Milosevic Taught Albanians That Violence Pays

SARAJEVO, Mar 19, 2001 -- (Reuters) As Slobodan Milosevic contemplates a future behind bars, he is doubtless finding rare satisfaction in contemplating events in Macedonia.
    His enemies in the West are struggling to extinguish the flames of another Balkan conflict, and for once no one is blaming him directly.
    But it was Milosevic's stern repression of Kosovo's Albanians that generated the ethnic anger and frustration which has spilled over into fragile Macedonia.
    As European foreign ministers meet on Monday they confront a Balkan scene blacker than it has been for almost two years.
    Fighting between Macedonian forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas, schooled in the struggle to oust Milosevic's soldiers from Kosovo, has raged for almost a week.
    The violence, which Macedonia blames on guerrillas infiltrating across the border from Kosovo, threatens to drag into civil war the one republic that left the old Yugoslav Federation without violence.
    It comes in what was supposed to be a new era of democracy and peace following Milosevic's ouster last year and the death of nationalist Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman in late 1999.
    "From a political game, Milosevic created a war game. He opened the Pandora's Box," said Baton Haxhiu, editor of Koha Ditore, an influential Kosovo Albanian newspaper.

MACEDONIA LONG SEEN VULNERABLE

Kosovo, where Serbs and Albanians have always been at odds, became an open sore after Milosevic replaced autonomy with repression in 1989 in the name of Serb rights, two years before Socialist Yugoslavia fell apart.
    Back then Western leaders expressed concern that tensions in Kosovo could threaten neighboring Macedonia, which has its own large and restive Albanian minority and one-time territorial claims from neighbors Greece, Serbia, Albania and Bulgaria.
    But Kosovo was also Milosevic's holy grail, which secured his rise to power and ultimately helped to bring him down.
    When he came to the negotiating table in 1995 to discuss a settlement to three and a half years of war in Bosnia, Albanian demonstrators turned up at the air base near Dayton, Ohio, to plead the Kosovo case.
    International mediators say they tried to get him to discuss the issue but he flatly refused.
    The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had already been set up by then, but seeing their protests ignored fuelled their struggle.
    "The mistake of world diplomacy was that they didn't find a solution to the problem of Yugoslavia at once in all territories," said Emrush Xhemaili of the People's Movement of Kosovo (LPK) who argues Macedonia's gunmen had no choice.
    "So more rights were given to some people and less to others," he said.

ON THE MARGINS

Xhemaili's party, which has its roots in the movement which launched the KLA in 1993, is just one of the organizations supporting the gunmen in Macedonia, who have been widely condemned by the international community.
    All are on the margins of political life in Kosovo or Macedonia and both diplomats and those Albanian politicians who represent the mainstream see the fighting as a grab for power by people who could not win through the ballot box.
    "They have lots of weapons, lots of reservists who can be called upon with little notice and unfinished business that appeals to some Kosovo Albanians here," said one diplomat.
    Xhemaili rejects the label extremist and says his party, which once sought the unification of all Albanian lands within former Yugoslavia, now seeks independence for Kosovo through parliamentary means and offers only moral support to the gunmen.
    But he equates the ills done to Albanians in Macedonia, where the minority has five ministerial posts in government and a growing role in the police force, with those done by Milosevic to Kosovo.
    The vast majority of Albanians reject such comparisons.

MILOSEVIC LEGACY

In Kosovo the West, determined not to let Milosevic repeat the horrors of Bosnia, intervened on the KLA's side with air strikes in 1999 to stop human rights abuses for which the United Nations war crimes tribunal is now seeking to try him.
    This year in Serbia's Presevo Valley just outside Kosovo it is encouraging his reformist successors to negotiate more rights for Albanians with guerrillas operating there for a year.
    Adem Demaci, veteran firebrand of the KLA, said others were now trying to jump on the bandwagon, using the analogy of the gas stations that have sprung up in Kosovo since NATO-led peacekeepers and United Nations officials took it over in 1999.
    Writing in a newspaper commentary, he said that when people saw one gas station was profitable, they began building them everywhere. As a result, no one made any money.
    "Some individuals are wrongly investing the political and military skill they gained in our successful rebellions and wars now when its not the right time or the right place," he said, arguing that the gunmen had hurt Kosovo's independence prospects.
    One moderate Albanian figure in Kosovo said he had tried to persuade those backing the guerrillas that they should have put pressure on the Macedonian authorities with protests first rather than going straight for the gun.
    "But now is not the time for people like us," he said.
    "They tell us it's the time of the Kalashnikov."

(C)2001 Copyright Reuters Limited.
 

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