Saturday, March 10, 2001Balkan foes join forces against common enemy
Suddenly the Serbs are on the side of the angels, reports Simon Mann, Herald Correspondent.
Spring is heralding an astonishing new political order in one of the world's flashpoints.
Two years after NATO went to war against Serbia, the arch enemies are forging a security alliance in the Balkans.
United States NATO troops who fought Serbia to protect Kosovo's oppressed ethnic majority in 1999, this week found themselves firing on Albanians - extremists who have launched crossborder incursions into Serbia's Presevo Valley and northern Macedonia.
NATO leaders in Brussels are praising the restraint of Serb forces in the face of escalating provocation and have agreed to join Serbs in patrolling a contentious corridor on the Kosovo-Serbia border.
If that was not a measure enough of detente, Yugoslavia's President Vojislav Kostunica declined in a newspaper interview to rule out the possibility of his nation eventually joining NATO's Partnership for Peace program, which is widely viewed as a prelude to a move for full membership of the alliance.
Oxford University Balkans expert Dr Mark Almond, with tongue in cheek, said:
"Of course, the Serbs were always our dearest buddies, always our real allies."
A resurgence of Albanian extremism is concentrating the minds of the former foes. Rebels operating out of southern Kosovo have launched attacks on Serb and Macedonian positions, and are blamed for last month's bombing of a bus near Podujevo that killed 10 Serb civilians.
Though their numbers are low, and their ultimate goals unclear, two main rebel groups seem to be threatening the region's brittle ethnic co-existence.
Both groups are mutations of the former Kosovo Liberation Army, and say they are fighting to protect the local ethnic Albanian communities in southern Serbia and Macedonia from heavy-handed security forces. Both, however, are suspected of harbouring more sinister objectives: establishing a Greater Albania and possibly securing black market trade routes into and out of Kosovo.
One of the rebel groups is the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac. Serb commanders put the group's strength at up to 4,000 fighters, most of whom have been operating with impunity from within the five-kilometre buffer zone mapped out between Kosovo and Serbia to separate United Nations peacekeepers and Yugoslav armed forces at the end of the Kosovo war.
The group essentially wants to unite the Albanian communities in the southern Serbian municipalities of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac with an independent Kosovo. Its forces already protect Albanian villages and towns within the zone, where pimply-faced young men shoulder AK-47s at streetside checkpoints. It is an ominous presence that is likely to be challenged as NATO dissolves the restricted area and begins patrolling the territory alongside Serb special police.
The second rebel force, which calls itself the National Liberation Army, is thought to involve perhaps 300 fighters. It is also believed to carry a separatist agenda: it hopes to unite the 500,000-strong ethnic Albanian community in Macedonia, which accounts for a quarter of the total population, with neighbouring communities to create a north-western corridor that would link Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia.
The concept of a Greater Albania is seen by regional leaders as little more than a dream.
Albania's President Mr Rexhep Meidani condemned the recent violence, and this week telephoned his Macedonian counterpart, Mr Ljubco Georgievski, to express support for Macedonia's sovereignty. Albania's Prime Minister, Mr Ilir Meta, was more blunt: "We are not in favour of any border changes ... I hope the Albanians [of southern Serbia and Macedonia] will choose dialogue because otherwise they will become isolated and lose everyone's support."
While such words are being used to temper the militants' expectations, commentators agree a new urgency is building in Kosovo, where Kosovar Albanians and the international community responsible for rebuilding the trashed Yugoslav province grow steadily apart.
Thwarted ambition is prompting the anxiety. October's local elections, boycotted by the few remaining Serbs in Kosovo, delivered power to the Albanian moderate Dr Ibrahim Rugova, whose Democratic League of Kosovo, with 60 per cent of the vote, defeated the Democracy Party of Kosovo, led by Mr Hashim Thaci, the former commander of the KLA.
While the rejection of Mr Thaci might have carried a message of conservatism, the local population - previously 90 per cent, now almost exclusively, ethnic Albanian - continues to press for independence from the Yugoslav federation.
Yet the UN-led administration in Pristina, presumably as a sop to Mr Kostunica's New Democracy Federal Government in Belgrade, continues to play a dead bat to the issue.
The portents were bad, said the president of the Geneva-based Business Humanitarian Forum, Mr John Maraesca, a former US ambassador, who warned that inertia by the world would push the province perilously close to renewed conflict.
"Interest in Kosovo is lagging, while the problems become starker," he said. "It's estimated that as many as 70 per cent of Kosovar workers are unemployed. There are virtually no banking or insurance systems. Laws and regulations on trade are outmoded.
If no new jobs are created, many young Kosovars will turn to crime, or will be ready volunteers for Serb-baiting or guerilla warfare."
The author James Pettifer wrote in The Wall Street Journal Europe: "Indeed, the international focus seems now to be exclusively concentrated on Mr Kostunica and Yugoslavia.
"Mainstream Albanian politicians in Kosovo feel abandoned. Neither they [nor] the majority of ordinary Kosovars are nationalist extremists, and they would be happy with moderate progress towards some measure of autonomy that would lead to eventual independence.
"Democratising the Balkans is a holistic project. The fact that Serbia has begun to make improvements since the end of the Milosevic regime should be applauded, but the faster progress of the other countries cannot now be held up to allow Belgrade to catch up. It's particularly dangerous if Kosovo is held hostage to Serbia's pace, as the whole region is involved in an inevitable movement away from central authority."The Sydney Morning Herald
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