by Christopher Lord
Monday, April 9, 2001
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How is it possible that we have ended up with such an appalling mess? The root cause is a failure of policy. NATO has no vision of how the Balkans area is supposed to look when this is all over, and without such a vision, any military action is necessarily haphazard, and the results unpredictable. The original plan was simply to show Slobodan Milosevic who was boss. Now that he has been removed from power in Belgrade, NATO is left with no real policy objective. However, since it was not NATO, but popular rebellion in Serbia, that removed him, there is no way to announce victory and leave. Quite the opposite: if NATO left now, and the Albanian extremists escalated their programmes of ethnic cleansing inside Kosovo plus guerrilla attacks at the borders, it would be hard to see it as anything but a defeat for the forces of the West.
The same policy paradox is seen very clearly in Macedonia. NATO is still committed to protecting an ethnically mixed society there. Macedonia is the only part of former Yugoslavia where the mixed society of the socialist period has survived, and where there has been no organised conflict. However, in Kosovo and in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where NATO (and especially American) involvement led to drastic political changes, what resulted was not an ethnically mixed society, but one based on ethnic separation.
In Bosnia, there are supposed to be two entities, set up by the USA after Dayton, and protected by NATO: the Republika Srbska (Serbian Republic) and the Croat-Muslim Federation. These are then supposed to co-operate in shared political arrangements for the running of the country. This has never worked, and the only reason this system survives is because it is enforced by foreign troops. At the time of writing, the Bosnian Croats have withdrawn from the Croat-Muslim military structures, for political reasons, and the three ethnic groups are co-operating less and less. The rhetoric is of co-operation and harmony; the reality is of separation and confrontation.
While the official Western line is that this is all a great success, the absence of a similar attempt to develop "co-operative" political structures in Kosovo demonstrates that no one believed it was worth trying anything like that again. Instead, the talk is of Democracy. However, the ethnic cleansing of the Albanians has ensured that any democratic, majority decision about the future of Kosovo would consist of an almost unanimous demand for total independence.
We have already seen that even this is not enough for the extremists, though. They are pressing for other Albanian-occupied territories (in Macedonia and Federal Yugoslavia) to be added to Kosovo, and in Albania itself it is feared that they would also like to take over that country, and add it to the "Greater Albania" thus created. This would be unacceptable for the other states in the region, who would rightly fear a general war over territory. This could suck in countries that have not so far been involved, such as Greece and Bulgaria.
Macedonia has a worse problem still: it could well cease to exist if anything like this were to happen.
When we talk about "the Macedonians", we must realise that these labels of nationality have a different meaning in the Balkans. Historically, the political divisions in Macedonia were not ethnic or linguistic, but religious. As a province of the Ottoman Empire, all the decisions were made by local Turkish officials, and the political status of the subject populations depended on their religion. They all lived together under the Turkish power. Later, they all lived together under the special socialist system of Yugoslavia, where there was a higher political ideal, at least officially: international socialism. Now that this, too, has gone, all that can replace it is nationalism: which leads inevitably to ethnic separation, as the differences become irreconcilable.
However, if you take a Macedonian Slav and move him or her across the border into Bulgaria, he or she instantly turns into a Bulgarian. There is no real difference in the language spoken in the two countries, and they are historically members of the same Orthodox division (millet, in Turkish) of Ottoman society.
The reason, then, that Macedonia has survived so far is not directly because the Macedonian people need their historic homeland (a claim often made by Croats, Serbs, Albanians and others): it is because the Slav majority fears that an ethnic war will simply lead to their state being dissolved, and their "nationality" disappearing. The balance of power with the Albanian minority (although there are many other minorities too: almost every nationality in the Balkans is represented in Macedonia) has suited both the main players. The Albanians have their own schools, special political representation, and other advantages; and the Slavs are able to continue to have what is on paper at least their own country.
Macedonia is seen by many Balkans specialists as the key to the whole region: the "Macedonian Question" has been discussed by historians and other scholars for generations. If Macedonia dissolves, the last bastion of multi-ethnic politics falls. NATO, however, has now imported the ethnic conflict they have resisted so long inside their borders. Albanian guerrillas, operating safely from bases in Kosovo which are supposedly under NATO's military control, and with a political project that has only arisen as a result of NATO's war, make incursions on one side, attempting symbolic seizures of territory. On the other side, the Macedonian Army, going into battle for the first time, is supported by NATO at a military and political level, and encouraged to pour gasoline on the flames with artillery fire and helicopter gunship assaults.
It is not yet a very serious conflict, and should be resolved peacefully if at all possible. But Bosnia and Kosovo have demonstrated that whatever we would like to believe, and however pure our intentions seem to be, if the Macedonians make the mistake of listening to us, the lack of direction in our policy will produce the same results as usual: the radicalisation of the ethnic conflict, the failure of inter-ethnic political dialogue, ethnic cleansing, paramilitary gangsterism and war.
After that, if they are lucky, we will stomp in and force them to accept an unworkable political system, which will only continue to exist as long as we are prepared to send our troops to enforce it.
Christopher Lord is the editor in chief of Perspectives - The Central European Review of International Affairs, published by the Institute of International Relations in Prague. His recent books include "Politics" (1999) and "Family Values" (2000), a collection of fiction published in the United States.
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