APPENDIX 4
Memorandum submitted by Mr Christopher
Cviic
THE WAR OVER KOSOVO AND SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE
CHRISTOPHER CVIIC
(Christopher Cviic is Associate Fellow, European
Programme, The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London
and author of Remaking the Balkans (London:Pinter, 1991.
Second Edition 1995.).
The war in Kosovo has been a huge human tragedy—above
all for the province's majority Albanian population which has
suffered mass expulsion, murder, torture and rape on a large scale
at the hands of the Serb security forces. The war has also been
a tragedy for Kosovo's Serbs. Most of them have either retreated
with the Serb security forces or fled afterwards. Serbia is on
its knees economically, with much of its infrastructure destroyed
by NATO's 71-day bombing campaign. For the neighbouring countries,
too, the war has been a calamity. Yet, as so often in history
a sequence of events perceived in the shorter term as an unmitigated
disaster may here too prove in the longer term, when the dust
has settled, to have benign political and economic consequences.
This article puts the case for a "silver lining" scenario.
Consider first the de facto amputation
of the Kosovo province from Serbia and the establishment of an
international protectorate over it. This is good news both for
the region's stability and for democracy in Serbia. Ever since
Yugoslavia imploded and broke up in 1991, a democratic Serbia
living at peace with its neighbours has been seen as a key element
of political stability and economic progress in the whole of South-Eastern
Europe. But standing in the way was the expansionist "Greater
Serbià project, which had since the late 1980s been the
principal de-stabilising factor in the area of former Yugoslavia.
A negotiated retreat of the Belgrade-commanded Yugoslav People's
Army from Macedonia in 1992 was a step in the right direction
and made an important contribution to regional stability. The
military defeat in Croatia and Bosnia in 1995 of Serb paramilitary
forces backed from Belgrade by the regime of President Slobodan
Milosevic made another such contribution. It opened the way for
a gradual normalisation of relations between Belgrade on the one
hand and Zagreb and Sarajevo on the other.
However, the biggest block to progress towards
peace in the region and, indeed, democracy and the rule of law
in Serbia still remained in the shape of the Belgrade regime's
apartheid-style policy towards the majority-Albanian population
in Kosovo. Kosovo had been good for the regime of President Slobodan
Milosevic. Back in 1989, two years after Milosevic had gained
total power in Serbia, Kosovo's autonomy was abolished—to
popular acclaim in Serbia: Kosovo, a part of the medieval Serbian
state, was dear to the Serbs. When, in the late 1990s, Kosovo
Albanians, tiring of their then leaders' peaceful, "Gandhian"
attempts to win back the province's autonomy, began to resort
to guerrilla struggle, this was also grist to Milosevic's mill.
He could now assume the mantle of the defender of the country's
territorial integrity. As part of its counter-insurgency operations,
the regime reactivated old plans for a systematic, stage-by-stage
expulsion of the bulk of the Albanians from the province.
The bulk of the anti-Milosevic opposition went
along with the regime's policy of holding on to Kosovo at all
costs. This was partly out of conviction but partly also for opportunistic
reasons: the policy enjoyed wide popular support in Serbia (including
that of the Serbian Orthodox Church).
As well as exploiting the Kosovo issue domestically,
the Milosevic regime sought, with some success, international
tolerance for its policy of repression in Kosovo by invoking the
spectre of a supposed greater evil—that of a "Greater
Albanià consisting of Albania proper and majority-Albanian
parts of Macedonia and with an independent Kosovo as its nub.
Despite its superficial plausibility, the "Greater Albanià
project has never enjoyed significant support either among Kosovo's
Albanians or among the Albanians of Albania and Macedonia. An
encouraging pointer to the future has been the fact that, both
during the war and afterwards, one of the Macedonian Albanian
parties has continued to participate with two Macedonian parties
in the coalition government in Skopje. With Kosovo under an international
administration, any chance—if it had ever existed—of
a "Greater Albanià has receded.
Serbia's defeat in Kosovo should not be assumed
to mean the abandonment of Kosovo by Serbian policy and public
opinion. However, the chances of Serbia getting Kosovo back after
the massive "ethnic cleansing" of its Albanian population
in the first half of 1999 are nil. None of the Great Powers would
support Kosovo's return under Serbian rule. Nor would Serbia's
neighbours—even those (like Greece and Italy) traditionally
sympathetic to the Serbs. Some individuals have backed the idea
of attaching to Serbia the Serb entity in Bosnia (Republika
Srpski) as "compensation" for the loss of Kosovo.
Others have supported detaching "Serb" bits from Kosovo
and attaching them to Serbia. But neither idea has attracted official
governmental backing either from European Union governments or
from that of the United States. Too much is still at stake for
the outside powers both in Bosnia and in Kosovo to tamper with
the post-conflict status quo into which so much diplomatic
and military effort has been invested.
But equally, there is no governmental consensus
in favour of allowing Kosovo to become fully and formally independent.
In the foreseeable future international consensus will continue
to back the fiction of a Kosovo formally linked to Belgrade constitutionally—rather
as Bosnia remained under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan
in Constantinople for decades after it had been placed under Austro-Hungarian
administration in 1878.
The danger that Serbia, under Slobodan Milosevic
or later under a successor, might nevertheless challenge the status
quo and try to take Kosovo by force cannot of course be ruled
out categorically. For the moment, however, this danger remains
minimal. The seriously weakened Milosevic could not risk the renewal
of a military conflict that has cost Serbia so dearly. However,
conflicts outside Serbia have been extremely useful to Milosevic
as a means of strenghthening domestic support and there is still
some danger of Belgrade deliberately provoking such a conflict
with Montenegro, Serbia's smaller partner in Federal Yugoslavia.
Montenegro has used the Kosovo war to carve out, with Western
support, an increasingly independent position for itself, perhaps
preparatory to tiptoeing, if and when that became possible, out
of Yugoslavia altogether. As time goes on, this danger will gradually
diminish—not least because Russia has, for its own reasons
and to the annoyance of the Milosevic regime, taken Montenegro
under its wing.
In domestic Serbian politics, the Kosovo issue
will remain a factor for a long time—rather as, in Hungary,
Transylvania and other territories lost after 1918 remained an
internal issue for decades afterwards seriously bedevilling Hungarian
politics. As the Serbs continue to work off their bitterness over
the province's loss and look around for culprits, they will need
to face up to and acknowledge publicly—as none has done
up to now—the truth about the harm Serb policy had done
to others, as, for example, Germany did after 1945. Failure to
meet this challenge could be an obstacle to post-Milosevic rulers'
attempts to get international money for reconstruction and development
within the framework of rebuilt links with European Union.
However, the post-Milosevic era has not been
reached yet. Inside Serbia, the anti-Milosevic opposition is—not
least because of its own internal divisions but also because of
its complicity in Milosevic's "Greater Serbià policy—having
a hard time trying to dislodge Milosevic from power. But the writing
is on the wall for Milosevic. Unlike Iraq, Serbia will not—because
it cannot afford to—for long remain a defiant, pariah state.
Unfortunately, the slow pace of political change in Serbia is
delaying the launch of the international effort for the reconstruction
of the region within the framework of the Stability Pact. The
delay is also being caused by the slowness of political change
in Croatia, as President Tudjman's rule approaches its end, and
by political stagnation in post-Dayton Bosnia.
But, as Carl Bildt, Kofi Anan's envoy to the
region, quite rightly stresses, unless significant political and
economic reforms are made in the region—and that does not
apply only to the states of former Yugoslavia—much of the
reconstruction aid promised to Kosovo and to the region as a whole
by world leaders will be wasted. The underlying problem is the
persistence of old-style Socialist or Communist political and
economic systems, with all their built-in faults. Serbia has been
the biggest but no means the only drag on the region's economic
growth. "Crony capitalism" exists in Bosnia, in Croatia,
in Romania, even in Slovenia. The best that can be said—and
it is a lot—is that, with much of the old unfinished political
business at last out of the way, the preconditions for the region's
inclusion into the wider Europe have at long last been created.
Actually, the region—with the big exception
of former Yugoslavia—has been a lot of more stable for a
longer time than it had been given credit for. But even when the
trouble erupted in Yugoslavia in 1991, there were—unlike
in previous times—no territorial claims. All of the neighbours
behaved. With all the international attention that is at long
last being lavished on the region the danger of marginalisation,
which has hovered over it since the end of the Cold War, has receded.
But it is still there. Ultimately, it will be up to the locals
to remove it altogether.
|
