John RapleyI ONCE likened Kosovo, the province of Yugoslavia populated mainly by ethnic Albanians, to a quagmire. Once NATO troops moved in after the 1999 bombing campaign, they ran the risk of getting drawn into the quicksand. Two years on, it seems that is now happening. And once again, the Balkans are raising the threat of regional instability.
Back in 1999, the Yugoslav army was cracking down on Kosovo and cleansing the region of its Albanian population. Behind its brutal campaign lay the desire to crush an insurgency by Kosovar guerrillas, who got support in neighbouring Albania (itself a fragile state). The guerrillas wanted to break Kosovo away from Yugoslavia. However, the Serbian majority in Yugoslavia was just as anxious to keep Kosovo in what little was left of the Yugoslav federation.
The brutality of the Serbian repression prompted an international outcry, though. The European Union feared the spread of instability in its backyard, and the US government seemed anxious not to repeat its previous failures to thwart genocide (most notably, its scandalous inaction during the 1994 Rwandan genocide).
Nevertheless, there was little stomach for firm action. Still smarting from the psychic wounds of Vietnam, the Americans wanted to avoid a ground war. For their part, the Europeans lacked the logistical capability to launch an invasion of Kosovo without US support. So NATO opted for a bombing campaign. From the vantage point of poll-driven Western leaders, this solution seemed like a stroke of genius. It had all the advantages of a decisive action, but none of the apparent costs, namely, casualties. Of course there was plenty of suffering on the ground, but what was all but certain was that no American or west European servicemen would return home in body bags.
Once again, we were given an example of the sort of post-modern politics to which a media-savvy generation had devoted itself: gain without pain, costless consumption, same great taste without calories. Old military hands insisted that the strategy was doomed to failure. You can't, they said, defeat an enemy without pushing him off his land. Yet when the Serbs finally capitulated and withdrew from Kosovo, Western leaders seemed vindicated. And why not? Serbian bullies had fled, the Albanians were allowed to return, and within a couple of years the bad boy of it all, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, was overthrown by a democratic opposition. Who could argue with success?
On the ground, though, the seeds of a future crisis had been sown. Had NATO launched a conventional ground campaign to flush out the Serbs, it would probably have taken losses. However, it would also have established a firm hold on the region and thereby enabled the new UN administration to impose its stamp on Kosovo. Instead, the gap between the bombing campaign and the arrival of NATO troops in a "permissive environment" gave the Kosovar guerrillas a window of opportunity. In effect, they used NATO bombing raids as air cover for their own ground occupation movement. By the time NATO troops reached Kosovo, the guerrillas, well-armed and entrenched, were an established reality.
Since then, NATO has been trying to find a way to disarm them. To date, a solution has proved elusive. Anxious to prosecute their war for independence, the guerrillas have been terrifying Serbs. More recently, they have apparently launched a campaign for a greater Albania, carrying their struggle into neighbouring Macedonia. A tenuous state with a large Albanian minority, Macedonia can ill-afford an ethnic insurgency just now. It has not helped matters that NATO, anxious to avoid an all-out fight, has taken a somewhat soft approach to guerrilla activities. This softening, incidentally, looks set only to worsen, since the new American administration is more reluctant than the previous one to commit itself to a Balkan role.
To avoid fighting the guerrillas, NATO recently gave the Yugoslav army permission to re-enter a buffer zone between Kosovo and Serbia. But recent actions in Macedonia, where NATO found itself reinforcing a Macedonian army action against the guerrillas, suggest NATO faces an unpleasant choice: either commit itself, which could involve taking on the guerrillas, or withdraw, allowing the region to sink back into crisis. It now appears that the costless solution was really an accounting fiction that involved deferring payment.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
