Europe's master of brinkmanship may try to convince his people that they have no option but to give up their beloved Kosova
By Mark Dennis and Zoran Cirjakovic
At first it looked like yet another atrocity committed by out-of-control Serb policemen in the rebellious province of Kosovo. A fierce firefight broke out on Jan. 15 in the village of Racak, only 16 miles south of the capital of Pristina, and at least 18 Albanians lost their lives while fleeing their homes. Although initial reports say one woman and one child were among the dead, witnesses say the total number could be at least six. Serb police nabbed 23 men hiding in a barn; later their bodies were found in a ditch. Many had been mutilated. The discovery of several more victims in the surrounding fields brought the body count to 45, making Racak one of the worst massacres of the Serbs' yearlong brutal repression of the uprising led by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Serb authorities said the victims at Racak died as the result of a fight with the KLA.
Then the Kosovo Verification Mission showed up. Its leader, American diplomat William Walker, was one of the first on the scene, and he said there had been no firefight, no heat-of-the-moment excuse for what he suggested was simply cold-blooded murder (following story). Yugoslav authorities promptly ordered Walker deported, in violation of agreements President Slobodan Milosevic had signed in October with Richard Holbrooke to stop the fighting in Kosovo. NATO's top two generals flew to Belgrade, and the Serbian strongman kept them waiting for a day because he was "too busy" to see them. Then Milosevic defiantly said his troops would continue their crackdown in Kosovo. What had at first seemed a rogue action was soon embraced as an official act of state—excused, defended and even condoned by the highest authorities in the land—and condemned by most of the rest of the world. Which, strange as it seems, may have been exactly what Milosevic wanted.
The Racak massacre and its aftermath left many people in and out of Serbia convinced that Milosevic is determined to wreck what few peace prospects there are in Kosovo. As usual, Milosevic proved a master of brinkmanship, pulling back just in time to avoid—for the moment—the renewed threat of NATO airstrikes. Walker had flatly refused to go, and by the end of the week Serbian authorities relented and suspended his deportation order.
The Serbs responded to international outrage with fresh indignities. Yugoslav authorities refused to let the U.N.'s international-war-crimes-tribunal prosecutor, Louise Arbour, into the country to investigate. When KLA troops showed up at Racak to help recover the bodies, Serb authorities attacked, and fighting seesawed around the victims while their families dressed them for burial. At least 5,000 more villagers fled their homes, huddling in caves and forests in the bitter winter cold. Moreover, the massacre happened just before the onset of Bajram, a festive holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. If the Serbs were looking for a way to lose hearts and minds in Kosovo, they could hardly have had a better week.
So what is Milosevic's game? "He wants to give Kosovo up," says a Western diplomat based in Yugoslavia. "[It's] an albatross. As long as he holds onto Kosovo he's going to be spending huge amounts of money keeping police and military there even though he'll never be able to have control. But he can't just give it up, it has to be taken away." However conspiratorial, this is a view popular now with everyone from foreign academics to Kosovo's Serbian minority—and even many of Walker's 800-man-strong verifiers, working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. "NATO airstrikes are oddly appealing to Milosevic," says one OSCE official. ''The West is a way out of the crisis. He'll hang onto Kosovo as long as possible, and then leave when the timing is right."
It's a theory that at least on the surface flies in the face of reason. Kosovo is the original homeland of the Serbs. The seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church, it is home to hundreds of ancient Serbian monasteries. Nationalists call it their Jerusalem, and the passions it provokes are as heated as those in the Holy Land. But only 10 percent of Kosovo's population is Serbian, and nearly all of the Albanian majority wants independence. No Serb leader could dare to negotiate that away. By provoking a confrontation with NATO, and perhaps an eventual deployment of Western peacekeepers, Milosevic could claim that a hostile world forced him to surrender Kosovo. "Milosevic will manage to win people over and tell them: 'Look, I tried everything, but Kosovo is now under an international protectorate'," says Natasa Kandic, director of the Belgrade Humanitarian Law Center. Or, as the opposition Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic puts it: "Extremist Albanians couldn't have found a better ally than Milosevic."
The strongest argument for finding a graceful way of dumping Kosovo is the demographic one. Serbia only has 10 million people—and 2 million of them are Albanians in Kosovo. While Serbs actually have a negative birthrate, Albanians are the most fecund people in Europe, with a birthrate of 2.8 percent—as high as many African countries. In two decades, there may be more young men of military age in Kosovo thanin Serbia, according to Srdjan Bogosavljevic, professor of statistics at Belgrade University. "What Serbs should do is either make peace with the Albanians, or separate from them," he says. An International Crisis Group report predicts that at present growth rates, Serbs will be a minority in Serbia by the year 2020.
Serbian officials are well aware of this trend. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes a booklet called "Kosovo Dossier" with articles such as "Demographic Time Bomb" that bemoan Kosovo's baby boom as "the battle cry of the Albanian separatists," and liken children to "weapons" in an "orchestrated demographic explosion." Serbs have tried to mount a demographic counterattack, but with no success. Their official "colonization process" in Kosovo encourages and assists Serbs to settle there, though few do—and many are leaving. "Respect God's commandment to give birth and multiply," said Serbian patriarch Pavle, the country's highest religious leader, in his Orthodox Christmas message Jan. 6. ''Because even if God leaves Kosovo in our hands, Serbs will very soon disappear over there if the birthrate remains so low."
The Serb propaganda that Kosovar procreation is subversive, with babies no more than innocent-looking weapons, may explain why many of the official murderers in Kosovo haven't hesitated to kill the elderly, women and children. According to NEWSWEEK interviews with eyewitnesses, at least three women and three children were among the dead at Racak—and many children have perished in previous massacres. Mostly, though, the victims are fighting-age males. Ismet Emini, 45, came home to Racak for the holidays from his job in Switzerland. Now he keeps in his coat pocket a chunk of skullbone from his brother's head, blown apart in front of him by Serb police when they initially laid siege to the village and the brothers fled their house. The dead man's five children are now Emini's responsibility. Once the police had entered the village, women like Lebibe Shabani cowered with their children in a basement and watched Serb police methodically round up the men from a nearby barn. The troops spent hours deliberating about what to do, talking frequently on their radios and casually beating the men, whom they forced to lie on the ground. During one beating, "I saw a stream of blood squirt one meter out of my husband's skull," Shabani says. None of those men was ever seen alive again; they all ended up in the same ditch, many with missing body parts.
If Milosevic really wants to shed Kosovo, he may well get his wish. Lately even prominent U.S. leaders have been bruiting about the idea of full independence for Kosovo; former Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell, a notably cautious figure, raised the possibility last week on NBC's "Today" show, and so have several U.S. congressmen. Diplomats from the big powers, led by American envoy Chris Hill, have insisted on an autonomy formula that would give Kosovo real self-rule, but within Yugoslavia's present borders.
Full independence would be risky. If massacres like Racak are any guide, the withdrawing Serbs would probably leave a trail of blood behind them. Kosovo's KLA guerrillas have made no secret of their hopes to join someday with Albania proper—a country that can scarcely govern itself, let alone a war-torn neighbor. So far, the Clinton administration and its European allies are reluctant to even consider the idea, because an independent Kosovo raises even more problems than it would solve. But perhaps, in Milosevic's tangled calculations, at least they wouldn't be his problems any longer.
Newsweek International, February 1, 1999
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