Freedom’s unfreedom

Will independence for Kosovo unleash another round of bloodshed in the Balkans?

Mehru Jaffer Vienna

Kosovo, the most troubled spot in Europe, is also the continent's poorest. Out of a population of two million, 90 per cent are ethnic Albanians. They happen to be mostly Muslim and want independence from Orthodox Christian Serbia. Serbs strongly oppose this and have the support of fellow Slavs in Russia in the United Nations Security Council. Serbia maintains its claim on the province and a part of northern Kosovo is now carved into an all-Serb enclave.

Kosovo, which has a per capita income of not more than one-and-a-half euros and an economy that thrives on smuggled petrol, cigarettes and cement, is now headed for independence in the early months of the new year. The recognition of Kosovo's independence, warns Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, will be the most dangerous precedent after World War II. Russia agrees that unilateral recognition of Kosovo's independence could trigger a 'chain reaction' of problems around the world.

Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, wants Russia to accept the reality that Serbia and Kosovo are never going to be one again, or risk instability there. EU leaders are tired of negotiating Kosovo's future and feel that independence for the province is the only alternative. However, within the EU, only a handful of its 27 member states are prepared to recognise independence for Kosovo. Particularly Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia fear that the move will encourage minorities in their own territories to do the same.

This muscle-flexing on the part of the influential in the world makes it impossible to forget that the Cold War is over. It also questions the motives of the most powerful members of the international community as they exchange threats and counter-threats over Kosovo, instilling fear and insecurity in the region.

An autonomous province of the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo is administered by the UN since 1999. Its future continues to be uncertain. The province shares its borders with Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. The two million population of Kosovo is largely ethnic Albanian with pockets of Serbs, Turks, Bosniaks and Romani people. Even before Yugoslavia — the non-aligned nation created for southern Slavs after World War II — disintegrated nationalists made the Serbian minority in Kosovo a political issue to whip up popular support. The wound of Kosovo on the southern tip of Serbia was reopened around 1987. In the trouble that followed, Serbs began leaving the province at the rate of about 2,000 a year while the Kosovo Albanians boasted the highest birth rate in Europe.

Nationalists claimed that Serbs were driven out of Kosovo by an organised conspiracy of Albanian terrorists and separatists. Those defending the Albanians in Kosovo said that the Serbs are moving out of ruined Yugoslavia's poorest and least developed region for economic reasons. They said that Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia are subjected to systematic racial discrimination at the hands of Slav Serbs and Macedonians.

Declaring the rise of Serb nationalism, Slovenia and Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia. Bosnia-Herzegovina, populated almost equally by Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, sided neither with Serbia nor with Kosovo. Attempts by Orthodox Christian Serbs and westward-looking Catholic Croats to establish their own nation-states on the grave of the common state and to define mutual borders by force broke into a terrible war in the 1990s at the doorstep of Bosniaks. Many of them lost the only home they have ever had. “The great victims of the wars of Yugoslav secession are the Muslims of Bosnia who have been squeezed between the fratricidal struggle of Serbs and Croats,” writes Misha Glenny in The Rebirth of History, a 1992 book on Eastern Europe in the age of democracy.

However, finger-pointing at Serbs as solely responsible for the mess in the former Yugoslavia activated a number of powerful and unpredictable volcanoes that lay dormant for the latter half of the last century. These have spewed forth lava of passions and conflicts whose fire had been doused by the Cold War, according to Glenny, a former BBC World Service Central European correspondent.

To single out Serbs as villains was to create new hatreds. To demonise the Serbs and their nationalism alone is to ignore the importance of nationalism among other ethnic groups and the competing interests of each of these groups as they searched for sovereignty within, at first, and later from Yugoslavia. This ignores the economic and geo-political realities of the time soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The role of Germany, Austria, the Vatican, EU and the US in encouraging the break-up of a united and socialist Yugoslavia and its consequences are not mentioned enough.

The reason for the war over Kosovo is traced back to 600 years when Serbs lost the territory to Ottoman Turks in 1389. The Serbs consider Kosovo their cradle of civilisation. The ethnic Albanian population claims that their national renaissance began here in 1878. Serbian accusations that Albanians are usurpers are countered with Albanian arguments that they descend from Illyrians who predated the arrival of Serbs in Kosovo. To reduce the problem to Christian versus Muslims is to simplify it. The bigger question before the region in the middle of the 20th century was how to get the diverse population here to live together with each other.

Yugoslavia was one solution.

“South Eastern Europe's 'national question' had always been tenuous,” wrote Edward S Herman and David Peterson in the Monthly Review of October 2007 in a reasoned essay titled The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse). Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, the three most bloodily contested areas in the 1990s, had been areas of high ethnic fragmentation and persistent hotbeds of political criminality. Throughout Yugoslavia's brief history, ethnic unity seemed more an artefact of party pronouncements, induced personnel rotation and institutional reorganisation than an outcome of genuine political incorporation or enhanced cohesion among the different segments of the population.

This fragile situation was held together by the charismatic leadership of Marshal Josep Tito along with western support for independent Yugoslavia in a Soviet-dominated area. Tito's death in 1980 loosened the glue and exposed economic disparities and decline that had accumulated over the decades. The West, without fear of a vanished Soviet Union, seemed to say “you are either with us, or on your own” after 1989.

It was not the poor but the wealthy who were most fearful of loosing what they already had as they saw the experiment in unity in the heart of Europe slip away before their eyes. Although less than 30 per cent of Yugoslavia's population lived in Slovenia and Croatia, they accounted for half of federal tax revenues. Soon, they stopped paying and openly expressed resentment. They looked up to Western Europe and were the first to break away from Yugoslavia.

Perhaps a more balanced look is a way of arriving at a more just solution for the region in the future.

It is seldom stated how the international community did not help Yugoslavia stay together. A little self-reflection is crucial. Interventions made recently in the name of humanitarianism in conflicts around the world seem more like adventures to advance the agenda of the rich and powerful and seldom to rescue people from the suffering imposed upon them. Often, the intervention has been leisurely, after wars have already broken out between nationalities, ethnic groups, religions or between the State and its population.

In the case of Yugoslavia, the Monthly Review paper argues, it was otherwise. The intervention came early enough to encourage divisions and ethnic wars. This had a damaging effect on the freedom, independence and welfare of the inhabitants, although the interventions served well the ends of Croatia, Bosnian Muslim and Kosovo Albanian nationalists, as well as those of the US and NATO.

The 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO provided precedents that advanced the same law of the jungle lineage under the cover of human rights, serving a model for the later US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. And a lot of lies were told to enable this to happen. Indeed, whether Kosovo's promised independence is another lie or not is the big question.