Taken without permission for fair use only.The Law of Revenge Rules
In a few areas, Serbs are being allowed to create their own enclaves. Around Mitrovica in the north, where the bulk of Kosovo's mineral and industrial wealth is generated, between 600 and 1,000 Serb paramilitaries have entered the region in full view of French KFOR troops and with the knowledge of the U.N. authorities.
By David Rieff
The West fought the war in Kosovo for the right reasons and, despite all the moral and operational ambiguities of the bombing campaign, fought it successfully. The return of the Kosovars to their homes is a tremendous accomplishment. For the first time in the post-cold-war period, ethnic cleansing was reversed. There is something magical and heartening about walking through the streets of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, and seeing young people who grew up fearful in a Serb police state finally getting a chance to behave like normal teenagers. And in the countryside, returning refugees are rebuilding their homes and their lives with impressive speed. None of this would have been possible without the air war, the deployment of KFOR troops and the establishment of what is, in practical terms, a U.N. protectorate for Kosovo.
But what kind of protectorate? All the talk at U.N. headquarters in Pristina is about creating civic institutions, establishing the rule of law and maintaining Kosovo's identity as a multiethnic state. The reality could not be more different. It is not the rule of law but the law of revenge that reigns. As the Kosovars return, the Serbs are leaving, and there is very little the United Nations or KFOR can do to stem the exodus. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright doubtless had the best of intentions when she said in Pristina at the end of July that "democracy cannot be built on revenge." But it is difficult to reconcile that notion with U.S. support for the Kosovo Liberation Army — at least some of whose members are complicit in the campaign to drive out the Serbs. And there is a larger, more fundamental reality to consider: those on the receiving end of radical evil, given the chance, will repay that evil in kind. For proof, all you need to do is drive past the burning Serb houses that still are an everyday sight in Kosovo and look at the hatred in the eyes of the Kosovars as they stand mutely watching the flames.
To a very large extent, what the West did in Kosovo was what, in retrospect, it believed it should have done in Bosnia. It bombed the Serbs and it installed a U.N. protectorate with real power and backed by a credible military force. The problem is that Kosovo is not Bosnia. For all the ways in which Sarajevo's multicultural, tolerant character could be overstated, there was a tradition of inter-ethnic harmony in the Bosnian capital, up to and including intermarriage, that war could not extinguish. It was at least as real as the ancient ethnic hatreds that were so often cited as the reason nothing could be done. But Kosovo has no such mitigating traditions. As aid workers who worked in both places say wonderingly, the hatred they encounter in Kosovo is unlike anything they experienced in Bosnia.
Is it too late to stop the ethnic unmixing of Kosovo? U.N. authorities are in a bind. The hastily crafted Security Council resolution that governs their actions is not a realistic blueprint for governing Kosovo (it also had to end the war — under terms that satisfied Russia and China). The resolution calls for the preservation of a multiethnic state, an example of pure wishful thinking. Publicly, the United Nations seems incapable of preventing the establishment of a largely Albanian state; privately, some officials concede that there is little they can do to head it off. Western authorities continue to create institutions based on the premise of a multiethnic Kosovo, and pontificate piously about the future. In the meantime, a mono-ethnic state is coming into being on the local level.
In a few areas, Serbs are being allowed to create their own enclaves. Around Mitrovica in the north, where the bulk of Kosovo's mineral and industrial wealth is generated, between 600 and 1,000 Serb paramilitaries have entered the region in full view of French KFOR troops and with the knowledge of the U.N. authorities. Undoing the damage caused by this will, for all the bluff talk emanating from the United Nations in Pristina, be extremely difficult, if not impossible. And what is happening (and not happening) in Mitrovica is only one emblem of a larger dilemma. The reality is that neither the Western governments that fought the war nor the U.N. authorities have any idea of how to reconcile their wish to turn Kosovo into a democratic and prosperous space with the realities on the ground. As has so often been the case with Western policy in the Balkans, our moral aspirations far outstrip our ability to carry them out.
In blood-drenched, hate-filled Kosovo, the West can probably do little more than offer money and expertise, and keep its soldiers and humanitarian relief workers on station indefinitely. Without them, chaos would quickly engulf the province. But to pretend that democracy is just around the corner, as too many international officials on the ground are doing, or even to insist that the outlook is promising, is an unpardonable exercise in creating false expectations. In the long run, it is bound to be a self-defeating one as well. For when these expectations are revealed as the wishful thinking they are, the predictable result will be calls for a hasty withdrawal of peacekeepers.
And that would be a catastrophe for a place that has already experienced too many of them.
Rieff is coeditor of "Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know."
Newsweek International, August 23, 1999
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