Serbian leader Milosevic's last act to hang in there

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "This is (Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's) last warning," said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in early June, announcing European Union sanctions against Belgrade in retaliation for Serbian attacks on Albanian villages in Kosovo. U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin was even blunter: "We are not ruling military options out."

So now, as Serbian tanks force their way down the roads from Pristina to Pecs and Prizren in a new offensive against the Albanians of Kosovo, while their artillery smashes nearby villages, NATO warplanes ought to be raining bombs on them. But in fact. NATO has gone rather silent. Could it be that it was just bluffing?

Of course it was bluffing. The North Atlantic Timidity Organization did not use air power against the Serbs in Bosnia until four years had passed and around 200,000 people had been killed. It is hardly likely to use force in Kosovo after only five months of fighting and fewer than a thousand deaths -- especially when it faces the additional difficulty that Kosovo is legally part of the sovereign territory of Serbia.

So are the Serbs going to crush the Albanians of Kosovo, who make up over 90 percent of the province's two million people? Not at all. They can probably re-open the roads between Kosovo's three biggest cities, since they have lots of heavy weapons and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) doesn't. But within weeks, the KLA ambushes will start again, and the roads will close again.

This war is not like those that Milosevic unleashed in Croatia and Bosnia, where there were large minorities of Serbs. Those were civil wars, in a sense, though they would not have happened if Milosevic had not been trying to create a "greater Serbia". But Kosovo is a classic "national liberation war".

Kosovo has legally been part of Serbia since Belgrade seized it from the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War in 1912, but it has an overwhelmingly Albanian population. This was no problem in the old communist Yugoslavia, whose leaders had the wit to give the province almost complete autonomy: under Tito, it was run by its own Albanian population. But that was before Slobodan Milosevic.

Milosevic's status as a Serbian nationalist hero is founded on his suppression of Kosovo's autonomy in 1989. Since then the Kosovars have lived in a police state where their language is banned from official use, their university and schools are shut down, and government jobs are reserved for the small Serb minority.

But for nine years, while first Slovenia, then Croatia, and finally Bosnia fought their way free from a federal Yugoslavia that had become merely a vehicle for expansionist Serbian nationalism, Kosovo remained peaceful. Instead of rebelling, the Kosovars opted for non-violent resistance, believing that their sheer numbers would eventually force Belgrade to recognize their rights.

They organized their own parallel Albanian-language schools, their own medical services, and even their own informal tax collectors to pay for it all. They held unauthorized, Kosovo-wide elections that made Ibrahim Rugova, an almost Gandhian advocate of non-violence, the unofficial "President of Kosovo". And since they weren't killing people, the world ignored their plight.

In the last two years, a few frustrated Kosovars formed a "Kosovo Liberation Army" that carried out a few attacks on Serbian police. But the province was still almost entirely peaceful until February, when Milosevic sent in his police to massacre several villages where individuals linked to the KLA were thought to live.

The killings were the last straw for most Kosovars: in months, the advocates of non-violence had lost their hold on the population, the KLA had grown a hundredfold to over 10,000 full- time fighters, and 30 percent of Kosovo was in its control. Like the French army in colonial Algeria, the heavily armed Serbian forces in Kosovo can seize any position they want -- but any ground they do not stand on immediately slips out of their control again.

Milosevic was very stupid to start this unwinnable war. But then, he is the most spectacularly unsuccessful nationalist leader since Adolf Hitler.

Just as Hitler promised a greater German state including all the ethnic Germans who lived beyond Germany's existing borders, Milosevic gained power by promising a greater Serbia incorporating all the areas where Serbs lived beyond Serbia's borders.

Hitler started and lost a war that shrank the lands inhabited by Germans in Europe by 30 percent: from East Prussia to the Volga to the Sudetenland, vast areas of Europe have been swept clean of ethnic Germans. In three smaller wars, Milosevic has achieved a similar result: thanks to him, there are no Serbs living today in eastern Slavonia, in the Krajina, or in much of north-west Bosnia.

In due course, there will probably be no Serbs left in Kosovo either. The Serbian forces can win battles there, but they are too demoralized and outnumbered to win the war. Despite its bluster, NATO will not intervene, because it doesn't want the casualties it would incur in fighting the Serbian army and because Kosovo is, in international law, sovereign Serbian territory. But eventually -- perhaps after great bloodshed -- the Kosovars will free themselves.

Why did Milosevic start this war? Because he is a man whose invariable response to domestic political problems is to create distractions elsewhere. "If you take the chess analogy," explained a foreign diplomat in Kosovo, "(Milosevic knows) how all the pieces move but doesn't know enough about the game to have a strategy. (His) only strategy is not to get checkmated on the next move... He just wants to hang in there."

So tens of thousands may die on Kosovo, and another of Serbia's neighbors will be left with a festering legacy of hatred, and in the end the territory inhabited by Serbs will shrink once again. And maybe then the Serbs will dump the political monster who leads them -- but even then, I wouldn't bet on it.