Kosovo

I read about Kosovo while at school. It was the last episode of the Balkan conflict of the 90s, or so we thought. I was supposed to have read this book, “Winning Ugly” which was a double edged assessment of the Clinton Administration / NATO’s handling of this conflict. But they couldn’t find enough copies of that book so we read an easier book instead. (Yay!)

I read that book eventually, a couple of months ago. On one hand NATO waged its first ever war and won it, which is why nobody calls it “no action talk only” anymore. But it won the conflict in a way which was a close shave, and plenty of mistakes were made on the way.

First off, the shameful way that NATO responded to the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia left their reputation in tatters. NATO decided that it wasn’t going to stand any more of Slobodan Milosevic’s nonsense, so it decided that it was going to use military force against Milosevic if he tried anything funny with the Albanians in Kosovo (like he did with the Bosnians). Well and good.

Unfortunately Clinton had this notion that the US army was too afraid of sustaining casualties to have a ground war. So what it tried to do was to bomb Belgrade into submission. It was only going to be a 2 week bombing, but it lasted a few months. The Chinese embassy got bombed. When they were asked what are you going to do if the bombing doesn’t work they said, I don’t know, it has to work.

Not long after the bombing started, Milosevic expelled a few hundred thousand Kosovo Albanians from their homes. A few hundred thousand people out in the open, and the winter approaching. Well this was very fortunate for Clinton and NATO because suddenly Milosevic was the really bad guy who had to be stopped at all costs. It was easier to get people to continue bombing Belgrade until Milosevic gave up.

Now here’s a plug for Clinton. Even at his most screwed up, Bill Clinton was much better than Bush. He understood the issues, understood what was going on, regardless of whether he had the courage or the wisdom to act correctly in the face of trouble. He managed something quite difficult: NATO had to act alone, because they knew that if they were to bring this issue up to the UN, Russia and China would veto any military action against the Serbs. But eventually he managed to convince Russia that it was completely wrong to support a bad guy like Milosevic. Most crucially, Russia had to tell Milosevic that it wasn’t going to support him any longer.

Eventually, this set off a series of events which culminated in Milosevic losing power. The Kosovo Albanians went back to their homes, and apart from a few poor Kosovo Serbians who probably had the shit beaten out of them, the story is over, and everybody lived happily after.

Or did it? The most alarming thing that I read in that book, to me, was that NATO did not allow Kosovo to hold a referendum about how it wanted to be governed. This is because the majority of the Albanians in Kosovo would want independence. Even after the conflict, Kosovo retained its status as an autonomous province of Serbia. So in a way it’s a time bomb – either the Kosovars change their minds about independence, or they will work towards it.

And it’s already happened – they have declared themselves independent. Serbia is refusing to recognise them, although a lot of countries have recognised Kosovo. I don’t know if they’re going to merge with Albania or anything, but at least they don’t want to take any more shit from Serbia.