Will the Serbs and Kosovars ever live side by side again?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "We'll dig up our dead and take them with us. There's no chance the Serbs will stay." That was the instant reaction of a Kosovo Serb to the prospect that the Albanian majority will soon be returning to their wrecked homes, and it is all too likely to come true. A great evil may have been reversed by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)'s war against Serbia, but a smaller one is about to occur.

In fact, it is half-done already, by some accounts. Reports from within Serbia suggest that almost half of Kosovo's Serbian minority, some 80,000 people, have already left the province to escape the bombing. Most of the remainder may well leave with the withdrawing Serbian army and police units this week, in order to escape the wrath of the returning Albanian Kosovars.

This is certainly not the outcome that NATO wanted, and even the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) denies that this is its goal. One KLA spokesman in exile in Albania, Kadri Kryeziu, recently promised that "Serbs who didn't support Milosevic's fascism will have their security and rights guaranteed." But the bitter truth is that most Kosovo Serbs did support Milosevic, and many of them participated actively in the government-backed robbery, rape and murder or expulsion of huge numbers of people from the Albanian- speaking majority.

There are stories of individual Kosovo Serbs who helped and sheltered their Albanian neighbors, especially in apartment buildings in the larger towns where it was possible to do so without being condemned by the wider Serb community. But that wider community was fully complicit in Milosevic's project for ridding Kosovo of most of its Albanian-speaking Muslim population, and must now have good reason to fear what would happen if it stays put.

What will push Kosovo's remaining Serbs into flight is not just the fear that the KLA will come down from the hills and start revenge killings after the Serbian troops pull out, but before NATO forces can get through the minefields and booby-traps to establish order in Kosovo. There is also bound to be quite legitimate fear in many Kosovo Serbs that to remain there under the NATO-run protectorate that will now emerge is to run a serious risk of prosecution for war crimes.

The crimes were committed, of course, on the assumption that there would never be prying foreigners looking into them. But Kosovo's total pre-war population was just under two million, with only one city that topped 100,000 people. It was a place where people generally knew each other's names -- including their killers' names.

Now the war has ended in a settlement that will bring all the surviving witnesses back to name their tormentors (and since the killings were mainly done in order to frighten the rest of the Kosovars into fleeing, there are lots of surviving witnesses). It has ended so abruptly, moreover, that there will not be time to destroy evidence like mass graves before the Serbian army pulls out and foreign investigators arrive. Lots of Kosovo Serbs will have strong legal reasons to leave.

Then there is the psychological dimension. For the past ten years Serbian nationalist propaganda has dinned in the single paranoid message that Serbs can never be safe if they live among other people. The conclusion ordinary Serbs were meant to draw (and most were quite receptive to the message) was that non-Serbs must be driven out of any territory that had even a minority of Serbs living in it, and that all these territories must be linked together as Greater Serbia.

But the flip-side of that conviction is that if Serbs cannot have a territory for themselves, then they must leave it. Sharing it is unthinkable. This was strikingly evident in the mass abandonment of the Serbian-inhabited parts of Sarajevo (with much encouragement and even coercion by Bosnian Serb forces) after the Dayton peace accords decreed the reunification of the city in 1995. Better even to lose your home than live under non-Serb rule, for everybody else is in league against you.

This victim' style of nationalism is strongly reminiscent of the Germans under Hitler, who still managed to feel sorry for themselves and ask why the world was against them even while carrying out the most flagrant aggression and the most terrible atrocities. And the analogy is even closer than that, for in the end, as a result of its actions, Germany lost about 15 percent of the lands traditionally inhabited by Germans, and ten million German refugees left their ancestral homes in east-central Europe never to return.

Nobody planned this exodus, or even dreamed of it, before Hitler launched his war in 1939. But nobody was prepared to invest a huge amount of effort into reversing it, either. Though many individual refugees bore no guilt for the horrors of Hitler's war, there was a general feeling that the Germans had brought it on themselves.

Serb refugees from Kosovo are likely to find the world equally uninterested in their plight, especially once the full details of what has been happening to the Albanians of Kosovo over the past eleven weeks come to light. It is, in truth, hard to imagine Serbs and Kosovars living side by side again after what has transpired -- and if Milosevic remains in power in Belgrade, it is quite unimaginable.