The butcher of the Balkans

10/10/1998

It was in Kosovo that the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, first began his aggression. This week the crisis there escalated, with NATO poised for air strikes. The emeritus professor of theology at Leeds University, author of SOS Bosnia, believes that the Serbs cannot subdue Kosovo ? and that Milosevic knows it. KOSOVO is today the centre of world attention, as Bosnia was five years ago. Ethnic cleansing on the one hand, NATO intervention on the other. Why has this obscure corner of Europe leapt to such prominence? In point of fact, the whole Yugoslav tragedy of the 1990s began in Kosovo and only here can the genocidal ambitions of Serb nationalism be fully overcome. If the international community fails to act fast, a still wider disaster is bound to follow.

Kosovo has for centuries been an area of mixed population, part Albanian, part Serb. When Yugoslavia was formed after the First World War, Albanians became the largest group of non-Slav speakers in the country; as most of them are also Muslims they were an object of particular suspicion to anyone who wanted to strengthen the Serb and Orthodox character of Yugoslavia as a whole, and they suffered from repeated discrimination both between the two world wars and later. Moreover, the emotional and nationalist attachment of the Serbs of Serbia to Kosovo is very great, as it contains some ancient and beautiful Serb Orthodox monasteries, while defeat in the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 became in the nineteenth century the greatest of Serb national epics.

In the years after the Second World War Serbs made up about 27 per cent of Kosovo's population. By the 1990s this had fallen to 10 per cent, while the Albanian majority had risen to 90 per cent. There appear to be three reasons for this change.

The first is economic. Kosovo was the poorest part of Yugoslavia, and its Serb population, especially the young, migrated northwards to Belgrade and other wealthy urban areas. This migration was not confined to Kosovo but was characteristic of Yugoslavia as a whole, as of most other European countries. In consequence, several of the southern communes of Serbia proper also now have an Albanian majority, the Albanians being less prone to move elsewhere.

The second reason is demographic. Serbs have a very low birth rate coupled with the highest abortion rate in Europe; Albanians, on the other hand, have an exceptionally high birth rate and a very low abortion rate.

The third reason is political. Until 1974 the Serbs largely controlled the government of Kosovo and a high proportion of its state-employed jobs: two years before, they had held 52 per cent of all managerial positions. But after 1974 Kosovo was ruled by its Albanian majority and a rapid shift in employment patterns began. Between 1968 and 1978 the Albanian proportion of Kosovo's student population rose from 38 to 72 per cent. The whole privileged status of the Serb minority was crumbling.

When Milosevic came to power in Serbia and decided to switch horses from Communism to nationalism to avoid the fate of other East European Communist leaders, he resolved to establish his nationalist credentials irrefutably by re-Serbianising Kosovo. In March 1989, surrounded by Serb tanks, the provincial assembly in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, agreed to vote away most of its powers to Belgrade. It was soon to be abolished entirely.

Three months later, in June 1989, Milosevic made a highly inflammatory speech to mark the sixth centenary of the Battle of Kosovo. In the following months, under weird titles such as Programme for the Realisation of Peace and Prosperity in Kosovo, a quite extraordinary range of discriminatory measures were brought into force, encouraging Kosovan Albanians to emigrate, preventing them from buying property from Serbs, suppressing the Kosovo Academy of Arts and Sciences, closing down the Albanian newspaper Rilindja, dismissing almost all Albanian doctors and teachers from state employment, and even insisting on separate lavatories for Albanian and Serb children in school.

It was Serbian policy in Kosovo which led directly to the break-up of Yugoslavia when Slovenia and Croatia decided they could not remain within a Serb-dominated state behaving in such a way. What is amazing is how pacific the Albanian reaction to repression long remained while the eyes of the world were concentrated on Croatia and Bosnia. The constitutional Albanian opposition, led by Ibrahim Rugova, a distinguished historian, believed that the international community was bound to intervene sooner or later, to force an end to the quite extraordinary ethnic oppression to which Kosovo had been subjected; in the meantime, they must wait. But such a situation could not go on indefinitely. The failure of the world to take action has inevitably led to the rise of a movement determined to gain by force what there is no chance of being offered constitutionally.

Milosevic's own position has shifted. He has lost most of what he wanted in the last 10 years: first, Serb control of the whole of Yugoslavia; second, a carve-up of Croatia and Bosnia which would legally enlarge Serbia and make it by far the most powerful player in the region. He has been left instead with a country which is economically in ruins and inflamed by nationalism, in no mood to abandon the one area it effectively seized at the start of his campaign.

Milosevic knows that to do freely what the international community demands of him and open up negotiations for genuine autonomy in Kosovo must mean abandoning Serb control of the province and bringing down on his head the fury of Belgrade nationalists. He could lose power as a result. But he remains an acute politician and a great survivor. He knows now, as he did not in 1989, that he cannot re-Serbianise Kosovo. There are simply not enough Serbs willing to live (and die) there, whereas there is an abundance of Albanians determined to do so. The Albanians, moreover, are inevitably far more hostile to Serbia than they were 10 years ago. Milosevic's policies have effectively destroyed any possibility of long-term political links between the two communities.

BUT Milosevic has never at heart been a nationalist, simply a tactician determined to remain in the saddle in Belgrade. The real problem for him is how to rid himself of Kosovo without losing face. Only NATO can do it for him. The more ruthless his forces are in Kosovo, the more support he gains in Serbia, but also the more NATO is bound to act, thus releasing him from the stigma of abandoning the province. He can instead pose as one with his country in victimhood as Kosovo is wrenched from Serbian control and given back to its own inhabitants with an autonomy which can only lead to independence.

If this seems a strange explanation of Milosevic's mind, that does not make it less plausible. His tactics have always been exceptionally hard to fathom, at least by the Western politicians whom he has taken in again and again. It is, in fact, the explanation offered two weeks ago by Stipe Mesic, the last legal President of an undivided Yugoslavia, to an American analyst who remarked that no one in Washington could work out what Milosevic was really up to.

If, of course, despite repeated massacres, ethnic cleansing and the wholesale destruction of Albanian villages, the world still refuses to act, despite a multitude of threats, the Serbian leader has nothing to lose. The Albanian population of Kosovo will die or flee into Albania before moving on to multiply the refugees in every other part of Europe, while he will be left in the eyes of Serbian nationalism the undisputed victor of the latest battle of Kosovo. Why should he desist?