After nearly eight years of uneasy occupation of the province of Kosovo that NATO wrested from Serbian control by 78 days of bombing in 1999, the U.S.-led "International Community" is eager to shift responsibility for the intractable situation to someone else.
The "International Community", the contemporary equivalent of the nineteenth century Great Powers that carved up the Balkans in ways that led to World War I, appointed former Finnish president Marrti Ahtisaari to be "special envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for the future status process for Kosovo". Ahtisaari's task was to come up with something that would sound good to Western media and human rights NGOs. Neither international law nor mere reality on the ground were serious considerations.
Ahtisaari's "Kosovo Status Settlement" defines the future Kosovo according to the IC wish list. Kosovo, it announces, "shall be a multi-ethnic society, governing itself democratically and with full respect for the rule of law, the highest level of internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms, and which promotes the peaceful and prosperous existence of all its inhabitants."Kosovo "shall be..." Not is. Because that description is about the exact opposite of what Kosovo is now: a poverty-stricken cauldron of discontent characterized by violent ethnic hatred, a political system manipulated by armed clans, a corrupt judicial system, and terrified minorities (notably Serbs and Roma) deprived of the most basic freedoms, such as being able to venture out of their besieged homes in order to shop, go to school or work their fields.
Not to mention broken down public services, an economy totally dependent on foreign aid and criminal trafficking (drugs and sex slaves), and massive unemployment affecting a youthful population easily aroused to violence.
Turning water into wine is nothing compared to transforming this failed province into a model democratic multi-ethnic State. But that is the miracle Ahtisaari is announcing.
Kosovo illustrates the inextricable mess created by this current imposed version of Western "democracy".
The post-Cold War capitalist West needed to drape itself in a noble cause: "Human rights" did the trick. To preserve and expand the U.S.-led Cold War military machine after the dismantling of its official adversary, the Warsaw Pact, NATO was endowed with the new mission of "humanitarian intervention". The 1999 "Kosovo war" was the trial run for this new mission.
The background of the centuries-old Kosovo conflict was dismissed as irrelevant by U.S. policy makers in their search for "new Hitlers" on one side and "victims" on the other - the cast of characters required for staging "humanitarian intervention". Thanks to ignorant and biased media coverage, NATO enjoyed overwhelming popular support for its bombing campaign and subsequent occupation of Kosovo.
The main human problem in Kosovo today is psychological: the terrible hatred between communities stirred and aggravated by one-sided foreign intervention. This outside support by Great Powers encourages Albanian nationalists to seek more and more: more concessions, more territory, more indulgence toward their mistreatment of non-Albanians.
Reconciliation can only be based on a sense of common humanity, which is destroyed by constant identification of "guilty" and "victim" ethnic groups.
The basic attitude of the "International Community decision-makers is that they alone are qualified to make decisions. They are better qualified than the people directly affected by their decisions. Lesser peoples must be treated like unruly children, or rowdy animals in a zoo, kept in cages designed by those who know best what is good for them. This attitude is perfectly illustrated by a gaming exercize conducted by and for U.S. officials in the fall and winter of 2001 and 2002 intended as preparation for final Kosovo status negotiations. n these simulations, participants - mostly American officials - played the roles of Serbs, Albanians, Americans and other international players. The report notes that : "Both simulated 'Serbs' and 'Albanians' looked to the 'U.S.' as the power broker, ignoring other elements in the international community like the 'UN', which lacked credibility with both sides."
The conclusions were drawn in a report by two main operators of U.S. Balkan policy, James Hooper, executive director of the influential Balkan Action Council, and Paul Williams, who served as advisor both to the Bosnian Muslim delegation at the 1995 Dayton talks and to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the 1999 Rambouillet talks that set the diplomatic stage for NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Incidentally, Williams heads the International Law and Politics group that carried out the exercise and has already undertaken to write the Constitution of a future independent State of Kosovo.
Their most remarkable conclusion: " - When left to their own devices, the 'Albanian' and 'Serbian' delegations were ready to engage in division and reallocation of territory, exchanging land in northern Kosovo for land in southern Serbia and ignoring the consequences for Macedonia and Bosnia."
If redistributing territory to promote ethnic homogeneity is to be avoided, the international community, led by the United States, will have to prevent it." Leaving aside the dubious reliability of such simulations, what is truly remarkable here is the arrogance of U.S. officials, their absolute certainty that they have the right and the capacity to judge what is best for the peoples directly concerned, who must not be allowed to work out a possible solution by themselves. This has been U.S. policy all along.
While the same U.S. representatives who have exacerbated ethnic hatred between Serbs and Albanians now insist that they must live together in a "multi-ethnic Kosovo" with unalterable borders, Dobrica Cosic acknowledges that "ethnic Albanians do not want to live together with the Serbs" in Kosovo and "Serbs cannot live under Albanians; Serbs and Albanians can live freely only next to each other". He therefore argues that a territorial division worked out between the parties themselves could provide the basis for a genuine settlement allowing future generations to free themselves from this centuries-old conflict. Contrary to the U.S. approved Ahtisaari "Settlement", which prohibits Kosovo from uniting with neighboring Albania, Cosic sees such unification as a possible outcome of an overall settlement.
Whether or not Serbs and Albanians could work out a "peace of the brave", in mutual respect, along the lines suggested by Cosic, has been reduced to an academic question by U.S. meddling.
The United States and its "International Community" have done everything to preclude an accord based on mutual respect. The inevitable result is mutual hatred.
The province is now known throughout Europe as a hub of drug trafficking, transit for prostitutes bought and sold from desperately poor Eastern European areas (notably Moldova), and various other forms of illegal trade. Industrial production has plummeted. Trash accumulates uncollected. A plethora of gas stations serve as money laundering facilities. The landscape is dotted with huge buildings serving no noticeable purpose, other than to absorb foreign subsidies for "reconstruction". The local police and courts are described as corrupt and indulgent toward the criminal activities of fellow Albanians, and neither NATO nor the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) have dared to try seriously to enforce respect for the law.
In the midst of this mess, the United States operates the huge, self-contained strategic military base, Camp Bondsteel, that it built the moment U.S. forces entered Kosovo - the very symbol of the autistic empire. Revolution could happen in Cuba, but the U.S. military hung onto Guantanamo. Never mind what happens in Kosovo, Bondsteel can remain.
Emissaries of the "International Community" have announced that Serbia "lost its right to govern Kosovo" because of Milosevic's treatment of the province. This substitutes highly selective moralizing for international law.
And what gave the United States and its satellites the right to dispose of a Serbian province as they see fit? The answer: 78 days of NATO bombing of Serbian bridges, homes, factories, schools and hospitals, brought to an end when the faithful emissary Ahtisaari conveyed to Milosevic the message that if he did not give in, Belgrade would be razed to the ground.
Many Serbs might agree with Cosic that the burden of trying to govern a violently hostile Albanian population would be too much for Serbia. Perhaps more than Kosovo, Serbs want to keep their sense of honor. Their whole nation has been slandered for close to twenty years by enemies intent on grabbing off pieces of the former Yugoslavia for themselves, on the pretext that they were "oppressed" by the Serbs. In their (successful) effort to curry favor with Western Great Powers, a number of Serbian politicians and journalists have eagerly spread lies about their own country in order to demonstrate that "we are better than Milosevic". The most significant of these lies is that the Albanians of Kosovo had to be rescued by NATO because they were "threatened with genocide" - a "genocide" no more real than the "weapons of mass destruction" that served as pretext for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Kosovo Albanian leaders have long announced that they intend to declare independence, regardless of the UN Security Council. According to Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch, "If the UN Security Council fails to approve the plan, then Washington could turn to Plan B: unilateral recognition by the United States, the United Kingdom, and then other states."
This text is excerpted from a column which first appeared in the CounterPunch Newsletter. Diana Johnstone, an expert on the Balkans, is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. [1] She lives in Paris.