. Air power is all right for fireworks displays, but you need to commit ground troops if you're going to do something complex like shepherding Kosovo to independence.

Ground troops, in the Kosovo situation, mean casualties. The largest military organization on the planet is a complete paper tiger, because its governments dare not face the domestic political repercussions of even a dozen dead soldiers. So Kosovo's agony must continue until some tens of thousands more people have been killed, and the remaining villages have been burned to the ground, and the Serbs finally give up and go home.