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The Constitution of the CRCE requires that its Trustees and Advisers dissociate themselves from the analysis contained in its publications but it is hoped that readers will find this study of value and interest.
The author, Alex Standish, is a member of the CRCE Board of Trustees. He is currently a BBC television producer, but the views expressed here are entirely his own. Editor's Note - In preparing this publication from a talk by the author, we have included some of the audience contributions which followed the talk, as we felt they complement the text. We are grateful to those who took part for allowing us to publish their comments.
Kosovo One Year On : The Crisis and its Consequences
When I began to prepare for this talk I was reminded of a similar presentation which I gave for CRCE back in February 1998, and some of those people who are present this evening may remember the occasion. At that time I had recently returned from the Balkans after having worked in Albania for the latter part of 1997. On my way back to Britain I travelled through Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia. I formed the impression that a regional crisis, which many people had been predicting for nearly a decade, was almost inevitable.
I say 'inevitable' not because I subscribe to a Marxist interpretation of history, but rather because no one appeared to have a workable solution to the problem of Kosovo. My view then, and now, is that international foreign policy towards the region is conspicuous by its absence. In the words of one high-ranking American diplomat: 'the problem with our [i.e. the US State DepartmentÕs] policy in the Balkans, is that we don't have one.'
That is not to say that there are no policy positions on certain issues, but that overall there is no coherent regional strategy for the future stability and development of the southern Balkans. My aim this evening is not to suggest solutions, but primarily to explore the nature of the problem, and the precarious situation which currently prevails in Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia.
As most of you will be aware, I recently returned from another long assignment in Kosovo and Macedonia for the BBC, following two stints in Serbia,Êthe first for Channel 4 and the most recent for the BBC. However at this point, I think that it is important to stress that this presentation does not reflect BBC thinking on the subject, nor am I in any way speaking on behalf of the BBC. The views expressed here are my own.
Before I go on, I should also like to say a few words about place names. We are all sensitive to the debate over the so-called 'o/a' issue, that is 'Kosovo' or 'Kosova'. I noted that in his book Kosovo: War and Revenge, which was published recently and which I commend to all of you, Tim Judah felt the need to state in a special note the following: 'Do not look for biases in place-names. There are none. Kosovo is Kosovo, as the region is known in the English-speaking world, and not the Albanian ÔKosova' or the full and official Serbian ÔKosovo and Metohija' (or the abbreviated Kosmet) unless in a quote.' I would take a very similar position. When I am speaking Albanian I use the Albanian form; in English I use the accepted English form. The same holds for the names of towns and cities.
Dayton
Although it almost amounts to stating the obvious, the Kosovo crisis was a disaster waiting to happen. Having worked in the Balkans for a substantial part of the last decade (four years of that in Albania alone), I, along with most other regional specialists, could see that tragedy unfolding. What was more difficult to predict, of course, was the exact point at which the tension would spill over into open conflict. I remember having discussions with Kosovar Albanian politicians in the mid-1990s and noted how the tone changed radically in the aftermath of the Dayton Accord of 1995 which singularly failed to address the problem of Kosovo.
That, in many respects, was the crossing of the Rubicon. While it is abundantly clear that the international community was overwhelmed by the break-up of Titoite Yugoslavia and its consequences, and absolutely unprepared, and frankly unwilling, to face the prospect of bloody inter-ethnic warfare in Europe's own backyard at the end of the twentieth century, the issue of Bosnia overshadowed all other considerations. A solution had to be found, even of the most imperfect kind, to halt the bloodshed. This excluded any serious discussion of the explosive situation in Kosovo. But it was also inevitable that the consequences of that policy would return to haunt Europe.
The legacy of the calculations which led up to Dayton and the spectre of Bosnia, the horrors of which have come to dominate popular consciousness of Former Yugoslavia, are everywhere to be seen in the run up to the Kosovo conflict. Many of the same diplomats and foreign ministry personnel were involved, some of course in more senior positions, and I believe that this is the single most important factor in what is currently in danger of becoming a peace-keeping debacle for all concerned.
Avoiding a crisis. Could the Kosovo crisis have been avoided? In my view, by late 1998, the answer is 'no'. At that time I was sent to Belgrade by Channel 4 and I spent several weeks in discussion with Serbian officials, including members of the cabinet and advisers close to the Socialist Party leadership. What became clear to me at that stage, immediately after the first NATO activation order had been signed, was that no one really had any idea of how to resolve the crisis.
Serbian ministers were, I think, genuinely surprised that the NATO leadership suddenly appeared radically to alter their position on the Kosova Liberation Army (the KLA or UCK). In my view, the KLA had actually been very welcome in terms of Realpolitike for the Serbian government. It was never a serious military threat to the Yugoslav forces, although its well-publicised attacks on mainly local police and civilian targets served to reinforce much of the frankly racist anti-Albanian rhetoric which had assisted Slobodan Milosevic early on in his rise to political power.
KLA activity certainly helped develop a defensive laager mentality amongst the remaining Kosovar Serbs, although by 1998 I think a substantial proportion of them realised that they would ultimately pay the price for Belgrade's policies. One only has to look at the ongoing exodus of Serbs from Kosovo which took place during the 1990s and before to appreciate that there was a greater degree of realism present, albeit very reluctantly acknowledged, that whatever the eventual outcome, the Serbs of Kosovo would be the ultimate losers. This was also very well understood amongst the urban intellectuals of Serbia. As one Serbian minister remarked to me in November 1998, 'once the western media started using the term Ôguerrillas' rather than Ôterrorists' for the KLA, we knew we had lost Kosovo.' It is important to note the vital role the international media played, and the way in which the KLA leadership handled its public relations. The KLA may not have been a particularly able military force, but it fought a first-class media campaign, and that had a very significant impact upon international public opinion, the so-called 'CNN factor', which in turn provided NATO with vital domestic support within most member states. Economics
Paradoxically, the Kosovar Albanian community had to a large extent also won the economic battle for the province in the aftermath of Belgrade's amendment to Kosovo's autonomous status in March 1990. Having been effectively ousted from ailing state industries and chronically under-funded government employment, the Kosovar Albanians developed an intricate social, educational and economic network, along with a parallel political system with elections (unrecognised by the Belgrade authorities) being held in May 1992. One immediate consequence of this parallel system, and the mass emigration of hundreds of thousands of young Kosovar Albanians, primarily males, was that Kosovo, which had been the least economically developed region of Former Yugoslavia during the communist era, soon became Yugoslavia's answer to China's Hong Kong: a major source of hard currency, remitted to families by the emigrants working abroad.
This relative prosperity ultimately became yet another cause of bitter resentment amongst Kosovo's Serbs. How was it possible that these 'Skiptars' (as the Albanians were referred in a derogatory sense) suddenly gained the upper hand in economic terms? Serbs who remained in state employment, particularly following the great inflationary disaster caused by Serbia's unfettered printing of money, saw their salaries and pensions effectively disappear; at the same time some of their Albanian neighbours were able to build impressive new homes, drive imported cars and enjoy a Western European life-style, at least in the towns. This bitter resentment, fuelling the negative ethnic stereotypes which became prevalent, particularly amongst Serbs outside large cosmopolitan centres such as Belgrade or Novi Sad, was to have tragic consequences during the conflict itself, when the politics of envy played a major factor in attacks on Kosovar Albanians.
The Failure of Rambouillet
Much analysis has gone into the reasons for the failure of the Rambouillet talks. The BBC has, of course, offered its own interpretation as those of you who have seen the Panorama special 'Moral Combat' will know. While the debate will no doubt roll on for many years to come, my own shorthand version is that the Serbian delegates simply did not count on the Albanians signing up to the deal on offer; when the Albanians did so, Belgrade was left without a strategy.
Now there is a major difference of opinion between those observers who maintain that President Milosevic has been very clever, and those who think he has not. The former school of thought, on which I would like to concentrate now, bases its view upon the following points:
First, the Military-Technical Agreement signed at Kumanovo on 9 June last year, and UN Resolution 1244 which followed, are very different documents to that which was on offer at Rambouillet.
The second point is that through those agreements, Yugoslav sovereignty is formally preserved. NATO forces do not have free access to Serbia proper, and the KFOR mission is, at least on paper, under UN auspices with a small and somewhat poorly equipped Russian contingent.
The third point is that President Milosevic remains in power. The domestic opposition in Serbia remains chronically weak and disorganised. In the absence of Anglo-European influence at home, he is actively undermining what opposition and independent media remains. At the same time he is settling some unfinished business with opponents, new and old.
The fourth point is perhaps the most important of all. President Milosevic has been able to present the conflict in what is for him a much more positive light than would have been possible had he signed up to a deal at Rambouillet. In effect, he considered it more heroic to stand and fight, even against the combined forces of NATO, than to do a diplomatic deal in smoky conference halls aboard. Milosevic's honour, and that of the Serbian nation, could be presented as remaining intact. 'Better to lose with honour than to be party to a dishonourable peace imposed by our enemies,' seems to be the political message, as he wished the nation a 'happy peace' in his television broadcast.
Of course, Mr Milosevic's longer term future is very far from certain. He remains under indictment from the International Criminal Tribunal. Serbia's economy is in a desperate state. After the air campaign was over I travelled across Serbia visiting the worst hit areas, such as Pancevo where the oil refinery was hit, Kragujevac where the Zastava works (which formerly produced the Yugo car) were bombed, and Novi Sad which lost its three trans-Danube bridges.
In the resulting documentary which followed on BBC2 in October, '78 Days: an Audit of War', we assessed the estimated economic cost of rebuilding Serbia, including its damaged infrastructure. We came up with a figure, which is inevitably only an estimate, of some £20 billion. Of course, as several leading Serbian economists including Dragoslav Avramovic have pointed out, the destruction of some industrial plants, for example, the Yugo car plant, may actually have been a blessing in disguise for the government in Belgrade, in that it has saved the state the task of closing down uneconomic industries at some future date. So in terms of discussing the future for reconstruction, it is not simply a case of replacing like with like. Indeed, Serbia is in desperate need of rethinking its entire industrial structure. Another important factor is that unlike the rest of the Former Yugoslavia, privatisation has been lamentably slow in Serbia. Many of the industries are still controlled by the old system of centralised state cronyism, and that has certainly not helped the Serbian economy generally. Finally, in addition to the great losses incurred in the war, Serbia has lost Kosovo, which previously functioned as the equivalent of China's Hong Kong, the doorway through which considerable hard currency was coming has now been slammed closed. I think that is going to have a long-term impact of Serbia.
Post-War Kosovo
Having jumped over much of the actual detail of the conflict, which I am sure is very familiar to most of you, I would like to say a few words about the human cost of the crisis. One of the features of modern wars is the immediacy of the post-mortem, which is now being conducted with such vigour in the media. NATO's media team and leading politicians have been accused of overplaying the suffering of the Kosovar Albanians in order to keep domestic public opinion behind the campaign, military action which, in my own view, few politicians had actually believed would ever be deemed necessary, certainly not for 78 days.
I believe the argument over actual casualty figures is effectively part of what has become known as the 'pornography of war', that a conflict requires big numbers in order to be considered serious. It is almost the reverse of Adolf Eichman's infamous comment on the Holocaust, I haven't checked the accuracy of the quote, but I think it is not apocryphal, that 'sixty dead is a tragedy, six million a statistic.' In a sense, it should make little or no difference whether 2,000 Albanians were murdered during the conflict, or 10,000, or 50,000. Nevertheless it has become an important part of the post-war equation, and I think it should be addressed.
On the basis of evidence collected so far, it is important to add that rider, it appears that around 3,000 Albanians were killed. Some allegations, such as the use of the Trepca mines as a mass grave, have been proven by international investigators to be baseless in fact. In other cases, however, including some in which I have conducted interviews myself, massacres did take place after the airstrikes began. The villages of Qyske and Pavlan in the north-west near the city of Pec were the scene of atrocious mass killings, and there is ample evidence to support that.
I spent around nine weeks in Pec interviewing survivors, including Mrs Bala, whose family was targeted two days before the conflict ended. Although she, severely woundedÐ her husband and one small son survived, three other boys were machine-gunned to death in their own sitting-room. The youngest boy was five. Her brother-in-law was tortured and killed, his wife raped and murdered. Two of their daughters died in that same machine-gun attack. I have interviewed what is left of that family, which was entirely unconnected with any political activity. I have filmed in the room where the murders took place. It is unchanged, even down to the blood-soaked carpet and bullet-marked walls. (We did not, in the end, use it in the actual film, as it was felt to be too powerful, too upsetting.) As a professional journalist, I have no doubts in my own mind that what I was told there was true. What happened really happened, and those alleged to be responsible, local Serbian paramilitaries and policemen, have also been identified. Hopefully, one day, justice will be done.
In assessing the future of Kosovo, however, it is vital to consider the future for the province's Serbs. At present, their situation is catastrophic. Although much media attention is currently focused on the divided northern city of Mitrovica, Pec has already seen its pre-conflict Serbian population fall from around 30,000 to two, both of those elderly women living alone, but guarded 24 hours a day by Italian KFOR troops. Small Serbian enclaves still exist around the Serbian Orthodox Church's Patriarchate, which shelters around 37, including the community of nuns. One village near Pec, Gorazdevac, is still entirely Serb, but is surrounded by Italian troops. There are a few other scattered communities, but effectively most of the Serbian population of western Kosovo has fled or been killed.
I had personal experience of what - along with the murder of the Bala family - must rate near the top in terms of sheer wickedness. A young mentally ill Serb was sheltering with his mother in the Patriarchate. His name was Slavko. One day, in December, he ran out of the medicine necessary to control his condition, schizophrenia. He just wandered off, past the Italian checkpoint and into Pec. Now I had come to know Slavko, having met him several times during my visits to the Patriarchate to conduct interviews. He was quiet and harmless. His worse vice was cadging cigarettes which he smoked in the bushes because the nuns banned smoking.
Slavko was absent for a few hours before the alarm was raised, and by then it was too late. In the last week of the twentieth century, a mentally ill person had been stoned to death in the street of his own home town. I shall repeat that, stoned to death, in case anyone missed it. Slavko's body was discovered by the Italian force. Even they - paratroopers who had seen conflict - were shocked.
Now during conflicts, wars, appalling things do happen. It takes a certain kind of killer, there are mercifully few of them, to machine-gun a five-year old child, as in the massacre of the Bala family. It takes a similar sort of killer to be capable of stoning a mentally ill person to death. And until those individuals, from both communities, have been brought to justice, the future of Kosovo is indeed bleak.
The Future
Perhaps the key factor for future of Kosovo rests in the issue of its constitutional status. At present, under UN Resolution 1244, it remains within Federal Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), but despite oft-repeated commitments to 'substantial autonomy', the UN, NATO and KFOR seem likely to be set upon a collision course with the Kosovar Albanian population.
At present, in my analysis, although there is no detailed political strategy for full independence coming from the Albanian side, there can be little doubt that that is the future objective of practically all political groupings amongst the Albanians, from the ex-KLA leadership under Hashim Thaci through to the pacifist leader of the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK), Ibrahim Rugova. At present, the basic policy of the Albanians appears to be essentially one of 'wait and see', while to the UN and KFOR, 'the I word', 'independence, has become t'he great unmentionable.
The Albanians know that Kosovo is ungovernable without their co-operation and consent. So far, relations with KFOR peace-keepers have been generally non-confrontational, other than in cases of straight-forward criminality, and around flash-points such as Mitrovica. Of course, there have been some serious incidents. To date 27 peace-keepers have died, but few of these cases appear to have been as a result of direct assaults. The real danger so far has been to be caught in the cross-fire or a demonstration, or killed in road or other transport accidents. The one exception seems to have been the Russian paratrooper killed recently by a 15-year old Albanian schoolboy.
There is, however, no guarantee that KFOR will continue to be regarded as a neutral player in Kosovo. French troops, and to a lesser extent, Italians are widely considered to be pro-Serbian by the Albanians. The Russians are, of course, loathed by Albanians and are the most likely targets if tensions continue to rise. Some hard-line Albanian nationalists are already speaking of 'a second occupation' as they realise that NATO was not simply acting as the 'KLA's airforce' in the conflict.
Elections, local due later this year, possibly followed by national ones, are likely to prove a serious test of the peace-keepers ability actually to maintain peace in Kosovo. With Rugova's LDK still likely to hold the allegiance of a majority of Kosovar Albanians, the next challenge is likely to be how to persuade the former KLA leadership and its supporters to accept the results. There is already a great deal of disillusionment amongst former KLA soldiers and supporters when they see what they consider their great victory snatched from them by KFOR.
Questions & Answers
In Tim Judah's book it was suggested that the KLA leadership is interested not just in Kosovo, but in linking up with the Albanian minority in Montenegro and Macedonia. Would you agree?
That is a very good point. What is interesting about the post-conflict regional question is that the question of a so-called Greater Albania is dead. I do not think there can be any doubt about that. It was raised on both sides, going back to the beginning of the 1980s at the time of the demonstration against Enver Hoxa in Albania, but in reality it was never a primary objective. Now, certainly on the basis of speaking to the majority of the active Kosovar Albanian leadership, it is not even a possibility.
The romantic idea of a single unified Albanian state pretty much died during the refugee crisis, because it came as a shock to a great many Albanians from Kosovo who went across the border actually to see what a mess there is in Albania! Having lived in Albania myself for four years, 1992-95 and then again in 1997, I do not find this surprising. But from one point of view that was a salutary lesson. The people in Kosovo will now consider their own position in terms of the question of a constitutional settlement for Kosovo now, not a question of some kind of anschluss with Albania.
But to answer your point specifically, it is true that in the Albanian-populated area of Macedonia, the area around Tetovo and Gostivar and so on, there is a genuine interest in the possibility of some form of unification. One of the questions which is under debate is the idea of some form of pan-Albanian federation. But it is also true that a considerable number of the weapons which were stolen, looted from the armouries in Albania in 1997, have not been handed in to KFOR, and that the most modern of those weapons are being stockpiled. This is well known. One sees it every day in the KFOR reports, where they report finding caches of weapons and so forth.
So there is a very real chance that there are sufficient weapons in Macedonia, which is a very weak state, Macedonia is not Serbia by any stretch of the imagination. The defence forces there are not really in any position to fight a prolonged guerrilla war, should there be one. Now at the moment the position has very much been relatively stable.
The Albanians of Macedonia are waiting to see what happens next door in Kosovo first. Certainly the question of what happens in Montenegro is going to be tied up with the fate of Djukanovic's government. If his government manages to survive with Western patronage in some form, as it is now getting aid and diplomatic support, I think that will be a secondary question. But if power were to be seized from Djukanovic by Belgrade in some kind of coup d'etat, then the whole question of what is going to happen to the Albanian minority there, located mainly in the region abutting northern Albania, well, I think that will be a very real question. But overall, the prospects of a Balkan federation are much more likely to find supporters amongst the Albanians of Kosovo than any kind of 'Greater Albania' concept which would include Albania itself.
In your talk, you mentioned that the people of Kosovo were treated with 'barely concealed contempt', why is this the case? Is this more true in Kosovo than in other UN operations? And could you provide practical examples?
Well, I can give you a very practical example in a moment, because I was on the receiving end of it! I think one of the problems with all peace-keeping missions is that the majority of the people who implement the policies, the peace-keepers on the ground, are basically the functionaries. They are not the people who make the policy. The people who make the policy are in Brussels or New York, and while they may make flying visits they are not there on the ground in the country. So one of the biggest problems in the whole question of a post-conflict settlement is the almost invincible ignorance amongst very senior people who spend very little time in the province because they have too many other commitments. Meanwhile people who genuinely do understand, for instance, Bernard Kouchner, the UN administrator has made an effort to understand the problems, are too often powerless. He does not have the resources actually to do anything,Ênot even to maintain a police force. The other problem, one has to say, is that the vast majority of peace-keepers, certainly the ones from the UK and Western Europe, would much rather be at home on their own bases than in Kosovo, where they live in appalling conditions, for instance, bombed-out Yugoslav army bases which were more or less in ruins and had to be rebuilt. I think they see it as a chore. There is not any great love lost there. Inevitably, too, these people are not primarily interested in policy. They are interested in their pay-cheques. That is the reality. It simply is not true to pretend that the average soldier is there in Kosovo because he has some great love for the development of democracy. He is interested in doing his job.
Many of them are doing a very professional job, but there are exceptions. I shall give you one example from my own personal experience. We were driving in Pristina, using a local taxi rather than an official BBC car. We had an Albanian driver and an Albanian member of the BBC staff in the front seat; I was in the rear seat. There was a blockage in one of the very narrow roads in one of the districts going up to the BBC office. It was only really wide enough for one car to pass at a time. It has been snowing. My driver pulled over to allow a British Army car to go through. But obviously not far enough, because the passenger, an officer, got out of the car and came over to say so. Our driver was somewhat upset by the ensuing and unfortunate altercation as the officer considered we had not pulled over far enough. Minutes later, however, his car drove through the gap, so clearly we were not an obstruction. I reported the incident to the British Liaison Officer at KFOR, and it was, I am pleased to say, dealt with satisfactorily.
But although that is an isolated incident, I have to say that it is symptomatic of what can go wrong in peace-keeping when you are perhaps in a country to which you are temperamentally unsuited, where you do not understand the body-language, where you do not understand the language itself. Therefore it is very easy for misunderstandings to arise. There is a famous quotation to the effect that you do not really have to learn a foreign language, just shout louder in English, and that unfortunately seems to be one of the factors in terms of peace-keeping the world over. It is certainly not unique to Kosovo. So in answer to your question, there is a feeling on the one hand that most peace-keepers, with the exception of some of those from Russia, ironically enough, because they are getting hard currency, which is very welcome and means they are doing rather well out of it, but in terms of the peace-keepers from most NATO countries, I think they see their role in Kosovo as a chore.
There is also the cultural gap and a lack of understanding. And recently, of course, there has been a feeling that a number of peace-keepers have, as it were, been picking up the pieces after some particularly appalling and gratuitous murders, the murder of Slavko, whom I mentioned earlier, is a case in point. When that happened, I had been there for a month and had two months of my assignment to go, and at that point it was quite clear to me that the Italian attitude towards the Albanians in Pec changed appreciably. There was a feeling that something awful had happened, that people knew it had happened, but had made no effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. That, and incidents like that, have contributed towards a very negative overall impression.
Given your comment that Americans do not have a foreign policy for the Balkans, and given the long-term nature of the problems in the region, what do you think the prospects for KFOR might be? Is it possible that they might end up staying for ten years or more?
I have to say that I think the prospects at the moment are really pretty bleak. It was interesting, I went to the Racak memorial meeting which was held in January 2000. This was a memorial which was held for a number of Albanians who were killed, there are various interpretation of what the incident really was, but I do not think it is really necessary to go into that here, but the fact remains that a number of Albanians were killed. This happened before the war started; it was really the biggest catalyst, the trigger which encouraged the US State Department to take a hard line. At the memorial service, the American representative , the guy who was running the American representative office in Pristina, made a speech in which he said that 'we are very glad to be with you today, and you can rest assured that the Americans will be in Kosovo for a very long time.' Anyone who has seen Camp Bondsteel, the American military base which has been built in southern Kosovo, will know that it is a very impressive town, complete with a MacDonalds and shops and so forth, so there is a feeling that they will be there for a long time.
On the other hand, there is also a very strong feeling in a year where we are approaching a presidential election in America that the one thing that will start to upset the bandwagon is images of Americans coming home in body-bags. The spectre of a foreign engagement of the Vietnam variety has inevitably haunted American foreign policy for more than two generations now.
So they are caught in a trap, really, between two competing policy positions. That is what I meant when I said at the beginning that while there are policy positions, there is no policy. On the one hand, nobody wanted to sit back and take responsibility for doing nothing if there was another Bosnia. No politician, particularly Madeleine Albright, who in my view is definitely a conviction politician, a real believer, she was certainly not going to sit back and go down in history as the woman who did nothing when Kosovo turned into Bosnia. On the other hand, there is another competing interest in foreign policy. There was this clean, clinical war, at least as far as the participants from NATO were concerned. There were no NATO casualties in action. As one Serbian minister described it, it was all a 'virtual reality war' with images on television of hitting targets. As long as there was not much coverage of people being killed on the ground, the Americans felt they were insulated in some way.
American foreign policy at the moment is caught between those two factors. They feel that they have done the right thing for the right reason, but now they are looking at the consequences, and the major consequence of not having a policy is that they are now adrift. It is not just a question of 'mission creep',Êit is a question of 'mission drift'. The mission is drifting out of control. No one knows what the objective is. If it is independence, the unmentionable 'I word', then there should be a position taken on that. Since it has not been taken, since there is a UN resolution on which the whole on the UNMIK mission is predicated, which states that Kosovo is an integral part of what is left of Federal Yugoslavia, then they are caught in an impossible position, between the desire of the Albanian majority in Kosovo to have an independent state, and on the other hand the feeling that the international community and in particular in terms of the UN Security Council, because China and Russia will never sanction that. And therefore they are in a mess, without an easy exit.
I think that the American exit in the end is going to be to put much of the responsibility onto the Europeans themselves. Many people would argue that is where it should have been in the first place. But whatever the rights and wrongs of that argument, if America in a presidential election year can get out without casualties, then I think they will consider that a job well done . They will run down the American commitment quite substantially. But it remains to be seen who is going to pick up the pieces, because Britain is also running its contingent down. There will come a time where if UNMIK is not properly funded, which it certainly is not at the moment, and that is something Bernard Kouchner has been pushing for, then I think we are going to see a situation where there is going to be a straightforward crisis. Does the UNMIK mission continue, or do they withdraw? And if they withdraw, what are the consequences?
You mentioned the unmentionable solution, independence, but what about the other possible solution, partition?
At the moment this is one of the big policy issues, especially in terms of the status of northern Mitrovica and the territory north of the city. There is clearly a feeling which one can understand on the part of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo that if they are not in some form of protected zone, then they are vulnerable. That does not necessarily mean that they would be massacred, but I think, having seen what has happened so far, it would be an unrealistic proposal to suggest that they could simply continue their normal lives as they did before.
There have been various suggestions,ÊDusan Betakovic, for instance, came up with 'cantonisation', an idea which was much discussed at one point, but it has gone past that. I do not think that, firstly, the Albanians of Kosovo would themselves accept partition. There is a very strong feeling that partition would really reward Milosevic in some way. The second factor is that the international community could not possibly be seen to partition a country along ethnic grounds, not least because the conflict was, at least ostensibly, fought partly on the premise that it would stop ethnic cleansing.
Now, we know that in practice this is precisely what has happened in reverse. One can debate the reasons for that, whether it is a question of fear that was encouraged by Belgrade, or a question of reality on the ground, but the idea of partitioning Kosovo to turn it over to Milosevic is unthinkable. Whether it might be possible in a post-Milosevic world is another question. The international community's long-term solution may be to sit back and try to hold the lid on the situation until such time as there is significant political change in Belgrade, and then hope that there could be some form of compromise solution.
My own view is that the time for substantive autonomy came and went. In 1995, had Milosevic seized the initiative at that stage, had he offered some form of substantive autonomy, Rugova might well have accepted it. There is certainly a body of opinion which would suggest that. Unfortunately things have gone too far now. Too many people have been killed, too many atrocities have taken place, the atmosphere there at the moment is poisonous, and I use the word advisedly.
It is very difficult to see what the solution is, other than these long-term positioning of KFOR troops around Serbian enclaves, or, as the UNHCR representative said unofficially to me,Êbussing these people out safely for their own protection. There are historical precedents, one looks at the situation in Istanbul over many years with what was left of the beleaguered Greek community. There are parallel situations. But we have the makings of an intractable problem. I am not sure there is a solution to it at this stage. On the other hand, one could say that if the KFOR mandate was not renewed and if KFOR pulled out, and the Yugoslav army returned, again, the consequences would be unimaginably awful. So one has to ask whether there is any real option? My own view is that the international community will do its best to do nothing. It is the politics of non-doing, because if you do not do anything then you cannot be criticised for what you have done in a positive sense. So I think that they will wait as long as they possibly can in the hope that Milosevic will fall, which I do not believe will happen. I think Milosevic is there for a very long time.
But does that not mean that you are getting the partition of Kosovo by default?
I made two visits to Gorazdevac. This is a whole village which is ethnically Serb. It is now guarded 24 hours a day by the Italian KFOR. The village in not economically sustainable. The inhabitants are living by a little bit of agriculture, but every time a farmer goes out to do anything in the field, he has to be accompanied by two peace-keepers. At that level of economy it is just not possible to carry on. They are living on what they can grow themselves and on shipments which are being sent in by the Yugoslav Red Cross. That is not a sustainable community in the long term. They cannot trade, not can they do business with Albanians, because the Albanians themselves are acutely aware that any contact with Serbs could be dangerous for them. The young people have a school there which is operational, but what is the future? To live in that kind of guarded, almost refugee camp-like environment? So what I think is going to happen is what, to a certain extent, is already happening. Those Serbs who have the possibility of getting out are doing so. One has to say that the Milosevic regime is not making things easy for refugees. Serbian refugees who go into Serbia are facing discrimination. They are not eligible for welfare benefits, they cannot claim pensions, their children generally are having grave difficulties in enrolling in schools or universities. They are being seen as second-class citizens, even in Serbia. The existence of the refugee camps in which they are living is a closely-guarded secret within Serbia.
Foreign journalists are not welcome, and certainly no Yugoslav journalist is digging very deeply into that problem. Isolated schools and so on are being used to house these people in very bad conditions. But in the long term, if the political position improved in Serbia, you might well find that a lot more people would follow that route. One does hear a few people saying 'this is my ancestral land and I will stay here.' On the other hand, however, a lot of Albanians, Belgrade had a substantial Albanian community before the war, thousands of people, are doing secret deals, swapping houses and land. This is technically illegal. By 1991, when autonomy was removed, there was already a pattern of depopulation. Serbs were already leaving. In order to try to put a stop to that, regulations were passed forbidding the sale of land to Albanians. So these people are technically breaking the law. But what it means is that some of the Albanians from Belgrade, very quietly and without advertising the fact, are coming back, I say 'coming back' although many of them have lived in Belgrade for generations. They are going back to Kosovo, and likewise the Serbs are swapping properties, often at very knock-down prices. But it is happening. It is a reality. It is something which is not receiving very much attention, but it is happening.
At this point in the discussion, an exchange took place between three members of the audience.
First Contributor: I am sure you have your own views on Rambouillet, but Tim Judah seems to me to make a very important point when he says that had Albright and Cook not tried to impose an ultimatum on the Serbs, but instead had invited them to Rambouillet to negotiate, and had we presented the Serbs with something like the deal which Milosevic finally accepted at the end of the war, for example, the fact that there would have been a peace-keeping force ostensibly under the United Nations rather than NATO, the Serbs would probably have accepted it. Now if that is so, then it seems to me that there was not only an unnecessary war, but a huge failure, particularly on the part of Albright and Cook.
Second Contributor: Can I say something about Rambouillet as someone who was involved in UK policy-making at the time? I think there is a lot of nonsense talked about Rambouillet. I do not mean by that to criticise your documentary, the Panorama special 'Moral Combat', which I thought was by far the best of the various television retrospectives, and much more stimulating than the Jonathan Dimbleby programme which recycled lots of canards on Rambouillet. I mean the fact is that the Serbs were not presented with an ultimatum. On the political side, which was negotiated for two and a half weeks at Rambouillet, all those chapters had been the result of negotiations, shuttle diplomacy which had gone on for months before between Belgrade and the Kosovo Albanians. The military proposals were worked out initially in NATO. They were put to the two sides five days before the first round of the talks ended, clearly as proposals. The Serbs clearly refused to discuss them. But this mythology was created once the air campaign had started that the military annex had somehow been the problem. The Serbs did not really complain that much about the detail, in fact they did not really talk about it. What they objected to at that point was the idea that there would be an international security presence in Kosovo, although everyone else in the contact group, including the Russians, agreed that there should be an invited international presence, the Russians said this at Rambouillet, to underpin the settlement. We were already thinking at Rambouillet about ways to define the proposals that would be worked up on the military annex. The idea that we wanted semi-free access across the area, immunity from prosecution and all that sort of thing, is wrong.
So the Serbs were given the proposals before the end of Rambouillet. They were given almost a month to look at them. And although they said at the end of Rambouillet that they thought progress had been made and that they were ready to come back to discuss implementation, they came back at Paris completely ready to frustrate the whole process. I think it was clear that that they had gambled, and I think you are right in saying this, that they could reject the proposals, that the Albanians would also reject them, and the international community would thus be stuck in a bit of a muddle and would not have the resolve to tackle the humanitarian crisis which was unfolding.
On the point about comparing the Rambouillet deal with what Milosevic eventually accepted, it is odd to say that he somehow got a better outcome, because under Rambouillet Kosovo would still have been under Serbian and particularly Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [FRY] institutions. Troops would have remained there. It would have to be very much an internal settlement, albeit with an international presence. I suspect the NATO force in Kosovo to implement Rambouillet would have had non-NATO participants and the whole thing would have been blessed by a UN Security Council resolution, with the Russians signed up to the process. What he actually had to accept in June was that all Serbian and FRY troops would withdraw, and a situation in which de facto Serbia plays no role in Kosovo and will not do as long as it is there. So I think the gamble he made paid off disastrously for him.
Looking into the future, I think it is right to say that the final status question is extremely difficult. It is extremely difficult because most of the international community does not believe you can have a reasonable dialogue about Kosovo's status while the government in Belgrade is run by people indicted for war crimes. Not only would the Kosovo Albanians not accept it, but I think that most international opinion after the events of last year would not accept it. There was a situation in Bosnia where the various sides hated each other; in the early 1990s the same sort of sentiments were being expressed about the impossibility of them ever coming to a deal, given all the medieval hatreds that one was seeing, and in fact far worse massacres in many respects. But in the end they did come to a deal in Dayton, to a large extent because of Milosevic. But now because of what Milosevic has done, and because of the way in which the international community has rightly reacted to that, he is the biggest obstacle to a deal. So I think that one can work out a regional approach, and Xavier Solana and NATO are trying to do this, and the contact group will try to do this, and what is happening in Croatia is encouraging.
It is very difficult to posit a final status for Kosovo which does not either turn off all the Kosovo Albanians or turn off all the neighbouring states, which are very anxious about independence. So I think in a sense we have to not just sit and hope that Milosevic disappears, but actively try to promote that possibility, while at the same time developing a policy which will open up new options for the FRY and for the region once Milosevic goes. In some ways, in the Western Europe of the twenty-first century, the whole concept of sovereignty and borders is becoming less salient. This is a lesson we have got to try to teach the Balkans, which are still stuck in the nineteenth century.
I do not believe it will be easy to convince the Kosovars that they should not have independence, or paradoxically to convince the Serbians to let Kosovo go to a more autonomous state and a final settlement. So none of these are simple things to resolve, but I think it is an unfair caricature to say that we have no overall policy. We have a policy which is still in the process of being developed because the situation is still evolving, and we have highly intractable problems, but I remain eager to hear, and have not yet heard, any convincing alternative strategy.
Third Contributor: You mentioned Rambouillet. Now according to James Rubin, their concern was to get the Kosovans on side, to get them to sign up. And then he says 'but we knew the Serbs would not accept this.' Well, if that was so, what they were saying in effect was that they wanted to have the Albanians on side, and once they had that, it did not matter what the Serbs said.
Second Contributor: Yes, I saw that interview with James Rubin on the Panorama special. I cannot speak for him, but I was clear that Robin Cook and the French Foreign Minister's position as the chairman of the talks was very much that they wanted all sides to sign up. And we did notice that they were sceptical about whether the Serbs would sign up to substantial autonomy for Kosovo and an international military presence, those were the two bottom lines. After Racak it was clear that opinion was polarising very strongly. I think we thought that we had to give it every chance we had. Robin Cook and the French Foreign Minister Vedrine went, I think, seven times in two and a half weeks,Êthey spent a lot of time with Milutinovic, the head of the FRY/Serb delegation. On the 20th of February, which was the second extension of the process, it was striking because the Serbs were actually the people saying 'well, we think there is a reasonable deal here.'
This may have just been tactical. The Albanians were very difficult to persuade. I think there was, as I say, I can only speak for where we were coming from, there was a genuine wish to get both sides to sign up. I think it would have been perverse to have said 'we do not think the Serbs are going to sign up so we do not want the Albanians to do so either', and indeed the fact that the Albanians signed up to the Rambouillet accords gave a sort of bench-mark to judge against when we came to the situation in June, because they had committed themselves to autonomy, we had not allowed them to commit themselves to independence because there was no independence provision,Êso to have them signed up was a useful thing in itself. We were quite clear in terms of our legal position that if NATO took action it would be to avert the looming humanitarian catastrophe as reported by the UN. That, I think, would have been the case given the behaviour of the Serbs forces on the ground, whatever had happened at Rambouillet.
Assuming the UNMIK has enough money to hold local elections in September, and taking into account that most candidates for mayor are ex-KLA members, do you think there will be leverage on the international community for producing future relationships? That is a very good question. I see the outcome of any electoral process in Kosovo as being absolutely fundamental. There are, at the moment, despite this advisory council which has been set up with Thaci and Rugova, quite serious tensions. The KLA at one point was threatening to execute Rugova as a traitor. So while on paper those things may have been somewhat swept aside, there are very deep divisions within Kosovar Albanians as a society. There is a genuine feeling amongst a lot of the urban population that that KLA are, if you like, the Johnny-come-latelys. The LDK has been running for a very long time. They are the people who kept the whole thing linked together, the people who were beaten up and put in prison and so forth. Then suddenly the KLA appeared. The KLA is to some extent a rural phenomenon, with the inspiration coming from outside, from ŽmigrŽs in Switzerland or Germany. A lot of ordinary Albanians now feel that, yes, the KLA played a major role in the internationalisation of the conflict, and that was their great success.
They internationalised a conflict which had hitherto been very much seen as a peripheral issue in Europe. Having done that, there are very real doubts amongst ordinary Albanians in Kosovo as to whether the likes of Hashim Thaci can make the transition to democratic politicians.
One of the most disturbing features of life in Kosovo today is the way in which the ex-KLA and its new incarnation, the TMK, the defence force,Êis actually raising taxes and enforcing law locally. While on the one hand they have no official status beyond the statutes which have been put up providing for them to provide ceremonial guard, like a civil defence force in the role of national emergencies, etc., in reality they are functioning as an army. Certainly we had problems filming in Pec as a result. We were intimidated by people who claimed to be serving members of the TMK who did not want us to film certain things. We had an altercation at one point.
A lot of questions are being raised, not least about the fact that the TMK is funding itself through a so-called voluntary levy. The way that that works in practice in a city like Pec is that they announce on the radio once a week who has donated money to the cause. Consequently, by omission, if your name is not on the list, there are questions asked. This is where the ex-KLA may destroy itself in the end. If they are seen as being rapacious illegal taxers and extortionists, then that is going to have a very negative impact on how they do in the elections, because people are now looking genuinely for political stability for themselves. They would like to see a broad-based coalition government headed by Rugova, embracing as far as possible all the factions in order to reduce the possibility of in-fighting. That would be my analysis of what the average Albanian is hoping for.
They are looking for political stability, for a chance to rebuild their economy. Although I have not really gone into it, the amount of rebuilding which has been going on in a town like Pec is amazing. The town was very badly damaged, something like two-thirds of the housing stock was destroyed. Yet the amount of money that ordinary citizens, not the international community, is putting into rebuilding housing and re-opening their businesses is phenomenal. In Albania, where I lived for years, I can tell you that that level of dynamism was lacking. I know Pec has always been a very strong commercial town, but people there are rebuilding an everyday life. That in a sense is happening independently of institutions.
So what people are most concerned about now is that they get a chance to rebuild their lives without the possibility of factional infighting and violence between the former KLA and other Albanian groups. In that way the elections are going to be crucial. If the KLA loses badly, it is going to be very difficult to convince people that they should be heeded in any sort of structure.
But what if the KLA wins? With the exception strong rural support in Drenica, there is very little support from the electorate. They are prepared to give a certain amount of credit, people are quite aware of the role the KLA played in breaking through the stalemate. But the analysis of Rugova's period now is that he did a good job for a period of years, but there was a 'politics of non-doing', as one Albanian journalist described it, and I think they felt they needed something to set the whole thing off internationally, which is what happened.
Now that the KLA has performed its task, and there is the classic question of post-conflict reconstruction, what role do you use your guerrillas for? This is something that has confronted in many places, for instance it is still the issue in Zimbabwe at the moment. If there are former guerrillas who are disenfranchised and disaffected, what do you do with them? In Kosovo, people are trying to involve them in various ways, but if they set themselves up as an unofficial, unaccountable, private police force which is involved in extortion from the business sector, they will find they get few votes.