Kosovo after Tito
By 1981, official census data pegged Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population at 77.5 percent. (6) The same year, in the wake of Tito’s death, riots broke out in Kosovo as ethnic Albanians demanded full republic status within the Yugoslav federation. In the course of the violence, Serbs and Montenegrins in Kosovo were beaten, their homes and businesses burned, and their shops looted. (7) Also, a mysterious fire was set at one of Serbia’s most cherished religious shrines, the Pec Patriarchate in Kosovo, a complex of medieval churches and the historical seat of the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. (8) The civil unrest was eventually quashed by the communist authorities, but thousands of Serbs fled Kosovo following the violence.
Throughout the rest of the 1980s the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo and Serbian civic groups documented numerous cases of harassment, intimidation, vandalism, destruction of Serbian monuments and churches, and attacks on Serbian priests, nuns, and civilians by ethnic Albanians. As historian Noel Malcolm reports,
“In the mid-1980s the Serbian Academy of Sciences commissioned a survey of 500 households of Serbs who had migrated to inner Serbia from Kosovo. Many of the people interviewed thought that there was a political dimension to the deterioration of conditions for the Slavs in Kosovo. . . . When giving the reasons for their migration, 41 per-cent mentioned “indirect pressure” from the Albanians, and 21 percent referred to direct pressure: that last category was composed of verbal abuse (8.5 percent), material damage (7.5 percent) and personal injury (5 percent).” (9)
While the number of cases of abuse against Serbs varies by source, historian Miranda Vickers has concluded that “many Serbs and Montenegrins who decided to leave Kosovo [in the 1980s] had experienced intimidation, pressure, violence, and other severe abuses of their human rights because of their ethnicity.” (10) Similarly, historian Richard West notes that while ethnic Albanians from Kosovo were “always ready to tell sympathetic journalists an account of their suffering under the Serbian regime . . . foreign observers failed to notice that, although the Serbs were supposed to be the oppressors, they themselves were departing from Kosovo, complaining about the destruction of property, the desecration of graves, and many assaults and rapes.” (11)
Enter Slobodan Milosevic
In April 1987, over 60,000 Serbs from Kosovo signed a petition calling on the government in Belgrade to stop the ethnic violence and intimidation aimed at them. (12) In an opportunistic attempt to raise his political profile, then Serbian Communist Party president Slobodan Milosevic traveled to Kosovo and played the nationalist card, proclaiming to Serbs everywhere, “No one should dare beat you again.” (13) By October 1987, federal riot police and army troops were deployed in Kosovo following demonstrations by thousands of Serbs protesting an alleged comment by a Kosovar Albanian leader that “the incidents of [ethnic] Albanians raping Serbian women could be reduced if more Serbian women worked as prostitutes.” (14) In 1989, Belgrade downgraded Kosovo’s autonomy to its pre-1974 level, and Milosevic was elected president of Serbia, with 65 percent of the vote. As Aleksa Djilas later noted in Foreign Affairs, Milosevic “succeeded because he understood the power of fear and knew how to use it for his own purposes.” (15)
Following the reduction of Kosovo’s autonomy, Belgrade imposed “emergency measures” in Kosovo, summarily dismissing thousands of ethnic Albanians from state-sector jobs. No part of Kosovo’s society was left untouched. Even the provincial theater in Pristina was placed under “emergency management” and the theater manager removed by police officers and replaced by a Serb. The greatest changes, however, occurred in education: The teaching of Albanian history, literature, and language was reduced to a minimum. Also, ethnic Albanian students were forbidden from enrolling in secondary school unless they could pass Serbian literature and language examinations, which few could do. (16)
In 1991, ethnic Albanians responded to their diminished autonomy by forming a shadow government, complete with a president, a parliament, a tax system, and schools. Shadow president Ibrahim Rugova has since worked for Kosovo’s independence through peaceful means, but a more militant group has emerged.
Enter the Kosovo Liberation Army
By the mid-1990s, the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo had grown to between 85 and 90 percent, and the human rights conditions in the province continued to deteriorate. (17) As Human Rights Watch, a New York-based rights organization, reported,
“Since the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy, the human rights abuses against ethnic Albanians by the Serbian and Yugoslav governments have been constant. The names of the victims change, but the frequency and the manner of beatings, harassment, and political trials remain the same. It is a status quo of repression. . . . The brutality of the police continues against the population. Random harassment and beatings are a daily reality for ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, especially those in villages and smaller towns.” (18)
In 1996, a shadowy separatist organization called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) surfaced for the first time, claiming responsibility for a series of bombings in southern Yugoslavia. By its own admission, the KLA killed more than 50 government officials and ethnic Albanian “collaborators” over the next two years. The KLA’s intention: To trigger the secession of Kosovo from the Yugoslav state. Pursuing a textbook strategy, the KLA carried out attacks on police and civilians aimed at provoking a government crackdown that would radicalize the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo. In February 1998, the KLA intensified its attacks against Yugoslav authorities and Serb civilians. Armed KLA guerrillas attacked Serb houses in the villages of Klina, Decani, and Djakovica, and a Serb refugee camp in Babaloc. KLA guerrillas also ambushed and killed two Serb policemen patrolling on the road between Glogovac and Srbica.
A government crackdown on the KLA immediately followed, and the world soon learned that nearly 80 Kosovar Albanians, including many women and children, were killed by Serbian internal security forces in Kosovo’s central Drenica region. The Yugoslav Interior Ministry claimed that the action was directed against Adem Jashari, whose clan allegedly constituted the core of the KLA organization. On a closely supervised trip to the village of Prekaz, foreign reporters were told that government security forces had killed Jashari and destroyed the power base of the KLA organization. “We have struck at their heart and we have dealt terrorists a lethal blow,” a police spokesman said. (19) The spokesman was wrong. Government versus guerrilla clashes continue in Kosovo, leaving more than 900 dead since February. “Only force keeps Kosovo inside Yugoslavia now,” concludes Mark Almond, Oxford professor of modern history. (20)
Tying the Balkan Knot
Still, there are more than 180,000 Serbs living in Kosovo today, and the province is widely considered by Serbs as the cradle of Serbian culture and history. (21) In fact, over 75 percent of all Serbian cultural and national monuments are located in Kosovo, including the historic 14th century monastery of Samodreza where the Serbian King blessed his army just before their defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389. Accordingly, Yugoslav Army Gen. Dusan Samardzic recently told a group of new officers,
“This is a turning point for Yugoslavia, when we need to show the world our military ability and might. Kosovo-Metohija’s integrity has been threatened by [ethnic] Albanian secessionists, with assistance from abroad. Our ancestry and posterity would never forgive us if we surrendered the cradle of Serb culture to someone else.” (22)
At the same time, representatives of the KLA have said that they will not stop fighting the Serbian government until they achieve the “total liberation” of Kosovo. (23) Further, in a March 1998 statement, the KLA pledged revenge on Serbs, declaring,
“We will wreak multiple vengeance for innocent deaths in the region of Drenica. We swear it on their blood.” (24)
The conflict is Kosovo, therefore, is not simply a matter of Kosovar Albanians suffering under a brutal and repressive regime–which they are–but a complex clash of mutually exclusive political claims which are aggravated by conflicting historical grievances–real and imagined. As former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman correctly observes,
“The competing claims of Serbs and Albanians have been hopelessly tangled in the webs of history and myth. In its essence, however, the main issue is as simple as it is intractable. The Serbian claim . . . is based primarily on the historical-cultural principle–the Jerusalem argument. The Albanian claim to independence is based largely on the demographic principle.the majority argument. Since these claims are mutually incompatible, there is little reason to believe that Kosovo will be easy to solve.” (25)
Similarly, Amos Perlmutter, professor of political science at American University, notes,
“Kosovo is the most intractable postwar Balkan conflict to date. . . . This is because the Serbs and their [ethnic] Albanian rivals are irreconcilable, poised to inflict heavy damage on one another to fulfill their conflicting aspirations.” (26)
Ironically, over the course of the last 50 years, Kosovo has gone from being Tito’s lure to bring Albania into a federation with Yugoslavia to a province that wants to secede. It is tempting to compare the situation in Kosovo today with that in Bosnia in 1991, but there are differences. The key distinction is that Kosovo, unlike Bosnia, was never a constituent republic of Yugoslavia. Indeed, since the 1913 London Treaty, which ended the First Balkan War, Kosovo has been recognized by the international community as part of Serbia.
Washington’s Reaction
Washington’s reaction to Belgrade’s February-March crackdown was immediate. “We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia,” warned U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright on March 7. (27) Two days later, she announced that the United States reserved the right to take unilateral action against the Serbian government, saying, “We know what we need to know to believe we are seeing ethnic cleansing all over again.” (28)
After holding emergency meetings in London and Bonn, the Balkan Contact Group–representing the United States, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy.agreed on an arms embargo against Serbia, a freeze on export credits to Belgrade, and a denial of visas to officials involved in the crackdown in Kosovo. Not satisfied with the Contact Group’s sanctions package, the United States left the door open to military intervention. In fact, when asked about that possibility, Robert Gelbard, President Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, told a congressional hearing, we will first use “every possible economic sanction or other kind of tool we have diplomatically, but we aren’t ruling anything out.” (29)
At the same time, the political arm of NATO, the North Atlantic Council, raised the prospect of NATO intervention noting, “NATO and the international community have a legitimate interest in developments on Kosovo . . . because of their impact on the stability of the whole region.” (30) NATO representatives then held an emergency meeting with the government of Albania and agreed to increase military and civilian assistance, including new communications equipment and vehicles to patrol the border. (31) But the violence in Kosovo continued. Soon afterward, NATO agreed to establish a small military mission in the Albanian capital of Tirana to oversee efforts aimed at helping the Albanians bolster their armed forces. (32) By mid-June NATO warplanes were conducting “show-of-force” air exercises over Albania and Macedonia, and in August and September, NATO participated in ground war games with Albania’s army.
Today, U.S. a