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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
NATO and the Kosovo Liberation Army—the two forces that have physically controlled this nominally Yugoslav province since their combined efforts prevailed over Serbia three months ago—are staggering on in uneasy coexistence. But they are finding it harder to conceal their disagreement about where the territory is ultimately heading.
Those were the main conclusions to emerge from this week’s deal, under which the KLA agreed to transform itself into a civilian “protection corps”, entitled to use only 200 small arms to protect its bases. The 5,000-strong force (only 3,000 will be full-timers) is supposed to help with reconstruction and neighbourly good works. A new, western-trained police force will absorb several thousand more ex-KLA men. But in any event the guerrillas, having lost hundreds of comrades in what they regard as a heroic war of independence, are not going to settle down as a glorified fire brigade. For them, the establishment of the protection force is just one more stepping-stone towards the creation of a sovereign and well-defended Kosovo.
Perhaps because its confidence about the final outcome runs so deep, the KLA has gone through the motions of disarmament with a willingness that would make peace-makers in Northern Ireland green with envy. Before officially ceasing to exist, it handed in more than 10,000 weapons. Nobody doubts that the guerrillas’ real arsenal is considerably larger, or that they can restock at will in Albania’s arms bazaar. Nor will anything change the fact that in most of Kosovo’s towns and villages it is the KLA and its nominees in the “parallel government”—unpaid and unelected but quietly effective—who call the shots. In larger towns they are supposedly subject to the UN; in smaller ones not even that fiction is maintained.
But the disarmament exercise serves some important political purposes. First, from the point of view of the big countries and international agencies trying to bring peace to the area, it helps underline the point that, whatever Kosovo may be, it is not (or at least, not yet) an independent state. This does not mean that Serbia, of which Kosovo is still technically a province, will ever again have any say over it; that seems unlikely, despite the mutterings of Serbian generals that their army might reinvade. But the legal status of Kosovo is important, because of the message it sends to other places. The issue is being watched closely in the region (in Greece, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, for a start) and beyond (in Russia, for example) by governments that dread the thought of border changes without consent.
The “decommissioning” of the KLA’s armoury also helps preserve at least a shred of credibility for the assertion by NATO and the UN that they are administering Kosovo impartially for the benefit of all its people, including the shrinking non-Albanian minority. The size of that minority is, however, a matter of dispute.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees—in between co-ordinating the work of 200 or so aid agencies and organising winter shelter for hundreds of thousands of people—has done a detailed study which suggests that Kosovo’s Serb population is now about 70,000 (a third of the pre-war total). Other minorities include at least 11,000 Gypsies (much harassed because they are seen as pro-Serb), 16,000 Muslim Slavs and 15,000 Turks. NATO, sensitive to the charge that its force is failing to protect civilians, insists that the numbers are higher.
In any event, the bare figures understate the precarious existence that many non- Albanians, especially Serbs and Gypsies, now lead. Increasingly, they survive only by bunching together in villages or suburbs that are large enough to offer some security. The quiet ruthlessness with which vulnerable Serbs and Gypsies have been picked off by gunmen suggests a systematic effort to make Kosovo an all-Albanian province. When Vetton Surroi, a widely respected ethnic-Albanian journalist, deplored the killing of Serb civilians, he was denounced as “irresponsible” by other Kosovars.
Meanwhile, money is pouring into the province: not just the $2 billion in emergency aid (for food, housing and welfare) pledged at a donors’ conference in the summer, but the savings of many members of the rich Kosovar diaspora which preferred to keep its money abroad as long as the homeland was in Serb hands. In a year or two, the province’s economy could be fizzing.
In part because of bureaucratic foot-dragging in Brussels and Washington, many Kosovars may still have a cold and uncomfortable few months ahead. The UNHCR reckons that 50,000 Albanian homes have been destroyed beyond repair; the 300,000 people who used to live in them will have to spend the winter with relations. Another 50,000 houses are too badly damaged to repair quickly. The UN is racing to get “shelter kits”—the plastic and wood needed to make at least one room habitable—to the owners of these premises, but the American government and the European Union have been slow with their promised contributions.
The UN’s official calculations take little account of Kosovo’s flourishing informal economy, which seems more efficient than any international bureaucracy at procuring materials. In any event, having gone to war on behalf of the Kosovars (and having failed to protect them from temporary eviction), western governments have apparently decided to take no chances with their welfare now. Food aid, too, has been on the generous side: handouts from the American government were available to the whole population until mid-September, and will still be given to 900,000 or so during the winter.
But if there is a real danger of hunger and destitution in the region this winter, it may be greatest in Serbia, where extended-family ties are not as strong as they are among the Kosovars, and more people are dependent on a bankrupt state for their daily bread. The political effects of this deepening misery are an open question. On September 21st, the latest round of protests against President Slobodan Milosevic attracted disappointingly small crowds. As winter tightens its grip, nobody can predict whether hardship will make the Serbs angrier or more passive.