September 7, 1999
A Multiethnic Kosovo Won't Work. What's Next?
By David Rieff, co-editor of "Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know" (Norton, 1999).
It was probably inevitable that Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, who were oppressed by the Serbs for years and then murdered by the thousands, would repay these cruelties in kind. Yet the international authorities in Kosovo were apparently caught off guard by the Albanians' eagerness for revenge, and are now scrambling to find ways to stem the exodus of Serb residents from the province. Bernard Kouchner, the top U.N. official in Kosovo, even hinted last week that local Serbs should be resettled to Serb-only areas in order to make it easier for the international security force, dubbed KFOR, to protect them.
Human rights and humanitarian groups, meanwhile, have expressed outrage that KFOR has so far been unable to slow Kosovo's transformation into a monoethnic state. They argue that more must be done to make Kosovo safe not only for Albanians, but for Serbs as well.
As unpleasant as it is to contemplate, however, a multiethnic society cannot be built in Kosovo. The reason is simple: It is not possible to rebuild something that never really existed in the first place. Because Kosovo, unlike Bosnia, has no tradition of interethnic harmony, its Serbs will continue to flee. Furthermore, a policy that focuses merely on building a multiethnic society in Kosovo actually makes a new crisis more, rather than less, likely. For such a policy completely overlooks the extent to which nationalistic sentiment guides the ambitions of ethnic Albanians not only in Kosovo, but also in neighboring Macedonia and Albania. Unless the West reconciles itself to these sentiments--perhaps by accepting the creation of a Greater Albania--peace cannot be sustained.
For entirely justifiable reasons, Western policy makers have treated the Kosovo issue as one of a succession of crises created by the breakup of Yugoslavia and Slobodan Milosevic's ambitions to forge a greater Serbia. But while the establishment of a U.N. protectorate in Kosovo has, for the time being, foiled the Serb dictator's ambitions, it has done nothing to answer the question of what kind of relationship an independent Kosovo will have with Albania proper and with Macedonia, which is between a quarter and one-third ethnic Albanian. U.N. officials in charge of administering the province still seem to have given little or no thought to these matters. If they mention Albania proper at all, it is usually to express anxiety about whether Albanian gangsters will slip across the border and exacerbate the security situation in Kosovo. For the most part, they seem absorbed in brokering deals between the various Kosovar factions, while at the same time maintaining the fiction that the province is still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. But they spend little time considering the Kosovo situation within its proper context, that of Albanian nationalism. This, they insist, is none of their concern since their mandate is merely to run the province and to help it establish what Jock Covey, the American deputy head of the U.N. mission, has referred to as "Eastern European-style transition politics."
Such Pollyanish complacency is all too familiar to anyone who has encountered U.N. officials in similar positions from Cambodia to Rwanda. The fact that Kosovo is not the Czech Republic, or even Moldova for that matter, but rather a place with no democratic tradition and little sense of nationhood (except the thwarted variant familiar to anyone with experience of the Kurds), seems not to have modified the thinking of U.N. officials at all. Claiming that an essential element of a political problem is not part of your mandate, meanwhile, is hardly the same thing as making it go away--a lesson the U.N. should have learned from its catastrophic experience in Bosnia.
The answers for Kosovo are not obvious. Eventual reunification with Yugoslavia is almost certainly out of the question, even on extremely generous terms. If Kosovo eventually gains its independence, it will still be an economic basket case. The result would be two impoverished Albanian states in southeastern Europe, bordering a restive Albanian population in Macedonia. This would not only threaten the stability and integrity of Macedonia, but would also have a spillover effect on Greece, which is home to an estimated 800,000 Albanian immigrants. Moreover, an independent Kosovo would be perpetually subject to attacks from Serbia.
Unless the West is willing simply to maintain Kosovo as a colony indefinitely (which may be what happens, despite the public denials emanating from Washington), there can be only one solution with the slightest chance of success: a Greater Albania.The dangers of this solution are obvious--particularly in light of its potential spillover effects to the rest of the Balkans--and so far Western governments have been implacably opposed to it. But they need to reconsider if they are committed to a general resolution rather than simply a doomed exercise in damage control. For only a Greater Albania--albeit one brought into being over a fairly long period of time and after an extended effort at economic development in both Kosovo and Albania proper--has the slightest chance of ushering in an era of lasting peace. Alone, neither Kosovo nor Albania is viable; at least together, with suitable safeguards and a commitment from the West to ensure their economic viability, they stand some chance.
In the near term, and at a minimum, no decision should be taken in Kosovo that does not take into account the spillover effects on Albania and Macedonia. On the economic front, the international effort to rebuild Kosovo must proceed in tandem with an effort to develop the other ethnic Albanian populations in the region. On the political front, a failure to address ethnic Albanians' national ambitions will increase the likelihood that the region will become more dangerous, and perhaps bloodier.