[ALBSA-Info] Intriguing article from The Economist

[Kreshnik Bejko]

Another Balkan civil war?
Mar 19th 2001
>From The Economist Global Agenda

The biggest threat to Balkan stability is now Albanian, not Serbian, 
nationalism

In context: Macedonian mission creep

A FEW months after NATO's air war against Yugoslavia in 1999, a senior 
American policymaker made a prediction about the Balkans. For the previous 
decade, he said, the main challenge to western policy in the region had been 
posed by Serbian nationalism; for the next decade, the biggest challenge 
would come from Albanian nationalism.


Guns...

On March 18th, as Macedonia's prime minister accused NATO of standing by 
while ethnic-Albanian guerrillas plunged his country into chaos, the 
forecast seemed all too prescient. When NATO took control of Kosovo from 
Yugoslavia after the war, its commanders knew they would have a hard time 
reining in the nationalist feelings of the province’s ethnic-Albanian 
majority, which had suffered discrimination and then pogroms at the hands of 
Yugoslavia’s Serb-dominated government. But now, in addition to keeping the 
lid on Kosovo itself, western governments are struggling to contain the 
challenge from ethnic-Albanian guerrillas in two other places: the Presevo 
valley in Yugoslavia and (with less success, evidently) in Macedonia.


Days after NATO officials negotiated a truce in the Presevo valley, there 
were reports of fighting in parts of Macedonia which had not previously been 
affected. For almost a week, a gun battle has raged in the city of Tetovo, 
Macedonia's biggest ethnic-Albanian stronghold, between government forces 
and a group called the National Liberation Army. The latter wants, at a 
minimum, to turn the country into a sort of segregated, bi-national state of 
Slavs and Albanians. Many of the NLA's fighters are veterans of the 
better-known Kosovo Liberation Army and its battle against the Serbs. These 
and the other armed Albanian groups which have emerged in different parts of 
the southern Balkans co-operate in some respects, but are also riven by 
local rivalries and feuds. That is one reason why keeping them under control 
has been such a headache for western policymakers.







On the face of things, it might seem extraordinary that a couple of thousand 
lightly-armed fighters, dedicated to the Albanian-nationalist cause but with 
no other coherent ideology, should pose an insuperable and apparently 
growing challenge to Kosovo's supposed protectors: a 44,000-strong force led 
by NATO, 4,000-plus foreign and local policemen, two dozen intelligence 
agencies and a team of well-paid bureaucrats seconded from the United 
Nations and the European Union. In fact, Kosovo's guardians have not proved 
as formidable as their numbers and firepower would suggest. They are keen to 
avoid casualties among their own soldiers; they are wary of actions that 
would alienate the ordinary people in Kosovo whom they are supposed to be 
shielding from the Serbs; and they want to avoid rocking the province's 
political boat too hard.


This strategy appeared to pay off last autumn in internationally-supervised 
local elections, which brought an impressive success for the relative 
moderates among the Kosovar-Albanian community. But Kosovo’s NATO and UN 
commissars failed to follow up with a crackdown on the nefarious activities 
of harder-line politicians and warlords: smuggling, racketeering, 
intimidation and racial violence. In part, this passivity stems from the 
different priorities among the western governments involved in policing 
Kosovo. French officials, for example, complain that as long as Slobodan 
Milosevic was in power, America tried to needle him by quietly condoning 
ethnic-Albanian militants–including those who are now causing such a 
headache in the Presevo valley.



...guns...


The guerrillas active there–at least some of whom very reluctantly entered a 
ceasefire arrangement with NATO on March 12th–describe themselves as the 
Liberation Army for Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, after the biggest towns 
in the region. Their main commanders–Shefket Musliu and Muhamet Xhemaili–are 
both veterans of the anti-Serb struggle in Kosovo, and are bitterly at odds 
with one another.

In total, the guerrillas in Presevo, who occupy a maximum of 120 square 
miles, are divided into at least four factions, which compete over criminal 
spoils, control of funds and weapons procurement. In the bizarre and 
ruthless underworld of southern Balkans, almost everything is available from 
anyone at the right price. The guerrillas apparently have no difficulty 
obtaining anti-aircraft guns (which are then used as crude ground-to-ground 
weapons) from renegade Serbs. Their arsenal also includes Kalashnikovs from 
all over the ex-communist world, mortars and rocket-launchers.

As for the guerrilla movement which has sprung up in Macedonia, they are 
mostly of local origin but many are veterans of the fighting in Kosovo two 
years ago. Ramush Haradinaj, a warrior-turned-politician who exercises huge 
clout in western Kosovo, has denied any connection with the NLA in 
Macedonia–though several of his former lieutenants have been spotted in its 
ranks. In fact, the ethnic-Albanian guerrilla movement is neither a 
centrally-controlled monolith nor a disparate, fragmented mixture of 
opportunists. There is an elaborate network of alliances and rivalries 
between fighters on different fronts. And with unemployment running at 60% 
in Kosovo, and something close to that figure among ethnic-Albanians in 
Macedonia, there is no shortage of bored young men to recruit.



...and more guns


NATO faces growing pressure to dismantle that network at its centre, in 
Kosovo, rather than leaving Macedonia and Yugoslavia, with their frail 
governments and baying nationalists, to bear the brunt. America is still 
squeamish—but its NATO allies are losing their patience: a senior Norwegian 
official recently declared, “There is a feeling that America could and 
should do more.” In the meantime, NATO and UNMIK, the United Nation’s 
civilian administration in Kosovo, are taking some practical steps to stem 
the violence. They have recently drafted harsh new anti-terrorist laws and 
set up a new criminal-intelligence unit. From the beginning of next month, 
anybody found in possession of a weapon faces up to ten years in prison or a 
DM20,000 ($9,200) fine. And to help gather evidence against arrested 
suspects amid Kosovo’s intimidatingly criminal climate, suspects can now be 
held 30 days without charge.


Whether such a crackdown will be fierce and fast enough to prevent a serious 
conflict in Macedonia or Presevo remains open to doubt. Macedonia's 
President Boris Trajkovski, whose administration includes a moderate 
ethnic-Albanian party, recently announced that his country could cope with 
the guerrilla challenge. “We will isolate them politically and militarily,” 
he predicted–just moments before the fighting spread to Tetovo

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