"Ethnic Tensions" in Kosovo. posted by Richard Seymour

The Latest Crisis

Following the announcement that the UN will allow further elections to take place in Kosovo, which will be overseen by OSCE monitors, renewed “ethnic tensions” explode onto the streets of Kosovo . The partitioned town of Kovoska Mitrovica has witnessed pitched battles between Serb and Albanian “communities” resulting in 14 deaths. This followed the drowning of two Albanian children who allegedly leaped into a river after being chased by Serbians with a dog. It now seems that, whatever the rumours, no Serbs were involved. The violence has since spread across the country, with Albanians burning Orthodox Churches (90% of which are already ablaze according to Radio Five), and Serbs destroying Mosques . Britain is now to send 750 troops to Kosovo to put the natives back in their place.

Who Did What, Where and Why...

As per usual, it would repay significantly to step back from the immediate horror and ask what happens when nothing happens? In other words, what is in this place that is leading to a renewal of the old “divisions” which Nato thought they had pounded to dust when they wrecked the Serb civilian infrastructure, killed a few thousand and dented some tanks.
First of all, the terms that I have enclosed in “scare quotes” are precisely useless for talking about this. The only reason I use them is because they are automatically recognised by everyone when discussing a topic like this. “Bitter hatreds”, “barbaric enmity”, “divided communities” … the lexicon of the liberal humanist (for such it is) is thus disfigured with politically vacant terms. I remember them well from growing up in Northern Ireland when the alleged apolitical liberals of the press pack would constantly bemoan the “sectarian rivalries” which were tearing Northern Ireland apart. The only problem was “hard-liners” and “the tiny majority that spoils it for the everyone else”. Please! It wasn’t no “tiny minority”. And, at any rate, this whole gesture reduces an intensely political conflict with a transparent inequity of power and blame to a simple ethnic conflict, a failure of two cultures to understand one another properly.
Imperialists, naturally enough, seem to use the same tactics to divide people wherever they find it useful. So why should it surprise us that Nato and the UN thought the best thing for Kosovo would be first to partition Serbia and Kosovo, second to partition the towns within Kosovo? From Belfast to Kashmir, the same dynamics replicate themselves in alarming fashion. (Or perhaps these are best understood as yer Wittgensteinian “family resemblances”) It isn’t that they create the division in each case – rather, they take it as read, perhaps as something natural in the species they’re dealing with, and institutionalise it. Predictably, it also contributes enormously to diverting the resources of the subjugated into internal conflict.
So, what has been germinating, breeding, in this cleaved community?

Neither Belgrade, nor Washington...

The starting point has to be international interference in the former Yugoslavia, specifically the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo which began on March 24th, 1999. The bombing's alleged motivation was the oppression of Kosovo Albanians by the Serb authorities. Either the scale of Serb repression in Kosovo had escalated (one version) or it was going to escalate (complementary version) under the aegis of Operation Horseshoe. I bow to noone in my cynicism toward corrupt old Stalinoid regimes like that in Milosevic-era Serbia. But my equal cynicism toward America necessitates that I cast a somewhat wider net of critique than the narrow concerns of the mainstream (especially liberal) media.

It would be nice to believe that Nato had transmuted itself, in the post-Cold War world, from a defensive-aggressive military pact into the armed wing of Amnesty International (as Nick Cohen might have had it in one of his many comforting soujourns off the planet). But the record of that war suggest a different story to the one relayed to us by Nato and the ideologues who supported the war. Specifically, the UK government cannot have been overwhelmingly concerned about the oppression of Kosovo Albanians because George Robertson claimed, speaking before the House of Commons on the day the bombing started, that until mid-January 1999, "the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been".

He later claimed:

"We were faced with a situation where there was this killing going on, this cleansing going on - the kind of ethnic cleansing we thought had disappeared after the Second World War. You were seeing people there coming in trains, the cattle trains, with refugees once again." (Jonathan Dimbleby, ITV, June 11, 2000)

William Cohen, the US Defense Secretary claimed:

"We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing... They may have been murdered." (Quoted, Degraded Capability, The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, edited by Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, Pluto Press, 2000, p.139)

This sort of claim was typical during the war, and was often used to legitemise the war itself. The salient fact that the bulk of the repression being described (and considerably exaggerated) began after the war started was rarely reported. Prior to the bombing, and for the following two days, the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported no data on refugees. On March 27, three days into the bombing, UNHCR reported that 4,000 had fled Kosovo to the neighbouring countries of Albania and Macedonia. By April 5, the New York Times reported "more than 350,000 have left Kosovo since March 24". It is also worth noting, regarding Robertson's March 24th testimony before the Commons, that the mid-January point he refers to is January 15th, when the Racak massacre took place, killing forty-five people. Subsequent to that atrocity, there was no discernable shift in the distribution of violence - therefore, if the observations of both Robertson and Robin Cook were correct until Racak, they were correct afterward. (I don't know if they were, but since they are the ones who nominally led us to war on that occasion, they are entitled to be judged on their own words). According to those who waged the war, it cannot have been fought on the basis of an escalation of violence, approaching "genocide" (a term frequently bandied about during that war).

Nevertheless, The Guardian beamed :

"It's hard to resist pride that a Brit has been deemed worthy of presiding at a top table... Even if George Robertson were a shining star of the administration rather than a competent performer whom events have tested and found to have the right stuff, his loss would be a small price to pay for remaking Nato." ('A Brit for Nato? Robertson has a lot of the right stuff', Leader, the Guardian, August 2, 1999)

It is true that violence dramatically escalated after the war. The OSCE reports:

"Once the OSCE-KVM [monitors] left on 20 March 1999 and in particular after the start of the NATO bombing of the FRY on 24 March, Serbian police and/or VJ [army], often accompanied by paramilitaries, went from village to village and, in the towns, from area to area threatening and expelling the Kosovo Albanian population."

But that was "entirely predictable" according to Gen. Wesley Clark. In fact, "the military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible efficiency with which he would carry it out." But that missed the point. The Nato war "was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was not designed as a means of waging war against the Serb and MUP [internal police] forces in Kosovo. Not in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea."

After the Catastrophe

Nevertheless, it is not surprising that the crimes that took place as a result of the bombing were invoked to justify that bombing. Nor is it surprising that the bulk of the news media which had been so excited by Milosevic's crimes against the Albanians proferred little or no reportage of, or reaction to, the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo which followed the end of the war. Jiri Dienstbier, the UN representative on human rights, declared in late 1999:

"The spring ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians, accompanied by murders, torture, looting, and burning of houses, has been replaced by the autumn ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Romas [gypsies], Bosniaks, and other non-Albanians accompanied by the same atrocities."

A November 1999 report by the International Crisis Group concluded that "there are as many killings right now in Kosovo as there were before NATO intervened."

Now, this is entirely predictable - not because the Kosovars were harbouring some secret agenda of destroying Serbia (as some Serbian nationalists pretend), but because it is precisely in the logic of trying to create a seperate state on the basis of ethnicity. (If anyone, by the way, will have the chutzpah to argue that this was a reaction to Serb crimes, will they at least be consistent and claim that the crimes of the Serb military were a reaction to Kosovan terrorism? That way I can disagree with them twice.) Indeed, these crimes did not merely let up after a while - which you might think if you allowed yourself to be guided by the quality and quantity of the news coverage. In 2001, 24 Albanians were shot, 13 of them children. They were members of the Krasniqi clan, of whom four men were considered "loyalists to the Serbian regime" because they worked in Serbian companies. For this, their whole family was exterminated:

"'Everyone in Kosovo knows but none dares to speak about it,' says the former prime minister of the exiled Kosovars and current chairman of the New Party for Kosovo, Bujar Bukoshi. 'After the war the cruelest cleansings took place among the Albanians. Under the pretext that they were 'Serbian collaborators', the leaders of the KLA liquidated their political opponents; old blood feuds were settled, and Albanian civilians were executed by the Albanians themselves.' ... The number of the victims is estimated to be more than a thousand. The perpetrators or instigators were usually former senior KLA leaders; after the war they were integrated nearly without exception into the KLA successor organization, the civilian Kosovo Protection Corps." (Der Spiegel, "The Cruelest Cleansings" September 21st, 2001).

Nor have the occupation forces acquitted themselves with any particular grace. Their corruption, the lack of democracy, the involvement of their security company, Dyncorp, in prostitution and sex with underage kids , perpetual unemployment and poverty have all led to rising anti-UN sentiment and protest in Kosovo. Radical Islamists have been able to capitalise on the poverty of Kosovans under the occupation, effectively monopolising the distribution of food, clothing and shelter in some areas, creating a "Taliban phenomenon" in which occupation policies in Kosovo may lead to "the production of Europe's own Taliban". (Isa Blumi, Current History, March 2003).

The Serbs have also attempted to reclaim some lost ground. And this is where Mitrovica comes in. In 2002, the International Crisis Group noted that the Serbian government was funding a security force in the northern half of the town, known as the "bridgewatchers" (which is about the height of creativity in the new Serbian regime), who see themselves a defending their part of the town against Albanians south of the river Ibar. Indeed, as far back as 2000, when Milosevic was overthrown, Kostunica suggested that Serb troops should be allowed to return to Kosovo. Naturally, the UN occupiers have done their very best to make the Serbs living in the north of Mitrovica even more resentful of the occupation than they had already been, by attempting to sieze control of a Serb factory in the town.

The Kosovo Provisional Authority has also been stirring the pot . In 2002, it passed a declaration challenging the Border Delineation Agreement of February 2001 which had established an internationally recognised border between Serbia and Macedonia. Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi, a member of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), presented the motion. The PDK is the main political successor to the KLA, headed by former commander Hashim Thaci. Albanian seperatists had never been particularly hot about an independent Macedonia, and two off-shoots of the KLA (the National Liberation Army and the ANA) began to mount attacks on the Macedonian army and police. One assumes the KPA declaration was intended to heighten that feeling and further the Greater Kosovo ends of certain a certain kind of Albanian nationalist. Dutch military intelligence analysts, at The Clingendael Institute , claim that the US has been supporting the NLA in its campaign against Macedonia .

Imperialism, Nationalism and Resistance

Those are some of the ingredients which are contributing to the present crisis. Serbian nationalists want to retake Kosovo, and would presumably like to enact some kind of retribution on Kosovo Albanians. Kosovan nationalists want to expand Kosovo, and expel or subdue remaining Serbs. The UN occupation is proving corrupt and held in considerable contempt on "both sides of the sectarian divide" (as ITN newscasters used to say about Northern Ireland). And in the midst of it all, the political supporters of Osama bin Laden are winning "hearts and minds" as fast as the "coalition" is losing them. There are forces within Serbia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia capable of challenging those setting about the destruction of the Balkans from within and without. Whether they are capable of mounting a decisive challenge is difficult to say. But the pretense that imperial occupation was ever a solution to the Balkans post-Tito crisis has been abraded somewhat by the dire presence and performance of UN supervised troops in Kosovo. Pan-Yugoslav solidarity is the answer to the bigots, nationalists and geopolitical schemers:

"The only way out of the national and state chaos and bloody confusion of Balkan life is a union of all the peoples of the peninsula in a single economic and political entity, on the basis of national autonomy of the constituent parts. Only within the framework of a single Balkan state can the Serbs of Macedonia, the Sandjak, Serbia and Montenegro be united in a single national-cultural community, enjoying at the same time the advantages of a Balkan common market. Only the united Balkan peoples can give a real rebuff to the shameless pretensions of tsarism and European imperialism."
(Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Question and Social Democracy)