<http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/The%20Balkans/Kosov
o/Kosovo_The_Plot_Thi.html?seemore=y>
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/The%20Balkans/Kosovo
/Kosovo_The_Plot_Thi.html?seemore=y
12 May 2006
Kosovo: The Plot Thickens
by Srdja Trifkovic
For a long time the proponents of Kosovo's independence have acted as if the
game was up, that all that remained was for the "international community" to
settle on the formula for independence-and for Serbia to sign on the dotted
line under pressure. Until recently, many old Balkan hands in the world's
capitals that matter expected that by the end of 2006 it would be all over.
There are recent signs, however, that "it" won't be over that soon, and that
the outcome is by no means preordained.
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It did not look that way when the United Nations abandoned its own policy of
"standards before status" last fall. The achievment of "standards"-measured
in terms of non-Albanians' personal security and the return of non-Albanian
refugees, which number a quarter of a million-only required a pretense of
ethnic and religious tolerance on part of the Kosovo Albanians, but they
refused to offer even that much. In addition, the political leadership in
the province passed into the hands of three notorious war criminals with
jihad-terrorist and organized crime connections, Agim Ceku, Ramush
Haradinaj, and Hashim Thaci.
The negotiations in Vienna opened in late February, but they have not been
going well and are doomed to fail: the province's Albanians will settle for
nothing less than independence, and that is the only issue on which Belgrade
will not budge. Serbia entered the talks in spite of the fact that the UN
envoy presiding over them is Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of
Finland who was instrumental in deceiving the Milosevic government into
surrendering Kosovo to NATO in 1999, and who has since served on the Board
of the International Crisis Group (ICG), together with Wesley Clark, Morton
Abramowitz, and other notorious pro-Albanian interventionists.
Over the past week, however, there have been signs of significant
counter-movement. Articles critical of the proposed independence scenario
have started appearing with surprising regularity. In a Baltimore Sun op-ed
on May 10, Christopher Deliso reminded us that "[a]verting a humanitarian
catastrophe was NATO's stated justification for bombing Serbia" but then
came "ethnic cleansing of more than 200,000 Serbs and other minorities by
Albanian militants." "Behind their façade of optimism, Western leaders
negotiating Kosovo's future status are panicking," Deliso says. If Kosovo
becomes independent, the remaining Serbs will flee-and the UN already
dismayed them by making Agim Ceku, "a man who once terrorized them, prime
minister":
Such privileged treatment reveals the fatal flaw of the U.N. mission.
Canadian police Detective Stu Kellock, who headed the U.N. Regional Serious
Crimes Unit in 2000 and 2001, says investigations implicating Albanian
politicians or their associates were routinely blocked. The orders came
directly from Washington, London and Brussels. Mr. Ceku and Mr. Haradinaj
control Kosovo's militant factions and are considered heroes by Albanians.
An anxious United Nations continually has sought to stay on their good side
through appeasement.
Alarmingly, Deliso concludes, the West has no Plan B for ensuring Balkan
peace:
In early 1999, Kosovo was a brutal but contained local conflict, relegated
to villages. Botched Western intervention has made it a potential precedent
for multiregional warfare.
A day earlier, on May 9, Admiral James "Ace" Lyons warned in the Washington
Times that "the drug, sex slave, weapons, money-laundering, and other
illicit trades" are flourishing in Kosovo, but none of this should come as
any surprise:
Even in 1999, when the Clinton administration decided to take military
action in support of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), there were
numerous and credible intelligence and news reports of the KLA's criminal
and terrorist inclinations. Predictably, KLA veterans found even more
opportunity to ply their illicit trades when, ostensibly demobilized, they
were recruited by the UN into Kosovo's police, civil administration, and
quasi-military 'Kosovo Protection Corps.' The foxes were asked to guard the
chicken coop-another U.N. fiasco.
If Kosovo becomes independent, Adm. Lyons concludes, even the minimal
interference in the Kosovo-based gangs' operations will be removed:
A criminal state not seen since the defunct Taliban regime in Afghanistan
will be set up with easy proximity to the rest of Europe. Such an outcome
would make a mockery of some of the United States' most important global
security priorities. While the international community desires some sort of
"closure" to the ongoing mess in Kosovo (and this is understandable), it is
hard to think of a supposed solution worse than independence. Seven years
after the 1999 war, this is one Clinton legacy that demands urgent
reconsideration.
The name of the former commander of America's Pacific Fleet was noted, only
days earlier, on the list of distinguished writers, policy analysts,
diplomats, clerics, and military men who have joined the Board of Advisors
of the newly-launched American Council for Kosovo, a Washington-based
nonprofit organization "dedicated to promoting a better American
understanding of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija and of the
critical American stake in the province's future." The Council's stated
mission is to "generate a heightened American awareness that an independent
Kosovo-forcibly and illegally detached from Serbia, as is now being
contemplated by the international community-would be harmful to U.S.
national interests and to European and global security."
Seven years after the 1999 war, the Council's introductory statement goes
on, criminal and jihad terrorist elements of the supposedly disbanded
"Kosovo Liberation Army" dominate the province's administration and maintain
a reign of terror over Kosovo's still-dwindling Christian Serb population.
Churches and monasteries that have not already been desecrated, blown up, or
burned by mobs of Muslim Albanians exist under tenuous protection from NATO.
And yet,
Incredibly, elements of the international community-including some sectors
of the U.S. government and important voices in Congress-have accepted the
idea that the only 'solution' for Kosovo is to detach it formally from
Serbia and to make it an independent state. This would mean officially
handing power to the criminal and jihad terrorist KLA leadership, who would
then be empowered as a 'sovereign' government. The terrorist and organized
crime menace emanating from Kosovo would increase. The last Christian Serb
elements (and all other non-Albanians, such as the Roma) would be
eradicated. Kosovo independence also would violate every principle of the
international system by forcibly and illegally detaching Kosovo from a
recognized state, Serbia, to which the government of that country
justifiably insists it will not agree.
But how does an organization created so late in the day intend to go about
it? One of the officers of the American Council for Kosovo is an occasional
"Chronicles" contributor, James Jatras, who says that the task of educating
the American public and policymakers of the inadvisability of the inertial
course of supporting Kosovo's independence is by no means impossible:
When the Vienna talks inevitably stall, the 'gameplan' is for the Western
powers to announce the 'solution' they have already decided upon. Aside from
the futility of their trying to assuage global Islamic sensibilities by such
a course, detaching Kosovo from Serbia without her consent breaks every
principle of international law. Sir Thomas More famously quipped about
giving the devil himself benefit of law-and Serbia is no devil, but Ceku,
Haradinaj, and Thaci are indeed the devil. The simple fact it that they are
terrorists and criminals. Whatever the bona fides of the late Mr. Rugova,
the mask is off.
Despite the pretense of "guarantees" for Serbs, Roma, etc. (there are no
Jews left, and even Catholic Albanians are almost gone), their fate in a
future "KosovA" is clear: there is none. The American Council for Kosovo-and
the lobbying and public relations actitivites working in parallel with
it-are predicated on the belief that it is necessary to break this issue out
of the Balkan policy specialist ghetto where it currently residesThe Council
will seek to focus on Kosovo the concerns of a broader range of opinion with
respect to jihad terrorism, persecution of Christians in Muslim-dominated
areas, anti-drug, anti-slavery, etc. Even this early into the effort, says
Jatras,
I am sensing that people here are surprising ready to rethink Kosovo if the
issue is framed right. I am confident that a change of course can and will
be effected as this unfolds. The absurdity and immorality of cold-bloodedly
consigning tens of thousands of people to extinction-not by inaction
(Darfur) but by a 'positive' decision of 'democratic' governments of mainly
Christian countries-ostensibly because of a man who's been out of power for
six years and is dead anyway, is inescapable.
The Council's twin themes are jihad terrorism and crime. Its position is
that the United States must not support detaching Kosovo from Serbia to
create an independent Muslim Albanian state because doing so would lead to
the elimination of the remaining Christian Serb population, strengthen
global jihad terrorism and organized crime, and fatally undermine the rule
of law in international affairs. Not only would this be bad for Serbia
(which is not a primary American concern), it would be bad for the United
States, which should be our concern.
The American Council for Kosovo is "an American effort," its founders say.
While it is undertaken on behalf of the Serbian National Council of Kosovo
and Metohija, it will seek to show why the current drift of policy is
harmful to American interests. They vehemently deny that it is too late in
the day to reverse what is often described as an irreversible process:
It absolutely is not too late! In fact, the false sense of inevitability is
one of the means by which the pro-independence lobby hopes to stampede
western policy (and even Russian policy) into a bad outcome, and even to box
Belgrade into accepting the unacceptable. The Serbian government must remain
unyielding on this matter. Any number of reasonable arrangements are
possible-but only if Kosovo remains within Serbia. Any number of Muslims
live inside majority non-Muslim countries which, with no exception I can
think of, better protect their interests than is the case of any Christian
minority in any Muslim country. Muslim Albanians in Kosovo are being offered
anything and everything they could possibly want (and indeed, had enjoyed
even before launching their initially political, and then terrorist, efforts
for independence), showing that what is at issue is not how they will live
as human beings but whether they will wield state power-in effect, to have
the 'right' to persecute and eradicate, as their behavior has shown.
What ultimately lies behind the Kosovo Albanian movement is violence, they
warn: "give us what we want, or there will be trouble. (And if you do-even
more trouble!" At the same time, many voices in the West suggest that we
should give the jihadists what they want, or there will be violence. That
would be self-defeating: among the many jihads in the world-Bosnia, Kosovo,
Chechnya, Kashmir, southern Philippines, etc.-appeasing the jihad has never
worked. Moreover, Jatras adds, if the international community, especially
the United States, try to appease the jihadists in Kosovo, that would only
whet the appetite of the terrorists for new victories. It would establish
the principle that once a militant Muslim minority resorts to violence in a
majority non-Muslim country, they are "entitled" to detach the area where
they are concentrated and create a new state where they can persecute and
uproot the non-Muslims.
Jatras also rejects suggestions that Russia may agree to Kosovo's
independence because it stands to gain by invoking that precedent for its
own purposes in S. Ossetia, Abkhasia, Transdnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and
other unrecognized ethnic statelets in the former Soviet Unin. There had
been suggestions of that sort from Moscow, but that notion seems to be
weakening:
My sense is that Moscow's willingness to go along with independence in the
UNSC and the Contract Group is falling fast. Also, as we thrown sand into
the pro-independence machinery here in Washington, I hope that will also add
to Moscow's reluctance to go along. Certainly, not long ago, some in the
Putin administration had suggested that if Kosovo is detached from Serbia,
the same principle should apply to places Russia cares about. Moscow's
gambit as least had the virtue of unapologetic self-interest: if we look the
other way at your bit of larceny, we'll expect you to return the favor. But
as becoming ever more evident to Moscow, the favor wouldn't be returned, as
western capitals have made very clear. Kosovo, they say, is 'unique.' Indeed
it is. It would be hard to find another example of a place where governments
professing the war on international terrorism as their first priority are
helping a Muslim terrorist movement with a strong jihadist element to detach
what is universally recognized as a part of another sovereign state and
consigning the remaining Christian element to extinction. Indeed, if we're
looking for Kosovo to become a 'universal' precedent with application to
Russia, a more plausible future candidate would be Chechnya.
It appears that Moscow has realized that it could never expect any credit
from its western partners on breakaway regions of other former Soviet
republics. Even the prospect of a Russian union with Belarus-a recognized
sovereign state, presumably entitled to do what it wants-will remain on the
verboten list. Finally, given the kind of anti-Russian rhetoric coming out
of Washington these days, there is no reason for Mr. Putin to offer any
favors.
****
In conclusion, it is worth remembering that the U.S. policy in the Balkans
is not cast in stone. The dominant modalities of the "resolution" in Kosovo
have acquired an explicitly Clintonesque flavor only in the second half of
2005, most notably with the return of Nicholas Burns to the center stage.
Never a paragon of original thought or principled consistency, his nominal
boss Dr. Rice has internalized the views of Mr. Burns, and other Albright
proteges like him, on what needs to be done on Kosovo and Bosnia. She has
come to favor a Balkan strategy that is hardly different from that advocated
by candidate John Kerry in 2004, but that strategy has never been subjected
to serious scrutiny within an Administration that has far bigger fish to fry
further east. As recent developments indicate, not all is lost. On Kosovo in
particular, things are not nearly as bleak for the opponents of independence
as that strain of the "international community" embodied in the ICG and Mr.
Burns wants them to believe, or as the decision-makers in Belgrade are often
cajoled into believing.
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