[Prishtina-E] What History Teaches Us About Kosova, by Alice Mead

[kosova at jps.net]

What History Teaches Us About Kosova

By Alice Mead (June 13, 2002)
Special to the Zeri, Prishtine

History is a tool for learning about ourselves and our past mistakes. It has
shown us, for example, that colonialism was a destructive and economically
devastating policy of exploitation that has left us with an immoral divide
between first world and third world countries today.

Fortunately colonialism has nearly been extinguished world wide, except in
Kosova, where it remains a constant. Exploitation of Kosova for political or
economic gain is still a hidden agenda for Serb politicians, hidden in the
sense that internationals cannot see it.

Only through history can we gain enough perspective regarding our actions
and motives to finally perceive a proximity to the truth. Internationals,
nearly all of them, have failed to study the truth about the historic
situation of Kosova or of Serbia¹s relationship with Kosova since 1912.

Instead of checking the historic record, internationals fall back on
ethnicity as the reason and cause for all that happens. It is not the
existence of ethnicity that causes conflict; it is the consistent abuse of
power.

Kosova was, and is still, Serbia¹s colony. Serbia has never in the past and
does not now extend international law, equality, human rights, and economic
development to Kosova. NATO did not "wrest" Kosova from Serbia with its
so-called humanitarian war of 1999. Serbia had already lost Kosova, time
will probably show that Kosova was lost in 1989, because of Serbia¹s
willingness to treat Kosova as a colony when the age of colonialism and the
resulting civil and human rights abuses was long past. Apartheid was over.

The Belgrade Serb policy in Mitrovica is but an extension of their disregard
for international law as applied to Kosova. Mitrovica is, in a sense, their
colony to be exploited.

Reading history can be especially instructive when trying to gain
objectivity during tumultuous periods of change and political
reorganization. In Kosova, internationals have tried to be objective by
evaluating all decisions with the measuring stick of minority rights, or, in
this case, Serb rights. While close monitoring of the safety and well-being
of minorities is important, giving political privileges to the Serb
minority(giving them more because they are numerically less) puts weak
political institutions in a vulnerable position that can be easily exploited
by the minority and can leave the majority on the sidelines. Covic demands
privileges for Serbs, decreases representation for Albanians. This is
divisive and unfair. Yet UNMIK supports him.

Affirmative action, the American policy of giving advantages to blacks and
other minorities grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960¹s. It was
based on the idea that the minorities were disadvantaged, that socially and
economically they did not have the same opportunities that white Americans
did.

In Kosova, the opposite is true. Serbs, a minority of the population, were
always the privileged few. It was the majority which had few or no
opportunities. This is an important historical point.

Creating a policy that is biased nowadays in favor of the formerly
privileged minority would be like giving South African whites extra
advantages over blacks. Kosova was an apartheid society. Serbs held all
positions of power and privilege. Serbs, now five per cent of the population
in Kosova, have gained 18 per cent representation in Kosova¹s Assembly.
Covic would like to move the Serb representation in Parliament towards 30
per cent. But is this kind of manipulation of power the same as “affirmative
action?” (Eshte nje ligj ne Amerike qe I detyron firmat qe te punesojne nje
perqidje te zezakeve si shtrese minoritare).  Or is it an attempt by Covic
and others to reinstate Serbian control over the Albanian population? Have
internationals, again, ignored the particular history of repression and
privilege that was an inherent part of Kosova since 1912? Blacks are twelve
per cent of the American population, but they do not have twenty four per
cent representation in Congress.

A history book I have been reading recently is Joseph Ellis¹ Pulitzer Prize
winner, Founding Brothers, about the men who helped guide the United States
through its perilous infancy and those who tried to bring it down. Ellis¹
thesis is that when political institutions are new and weak, and Kosova¹s
protectorate government is certainly both, then the outcome of fragile
nations depends very heavily on the moral character of a few individuals.
For example, perhaps in the long run, the future of Kosova will turn out to
have depended more heavily on the moral clarity and integrity of Judge
Goldstone and William Walker than on Hashim Thaci or Michael Steiner.

Ellis begins his exploration of his thesis with a most unheroic character,
the traitor Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson¹s Vice President in 1800. The moral
deviousness of this one person who constantly manipulated the institutions
around him was almost enough to bring about the dissolution of the fragile
U.S. republic. He continually found opportunities to increase his personal
power and influence, and he found the political and institutional weaknesses
of the new American government an intriguing medium for manipulation. Burr
had a "knack for injecting himself into the cracks" between warring
political parties.  He ended up disgraced, in exile in the American West.

Let¹s compare Vice President Burr with Deputy Prime Minister Covic. Why not?
It¹s not so outrageous, and it might even be revealing. Its very incongruity
might throw the moral character of Covic into sharp relief. We might look at
him as a human being first who takes his place in human history, not as a
Serb first. As a human being, Covic must stand on his record of past actions
and his efforts to uphold the law. The focus of Balkan international policy
cannot continually be viewed through guilt-ridden Western lenses of
ethnicity first, that what happens in Kosova is always part of an ongoing
crisis of ethnic violence.

Who is Covic? Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia, Covic is a close, personal
friend of the American ambassador in Belgrade, Ambassador Montgomery. Our
modern day Aaron Burr, he quickly designated himself the "go-to guy" on
Kosova. He told internationals he was a good problem-solver on Kosova
issues. He told Serbs in a speech in 2001 that Kosova should be returned to
Serbia.

Originally a member of Milosevic¹s party until 1997 (what kind of moral
character did that involve?) he changed political parties at an expedient
time. As director of the Kosova Coordination Center, Covic meets with UNMIK
officials and even spoke at the UN Security Council meeting in April 2002 on
partitioning Kosova. Albanians, however, are not allowed to speak at all at
the Security Council and are not allowed to mention independence. His speech
before the Security Council was amply supported and elaborated on by the
Russian ambassador. While he appears to be working with the UN, he was in
charge of efforts to create disruptions in Mitrovica at the same time.

Covic actively defies UN law in the following ways: he campaigns actively
for the partitioning of Mitrovica and against the rule of UNMIK, helps in
the creation of parallel Serb institutions in northern Kosova, has kept
30,000 Serbs in north Kosova on the Belgrade payroll, (UNMIK¹s Kosovo
Albatross, ICG report on Mitrovica, 2002). He has also failed to return 800
Albanian bodies found in mass graves in Serbia to Kosova.

Aaron Burr found endless opportunities for personal political gain in the
issues of secession, regional confederations, and shifting political
parties. Covic finds fertile ground in the issue of ethnic partitioning,
through which he scores political points with die-hard Serbs in Serbia and
offers a seeming inexpensive "compromise to the solution for Kosova" to
internationals. But Kosova is not Bosnia, first of all (Albanians are 90 per
cent of the population) and partitioning never works (see Palestine and
Northern Ireland or for that matter, BiH.)

If Covic is not administering international or UN law, what is he doing in
Mitrovica? Did he create the situation there on his own? The answer to that
lies in modern history. According to Louis Sell¹s new book on Milosevic,
discussions about the partition of the north sector of Kosova were known by
Boris Yeltsin in June 4, 1999. Russia, it seems, had offered to help
Milosevic by militarily taking the sector of Mitrovica North and perhaps
even Prishtina. While US and Russian officials were actively negotiating on
June 12, 1999, Russian troops from Bosnia entered Kosova to secure Slatina
airport for Russian troop planes that were already being prepared to fly
into Kosova. Russian General Ivanov stated that within six hours, he hoped
to take the sector that they wanted, the northern sector (p. 314-315, Sell.
Slobodan Milosevic. 2002). In the Russian government, this was no secret.
Even Putin knew about it. In the next weeks, over 1,000 plain-clothes
paramilitaries entered Mitrovica from Serbia. The MUP payroll in Belgrade
now pays the Bridgewatchers, as they have come to be called.

I have to disagree somewhat with the ICG report on Mitrovica. The situation
in Mitrovica did not spontaneously mushroom from sporadic ethnic conflict
between former Serb and Albanian neighbors, although that has certainly
happened. The decision to partition Mitrovica and to gain control of 30 per
cent of Kosova was an intentional part of Serbia¹s plan dating back at least
to June, 1999, if not before. The people on the ground, both Serb and
Albanian, are merely pawns.

Today, Covic is simply successfully carrying out that plan for partition,
financing it with the West¹s World Bank money! And internationals have never
formally challenged it. Certainly it seems that American Ambassador
Montgomery has not challenged it. According to ICG, "Publicly Covic and the
Kosova Coordination Center appear to be working with UNMIK and KFOR, but
behind the scenes, Covic¹s goal is to create as much discord as possible."
(p. 7, UNMIK¹s Kosovo Albatross). Any violent scenario that erupts in and
around Mitrovica and that appears to be an outburst of ethnic violence can
then be manipulated by Covic, in the same manner that Milosevic manipulated
such scenarios in the past. It would play straight into Covic¹s hands if
Albanian frustrations boil over and the Albanians attack French KFOR. This
is a prime example of why the disempowerment of the Albanians, the silencing
of the media and the politicians by UNMIK and Steiner, is a very grave
mistake.

Solutions to Mitrovica, and to the future of Kosova, must be based on
principles on not on ethnic counting games. For example:

1. UNSC and the USA must insist on the rapid transfer of UN powers to the
local Kosova Parliament
2. Internationals must investigate the origins of the partitioning of
Mitrovica and make the findings available to the  public
3. Internationals must investigate the colonialization of Kosova and the
lack of Serbia¹s legal ties and abrigement of basic rights dating from 1913,
as well as the role of massacres, deportations, and cultural genocide from
1913 to 1999. This must be publicly acknowledged as an important part of
Kosova's  history.
4. The media must be assisted in objectively analyzing politicians¹ records
without relying on nationalist overtones
5. Ethnicizing all policies in Kosova has proceeded out of control, creating
a four tiered society‹with extremely impoverished Roma at the bottom and a
politically privileged group of Serbs living in enclaves, internationals are
the most privileged of all
6. Limit Serb returnees to former property holders only. The other 100,000
Serbs should return to Croatia, where, as history will bear out, their homes
are located. They left these homes in 1995.

The dangers that can result when politicians govern by setting up local
populations in ethnic confrontations and violence are very dangerous. This
was Milosevic¹s method. It is Covic¹s method. Aaron Burr almost
single-handedly brought down a fragile new nation by fanning the flames of
partition. Fortunately, men of principle allied themselves against him and
he failed. Whether Covic succeeds or fails will depend on the same thing,
the moral strength of others, their objectivity, and their determination to
read history with care.


- Alice mead is an American author and a human rights activist.


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