On the Day of the Impeachment Inquire Vote, A Wag the Dog Attack Threatens Kosovo
Clinton First Wages War Without Congress, and Now Without UN
By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources
Today, Thursday, October 8, 1998, the House of Representatives is expected to vote in favor of the Republican impeachment inquiry resolution. At this writing, the only real question is just how many Democrats will vote for the Republican resolution. The guesses range from 40 Democrats up.
So, an impeachment inquiry is assured and, guess what? President Clinton has decided to have his own little war - without the approval of Congress, all of NATO, or the United Nations. It's just a cozy little war between friends - Bill Clinton and Tony Blair not AGAINST Albania, as was the case in Wag the Dog, but FOR Albania, over Kosovo.
Unfortunately, most Americans haven't a clue about what is really going on in Kosovo and why the Serbs are as stubborn about the situation as they are. And, according to the London Telegraph this morning, the Serbs are threatening to defy a NATO attack. Yugoslavia's deputy Prime Minister, Vojislav Seselj is quoted as saying, "Nato won't dare to bomb us. If they try to punish us, we will have to show them that we are capable of destroying their planes and inflicting unsustainable losses on them."
Addressing supporters in the Serbian city of Uzice, he said: "Maybe we can't crash every one of their airplanes, but we can catch their agents." Diplomats believe that threats against "Western agents" are designed to raise the spectre of Serb forces seizing hostages - a tactic used several times by Bosnian Serb forces during the war in Bosnia. American and British observers in Kosovo are believed to have drawn up contingency plans to evacuate the region this week.
While Serbian officials conceded yesterday that they could not withstand an all-out assault by NATO, they said would continue to fight the ethnic Albanian guerrillas despite UN insistence that Serb forces must return to barracks. Looking out over a swath of destroyed homes beneath Cicavica mountain, where Serb security forces have surrounded thousands of ethnic Albanian rebels, one young man, Vlado Radosavljevic, insisted that he was not afraid of the West.
"I'm not afraid of these people who just bombed Afghanistan," he said, referring to Clinton's missile attacks in August on a suspected terrorist base there. "We can respond with force."
The history of the Kosovo-Metohija area is a story that Americans need to know. And, like many ethnic issues in Europe, it goes back a long time. Almost any curious, logical person might ask how so many ethnic Albanians got into Serbian Kosovo in the first place. To understand that it is necessary to understand that, under the Ottoman Turks, who conquered the Balkans, an Islamic theocracy, not unlike the religious states we now see in Afghanistan in Iran, was set up. It was the battle of Kosovo in 1389 that marked the first step of the final penetration of the Ottomans which was completed in the mid-15th century.
The Serbs in that conflict ended up basically Christian slaves to the Muslim conquerers. The word "slave" in the English language is a derivative of the "Slavs" - mostly Serbs, who became the serfs of the region. The Albanians mostly adopted the Islamic faith and became the rulers. The Serbs, who refused to abandon either their Eastern Orthodox Christian faith or their desire for freedom, were long a thorn in the side of any ruler.
This was an area in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs were either killed, or driven from their homes during the Second World War. I personally suspect that many of the mass graves being uncovered in the area, showing only weathered bones, are not of recent vintage but are the mass graves of the many massacres that have taken place in the area in the last few centuries.
Although the majority of the people in the area have been Serbs, they have not been the rulers. After World War II Tito, a Croatian communist, seized dictatorial control and executed the Serb heroes who had fought the Nazi conquerers of their land, just as they fought the Islamic conquerers. The Kosovo-Metohija area had an important role: first it was an autonomous region (1946 Constitution), then an autonomous province within Serbia (1963 Constitution) and finally an autonomous province only formally linked with Serbia (Constitutional amendments 1968-1971 and 1974 Constitution), with competencies that were hardly any different from those of the republics (the Leninist principle concerning the right to self-determination was reserved for republics only). Kosovo owed the change of its status within the federation not to the freely expressed will of the people of Serbia, Serbs and ethnic Albanians alike, but exclusively to the ideological concepts of a narrow circle of national-communist hardliners around Tito.
During the period of centralism when Albania was, until 1961, part of the Soviet bloc hostile towards Yugoslavia, Tito relied on the Serbs in Kosovo who represented the guarantee of Yugoslavia's integrity. After the reconciliation with Moscow (1955) and the gradual normalization of relations with Albania (1971), Tito favoured the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo-Metohija in a way which, after the Constitutional amendments, they understood not only as a possibility for national emancipation but above all as a long awaited opportunity for a historical revenge against the Serbs.
Dusan T. Batakovic of the Institute for Balkan Studies at the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Belgrade wrote of this situation: "The ideological and national model of the Kosovo-Metohija ethnic Albanians was inspired by the Stalinist ethno-communism of Enver Hoxha, imbued with the old national intolerance towards the Serbs. The erasing of the name of Metohija, as a Serbian Orthodox term, from the name of the autonomous province (autumn 1968), symbolically indicated the political direction of the ethnic Albanian communist nomenklatura in Kosovo. The discrimination on an ethnic basis was followed by a series of successive administrative and physical pressures which resulted in the quiet, but forced emigration of a tens of thousands of Serbs from Kosovo-Metohija; a process which many knew about, but very few dared publicly to mention fearing being sentenced to prison for obstructing the official ideology of "brotherhood and unity". As the process of forced migration proceeded, the land of the expelled Serbs if not sold to local ethnic Albanians was officially given to emigrants from Albania. The conflict with the Serbs beside national had strong social causes: Kosovo-Metohija remained a primarily peasant environment where the society was organized on the basis of tribal traditions, with a significant Islamic impact. Ethnic Albanian society, marked by the highest birth-rate in Europe, chiefly agrarian, needed more and more land.
"From the end of Second World War until Tito's death in 1980, the number of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo tripled (undoubtedly also thanks to a large number of immigrants, a number that has still not be definitely determined). The systematic Albanization of the province of Kosovo in the administration, the judiciary and the police (Serbian officials were often replaced by incompetent but ethnic Albanian cadres) was followed by introducing the ethnic principle and ethnic quotas everywhere, including University where the number of places set for Serbs was to correspond to their percentage in the province's population. Money from Serbian and federal state funds (one million dollars a day in the early 1980's) was used by local Albanian nomenklatura not for encouraging economic development but for constructing prestigious state institutions. The uncontrolled growth of the population gave additional social stimuli to the intolerant nationalism of the numerous young and educated ethnic Albanians bound to Kosovo by the language barrier. Growing social discontent was transferred into national frustration. They were educated on school manuals imported from Albania, imbued with nationalist mythology and hate towards Yugoslavia.
"The unanimous requests of the Albanian minority for the creation of a republic of Kosovo (with the right to self-determination, including secession), set out in 1981, only a year after Tito's death, disrupted the sensitive political balance in the federal leadership. The attempt to hush up the Albanian question in Kosovo with a classical communist purge and with spectacular but inadequate measures (actions by the federal military and police forces, chiefly from Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina), ordered by Stane Dolanc (a Slovene, head of State Security Service), failed. Together with visible attempts to minimize the problem of the forced emigration of the Kosovo Serbs, these measures resulted in the deep frustration of the whole Serbian nation in the years that followed.
"The Serbs gradually started to realize that the Titoist order was based on the national inequality of the Serbs in Yugoslavia. The attempts by Serbian communists to resolve the question of Serbia's competencies over the provinces in agreement with the other republican leaderships from 1977 upto the early 1980's (the so-called Blue book), in order to protect the Serbs in Kosovo more efficiently, were openly rejected. The intransigence of the national-communist nomenclatures in the federal leadership created dangerous tensions that were hard to control: the Kosovo Serbs started self-organizing on a wide front."
So, what is going on there is a civil war in which the majority group, the Serbs, have been systematically ousted from their land by a dictatorial regime, Tito, which favored a minority - the Muslims of both Bosnia and Albania. In the early 1990s, Milosevic, leader of Serbia, a communist, and Ibragim Rugova, the leader of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were helping each other with their extreme nationalist positions. If the ethnic Albanians were to give up their refusal to recognize Serbian sovereignty, with their votes the democratic opposition in Serbia would easily take over power. On the other hand, while Milosevic is in power, and police repression continue, Rugova can still hope for the internationalization of the Kosovo question. .
Batakovic observed, "The geopolitical realities shows that every attempt at achieving the Kosovo ethnic Albanians' goals (an independent state or unification of Kosovo with Albania) would inevitably cause a broader Balkan war with unforeseeable consequences. An independent Republic of Kosovo would mean changing the stable inter-state Balkan borders established way back in the 1912-1913 wars. The right to self-determination, which the ethnic Albanians refer to when rejecting even the very thought of remaining under sovereignty of Serbia, is not envisaged by international law for national minorities, no matter how large their percentage may be compared to the country's overall population.
"Today, the ethnic Albanians account for 18 percent of the overall population of Serbia and 16 percent of the whole of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . That is the same percentage of the Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo. Secession of Kosovo would represent yet another dangerous fragmentation accompanied by a war in which there would be no winner. On the other hand, after the experiences with the self-determination of the nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which turned into a bloody inter-ethnic war with hundreds of thousands of killed and displaced persons, it is unlikely that the international community would tolerate yet another such attempt. The restoration of Kosovo's autonomy in accordance with the 1974 Constitution is also unacceptable for Serbia: that autonomy based on anachronous communist formulae practically excluded Kosovo-Metohija from Serbian sovereignity and was used primarly for the silent "ethnic cleansing" of the Kosovo Serbs."
So, when you have a state or province within a nation composed largely of a minority group which has a different religion and language, like Quebec in Canada for instance, or communities in Los Angeles and San Bernadino Counties, should they automatically have the right to a seat at the United Nations and the expectation of permanent police support and foreign aid from the American taxpayers?
I don't think so. My closest association with the Balkans was friendship with an elderly anarchist who had immigrated to America after World War II. When you have a region composed of several languages, several religions, strong nationalism, with communism and socialism as its prime political system, topped with a large dollop of anarchy, it isn't an area that should be used as a political ploy to get the public's mind off the pending impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton.
Let us not forget that the final blow to the USSR was a war with a backward nation called Afghanistan, armed with a few shoulder fired Singer missiles which shot down a surprising number of Soviet Aircraft.
According to the Constitution, Congress should be the one to discuss this situation and decide our national security requires us to bomb the Serbs over Kosovo. If Clinton thinks he has problems now, wait until some enterprising Serb shoots down a couple of our airplanes.
Used with permission
The Reagan Information Interchange
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