[ALBSA-Info] Outrageous article in the Economist

[ERI Budo]

letters to the editor, anyone????

Albanians on the rampage
Mar 30th 2001
>From The Economist Global Agenda


NATO's reluctance to crack down on ethnic-Albanian extremists in Kosovo has 
helped to precipitate
guerrilla insurgencies in Macedonia and Yugoslavia. The repercussions will 
be felt for years to come


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.
Even then, officials from NATO and the United Nations, who had taken over 
the administration of Kosovo from
Yugoslavia were having 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.
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. The grim prediction seems all too prescient.

Indeed, to anyone who has watched south-eastern Europe’s miseries over the 
past decade, the scene around the
hitherto agreeable Macedonian town of Tetovo, noted for its pretty textiles, 
pleasant cafés and access to the ski
slopes, looks dreadfully familiar. Since mid-February, the ramshackle forces 
of a ramshackle government have been
trading inconclusive fire with a motley band of guerrillas. Some 8000 
civilians have fled the fighting. Macedonian
troops appear to have lifted the guerrillas' siege of Tetovo itself, and to 
have regained control of several nearby
villages, but hardly any of their adversaries have been killed or captured. 
Few observers imagine that the world has
heard the last of them. Carl Bildt, the Swede who is the UN’s envoy to the 
Balkans, describes the news of the
standoff in Macedonia as the region’s worst in many years.

Growing apart

The guerrillas call themselves the National Liberation Army. They say thay
are fighting to force Macedonia's Slav majority to grant more rights to the
ethnic-Albanian minority, which makes up perhaps a third of the
population. They have, at any rate, succeeded in radicalising many of
their brethren: young ethnic- Albanians in Tetovo openly support the
insurgency. Co-existence between the two groups is in real danger of
collapsing horribly, both in the corridors of political power and in 
countless
streets and villages.

Slav Macedonians are seething with bitterness and encouraging the
government to crack down hard. Feelings are especially strong among
poorer Slavs who, in a refrain well-known from other communal conflicts,
say their Albanian neighbours already have things too good by half, with
their flourishing black economy and an Albanian-language university due to 
open later this year. Besides, an
Albanian party is in the government coalition, and has, among other posts, 
the justice ministry. What more, the
complaint goes, do the ethnic Albanians want? How can they be so ungrateful, 
it is added, when Macedonia (a bit
grudgingly) opened its borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees from 
Kosovo during the 1999 war?

The Macedonian government now faces the impossible task of restoring order 
without stoking tensions between
the two groups. A similar dilemma faces the Yugoslav authorities, who are 
grappling with the guerrillas of the
Liberation Army for Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB), named after the 
biggest towns in the partially
Albanian-inhabited region where they operate. In total, the UCPMB occupies a 
maximum of 120 square miles. But
small as it is, the area in question is of enormous strategic importance, 
since it lies along the borders of both
Kosovo and Macedonia. The guerillas there are taking advantage of something 
called “the ground security zone”—a
five-kilometre (three-mile) demilitarised strip on the Yugoslav side of 
Kosovo’s boundary. Under the agreement of
June 1999 that ended NATO’s air-war, Yugoslavia pledged not to deploy 
anything more than lightly armed police in
the area. The intention was to avoid clashes between Kfor, NATO's force in 
Kosovo, and the Yugoslav army. But in
practice, the zone has provided a no-man's-land that the guerrillas can 
exploit to take pot shots at the
ill-defended police and smuggle supplies to their comrades in Macedonia.

If Yugoslav forces respond too harshly, Kosovar Albanians will see it as a
renewal of the campaign of ethnic cleansing that prompted the Kosovo war
in the first place. On the other hand, many Yugoslavs already consider
their country unfairly put-upon. America and the EU are leaning on the
government to hand suspected war criminals over to the international
tribunal in The Hague. A campaign for independence continues in
Montenegro, the only republic left alongside Serbia in the Yugoslav
federation. Calls for Yugoslav forces to go soft on ethnic-Albanian
guerrillas might drive Serbs back towards the very nationalism that NATO
has long struggled to defuse.

Greater Albania calls

The threat the guerrillas pose depends in part on how strongly they 
co-ordinate their attacks. Paul Beaver, a
defence analyst, recently caused a stir among Balkan-watchers by asserting 
that the violence in Macedonia and
the Presevo valley, in addition to anti-Serb riots in the town of Mitrovica 
in Kosovo, form part of an orchestrated,
Balkans-wide Albanian-nationalist campaign.

Certainly, many of both the NLA and the UCPMB's fighters are veterans of
the better-known Kosovo Liberation Army, which mounted a guerrilla
campaign against the Yugoslav army during the Kosovo war. 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. The UCPMB, for example, has split into at least four
factions, which compete with one another almost as fiercely as they target
Yugoslav forces. That is one of the main reasons why keeping them under
control has been such a headache for western policymakers.

To make matters worse, the guerrillas' demands are impossibly vague: there
has also been talk of everything from hiving off Macedonia and Yugoslavia's
ethnic-Albanian areas into a greater Albania, at one extreme, to simply
ending discrimination against ethnic-Albanians at the other. Many accuse
them of using nationalism as cover for smuggling. Kosovo and the surrounding 
region are certainly major transit
points for illicit traffic in drugs, guns, prostitutes and immigrants. 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.

Whatever happened to NATO?

Whatever the guerrillas’ hierarchy and motives, Kosovo is clearly the
spiritual heart of their movement, as well as the source of much of their
supplies and manpower. NATO faces growing pressure to dismantle that
network at its source, rather than leaving Macedonia and Yugoslavia, with
their frail governments and baying nationalists, to bear the brunt. The
alliance has assigned more troops to border patrol, but the Sar mountains,
which overlook northern Macedonia and southern Kosovo, are rugged,
snowy, and forested—terrain where guerrillas and their mules have an
easier time of it than the NATO soldiers trying to stop them. The Presevo
valley is not much better. Even NATO’s cleverest drones have trouble with
thick clouds.

Nonetheless, it might seem extraordinary that a couple of thousand
lightly-armed fighters 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 UN 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 timid 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.

Time to get tough

America is still reluctant to put its troops in harm's way—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 further 
conflict in Macedonia or Presevo
remains open to doubt. Kosovo's hardline nationalists have been looking for 
a way to regain the initiative since their
setback in the local elections. At the same time, Kosovo Albanians as a 
whole have been alarmed by the western
world’s improving relations with the new Yugoslav government, led by 
Vojislav Kostunica, and its loss of enthusiasm
for the idea of eventual independence for Kosovo—which is notionally part of 
Yugoslavia, though in practice a
protectorate of the UN and NATO. The more-or-less amicable way in which NATO 
and the new government in
Belgrade have co-operated in dealing with ethnic-Albanian guerrillas in 
southern Serbia is, from the Kosovars’
viewpoint, depressing news.

Until recently at least, impatient ethnic-Albanians were counting on early
Kosovo-wide elections as a first step towards self-determination. But
Hans Haekkerup, the Dane who runs the province for the UN, has dashed
those hopes, ruling out a ballot until next year at the earliest. This may
have played into the hands of extremist Kosovars, who say only force will
achieve results.

Indeed, influential Kosovars have been warning their western friends in
recent weeks that they are ready to “go back to war” if their community
sees no prospect of self-determination (in other words, full independence)
through peaceful means. If that warning is understood as a threat to
attack western troops in Kosovo itself, it sounds very much like bluff.
After all, if NATO were forced to quit the province, that could simply give
the Yugoslav army free rein to re-enter and settle old scores. But if the
warning of a “return to war” is understood as a threat to ruin Macedonia’s 
fragile equilibrium, then it sounds all too
plausible—and it looks very much as if the threat is being carried out.

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