Volume 8 Number 3

Summer 1999

Feature: The inevitability of partition

Eastern Europe After Kosovo
     The Future of Kosovo
     Shlomo Avineri

At Rambouillet, a desperate attempt was made to accommodate both Yugoslav-Serbian claims for sovereignty over Kosovo and the Kosovar Albanians' rights to a modicum of autonomy, guaranteed for a period of three years by a multinational force (KFOR). The idea of deploying such a multinational force was to assure the Kosovars that, despite continued nominal Yugoslav sovereignty, they would be protected from effective Serbian rule by the presence of an outside guarantor. After three years, negotiations about the final status of the province would have started again: this was a compromise. It did not endorse the Kosovar claim for eventual independence but neither did it exclude it. Yet it also signaled to Serbia that the future of the province was still open-ended.

As Warren Zimmerman, the former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, recently wrote, it was not -a particularly good deal for the Albanians . . . [and] they accepted it only under American pressure . . . [as] it kept them under the nominal control of a man they had every reason to distrust" (-Milosevic's Final Solution," The New York Review of Books [June 10, 1999], p. 42). Zimmerman also maintains that although Rambouillet would be difficult to resurrect, even if there had been no war, -the war will make it that much more difficult. The very savagery of Milosevic's effort [at ethnic cleansing] may well have sabotaged any hope for a workable multiethnic solution" (p. 43).

Zimmerman is obviously right, but his language is still restrained by diplomatic pressure. Given the enormities of recent Serbian policies and the brutal attempt to deport, through terrorism and forced expulsions, the whole Kosovar Albanian population, a much more radical reconceptualization of what is needed and possible, regarding the future of Kosovo, must be undertaken. Moreover, the realization of this future will only come about slowly, at best. Consider: there is no reason in politics, diplomacy, history, or morality to have the province come, once again, under Serbian rule. Nor is there any effective mechanism that could protect the Kosovar Albanians from what it would mean for them to live once again under Serbian rule. And to imagine that most Kosovars will ever accept any such formula is a total pipe dream.For those who argue about-or for-the

inviolability of international borders, one must-sadly-suggest that borders in the Balkans (as well as in other contested areas) were drawn neither by a divine providence nor through freely negotiated peace treaties among equal partners. Belgrade likes to base its claim to Kosovo on Serbian national myths, most of them products of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, that hark back to the battle of the Field of the Blackbirds of 1389, when Prince Lazar's forces were routed by an Ottoman army (mostly made up, incidentally, of Serbian commanders and soldiers). But the one point twentieth-century history should have taught anyone is that boundaries cannot be based on romantic notions of past national glories or defeats. Otherwise, the Polish border could extend more or less to the Crimea, and Israel should be allowed to gobble up not only the West Bank but also the East Bank of Jordan. In concrete modern political terms, Serbia has ruled Kosovo only since 1912, when the outcome of the first Balkan War left that erstwhile Ottoman province in the hands of a victorious Serbia, with total disregard for its Albanian and Turkish-Muslim majority population. It was then that the first Serbian attempt to depopulate the province and expel its Albanian majority was undertaken, with mixed results (Ryan Liza, -A Final Solution," The New Republic [May 10, 1999], p. 28). The outbreak of World War I (ignited, one should recall, by a nationalist Bosnian Serb assassin) put an end to that first attempt to -cleanse" Kosovar of its Albanians.

But this is history, and while history should not decide borders, still, memories linger; for while the Serbs always hearken to the constructed memory of their mythic 1389, the 1912 memories of the Albanians in Kosovo are much more vivid and concrete-as are the realities of the 1990s.

It is in this context that one must realize that to demand or expect Kosovar deportees to return to their homes and accept even nominal Serbian rule under some sort of an international protective umbrella, is a travesty of all the principles in whose name this war was waged by the NATO allies. Perhaps if a true political transformation were to take place in Serbia, a truly democratic, pluralistic Yugoslavia could be imagined able to accommodate an autonomous Kosovo and satisfy the legitimate claims of the preponderant ethnic Albanian majority. But a viable democratic transformation in Serbia does not appear imminent. Nor does it seem as if the various opposition parties and leaders (Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement or Zoran Djindjic's Democratic Party) are in any way less nationalistic and less anti-Albanian than the Milosevic regime. It is a sad comment on the state of Serbian social and intellectual life that during the whole conflict there has hardly been any meaningful voice in Belgrade openly protesting Milosevic's near-genocidal policies. Even true democratic opposition figures, who utterly detest Milosevic, have not raised their voices in protest against the Serbian policies in Kosovo. The fact of the matter is that they did not protest Serbian-led policies in Croatia and Bosnia either. During the siege of Sarajevo, there was not one protest in Belgrade against what Serbian forces were doing, and when the issue of Srebrenica is raised with confirmed democrats and anti-Milosevic activists they usually appear to fall in with the dominant Serbian narrative of denial and self-victimization.

It is inconceivable that Kosovar Albanians-a million now returning from exile, and another half million in Kosovo itself-would or should accept any vestige of Serbian rule. Can one imagine a Serbian police force-even if under some NATO (or perhaps Russian) supervision? Or Yugoslav border guards on the frontiers with Albania or Macedonia? Yugoslav authorities, who had deprived the deportees of their identification documents, when they were pushed across the border, being responsible for issuing new identity documents? Or Serbian officials recognizing land titles in Kosovar villages torched by Serbian security forces? This is not only politically unfeasible; it is obscene. It would be like asking Jewish survivors in, say, Theresienstadt, to live under German officials after having been liberated by the Allies in World War Two.

Kosovar Albanians have a right not to live under foreign occupation-just as Palestinians have a right not to live under Israeli military rule. The fact that the West Bank was occupied in 1967 while Kosovo was occupied in 1912 is, of course, significant-but the temporal factor alone cannot be decisive. This is especially so since Serbia was offered, at Rambouillet, an open-ended formula that would have left Yugoslav sovereignty in place and still made it possible for Yugoslavia to claim the province in final-status talks.

The Yugoslav refusal to accept Rambouillet-which was not a diktat but a deeply flawed yet reasonable compromise-has caused the war. In the course of the war, Serbia has attempted to deport most, if not all, of the Kosovar population. Both its refusal to accept a compromise as well as its murderous behavior during the war mean that Serbia has forfeited whatever claim to Kosovo it might have had. Kosovo should become, on an interim basis, an international protectorate, with no-repeat, no-vestige of Serbian power remaining in the province. Anything else would mean rewarding Serbia for its refusal to accept a compromise and its engagement in colossal war crimes.

Politically and diplomatically, this will not be an easy formula to work out. There will be numerous complications that have to be discussed separately, and the outcome of the war, as well as the outcome of its conclusion, is far from certain. But what has to be faced now is the principle of the structure of peace after the war, and this has been neglected by most statesman and pundits who have been consumed by the conduct of war, avoiding the question of what is to be done in its aftermath, and how to bring back one million refugees to their homeland.

Serbs have rights in Kosovo, and they should be well guarded; but this has very little to do with sovereignty, which is a different issue. Serbian monasteries and other historical sites have to be protected. Even more meaningful will be the protection of the small Serb minority in Kosovo. Many have already decided they would rather live under Serbian rule in Serbia proper, but those who decide to stay will have to be actively and effectively protected from Kosovar resentment and revenge. A second Krajina-like mass exodus has to be avoided, and NATO should protect Serbs as rigorously as it should resettle ethnic Albanian refugees.

The international Kosovo protectorate should make every attempt to utilize the unofficial Kosovar self-government that had emerged in the province after its autonomy was revoked by Milosevic in 1989. Village councils, educational institutions, and health services should not be run only by international organizations, but once in place, should be handled by the Kosovars themselves. In like manner, the enormous effort of resettling the refugees should be administered, under international guidance, as much as possible by the returnees themselves. Kosovo should not become the ward of international relief organizations.

Kosovo will need a lengthy healing process. Serbian state presence, in any way, shape, or form, will be detrimental to that process. Serbia should be as much out of Kosovo as France is out of Algeria, and Israel is slowly and painfully realizing it should be out the Palestinian territories. If this were to happen, the war in Kosovo would be the last anticolonial war in Europe. No nation should be made to live under foreign rule, and a European Union-and NATO-that went to war in order to prevent ethnic repression will betray its mission if, by the end of the day, the Kosovar Albanians are unable to go back to Kosovo with some degree of peace and dignity and freed finally from the Serbian rule that was imposed on them by force of arms and European power politics in 1912.

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Shlomo Avineri is professor of political science and director of the Institute for European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and visiting professor at Cardozo School of Law, in New York.

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