http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/The%20Balkans/Kosovo/Kosovo_and_the_Glob.html?seemore=y
Chronicles Online Tuesday, October 03, 2006
*Kosovo and the Global War on Terrorism*
Srdja Trifkovic
Why is the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija - until two decades
ago an obscure corner of the former Yugoslavia - relevant to the War on
Terror? There are several valid answers to this pressing question, but
let me start with the one that is often overlooked or unthinkingly
discarded as either propagandistic or paranoid: Kosovo is a key link in
the Green Corridor, or the Green Transverse, an Islamic belt anchored
in Asia Minor and extending north-westward across the Balkans into the
heart of Central Europe.
Over a decade ago a friend of mine, an Orientalist who was at that time
a diplomat in Ankara, came across an interesting little brochure in a
second-hand book shop in Istanbul. It was an old propaganda pamphlet
issued by an Albanian émigré organization some decades previously, and
it contained a simplified colored map of the Balkans. The map showed a
mighty green arrow, emanating from Turkey, thrusting through the
Muslim-populated parts of the Balkans (Thrace, Macedonia, Kosovo,
Sanjak, Bosnia) all the way to Bihac and Cazin-an hour's drive from
Slovenia. It was depicted severing the links of the unbelievers'
defensive chain and victoriously heading to the north-west, towards the
heartland of Europe. This geopolitical idea, known for decades as the
Green Route or Green Corridor (Zelena transverzala) both by the
advocates and opponents of Islamic inroads into Europe was simple and
suggestive. It was the earliest known explicit depiction of a design
harking back to Sultan Murat and his successors, an idea that was
interrupted, rather than permanently defeated, at the gates of Vienna
in 1683.
As Yugoslavia started disintegrating in the early 1990s, most Western
analysts of world affairs promptly categorized the Green Route thesis
as a crude, anti-Muslim conspiracy theory, mainly propagated by
nationalist Serbian academics. But it has gained fresh credence, in
continental Europe at least (and notably in Italy), after 9-11. It is
by now hard to dispute that the radicalisation of Islam in the
Balkans-deliberate or not-turned out to be the net result of the
actions of the 'international community' during the Yugoslav crisis. In
fact, if Western policy in the Balkans was not meant to facilitate the
Green Route, the issue is not why but how its effects paradoxically
coincided with the enduring aspirations and goals of pan-Islamism,
including its extremist and even terrorist manifestations.
After 9-11, nothing was supposed to be as before, but the U.S. policy
in the Balkans has inexplicably retained its Islamophile bias, so
remarkably persistent during the Clinton years. In the meantime, the
Green Route has morphed from an allegedly paranoid Islamophobic
propaganda ploy into a demographic, social and political reality. The
absurdity of this ad hoc regional alliance between global enemies is
demonstrated by its end result, namely the further undermining of the
weakest geopolitical link in the war on terrorism.
The American benign attitude towards Jihad in the Balkans is not a
consequence of ignorance: within the U.S. policy-making community,
there have been voices for many years warning that those regions in the
Balkans where Muslims are in a majority are prime entry points and
transit routes for terrorists. And yet, when questioned about the
existence and the magnitude of the threat in the Balkans, U.S. policy
makers are typically evasive, sometimes aggressively so. They do not
deny the existence of various activities that point to Islamic
extremism and terrorist infiltration in the Balkans, but, as a rule,
almost immediately relativize it by saying that it is unlikely to
undermine the social, political and security balance in the region, or
to threaten American vital interests. Then follows the reassuring
mantra about the supposedly pro-European and pro-'Western' orientation
of secularised Balkan Muslims-and the alleged pro-Americanism of
Kosovo's Albanians in particular-with the optimistic conclusion that
the accelerated process of the Euro-Atlantic integration of the whole
region would narrow the space for radical Islamism until such
tendencies will finally disappear.
The problem with such rhetoric - detectable during Donald Rumsfeld's
recent visit to Tirana - is not that it is absolutely wrong, but that
it had never been right, and that it becomes less right with each
passing year. A majority of the Muslims in the Balkans may still be
nominally 'pro-Western,' but the question is how they perceive their
vocation. Are they likely to remain so if 'the West' stops pandering to
their demands as a matter of course, and starts judging them on their
intrinsic merits? Yes, a majority of Kosovo Albanians may be
19th-century-style nationalists who treat religion as an element of
their core identity, but there are a growing number of those who insist
that a return to authentic Islam is the key to their national
aspirations; and then there are their leaders who have well documented
and long-stablished links with various Islamic terrorist networks.
The principal defect of the American approach is in
(1) A visceral faith in the attractive powers of secularisation and
soft-porn consumerism; and
(2) The cynical expectation that feeding local Muslims with the morsels
of Balkan Christendom will keep the global beast at bay.
On this latter part of the equation in particular, the involvement of
the Clinton administration in the wars of Yugoslav succession was an
excellent example of the failed expectation that pandering to Muslim
ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the
Muslim world as a whole. That notion matured in the final months of
George H.W. Bush's presidency, when his Acting Secretary of State
Lawrence Eagleburger said that a goal in Bosnia was to mollify the
Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias
regarding American policies in Iraq in the period leading up to Gulf
War I. The result of years of policies thus inspired is a terrorist
base the heart of Europe, a moral and political debacle most visible
vis-a-vis Moscow and Peking, and the absence of any positive payoff to
the United States.
The state of Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic, decentralized, and
increasingly dysfunctional polity, was slow to reform following Tito's
death in 1980. By 1990 its survival was in doubt. In 1991 its
disintegration was given a major boost when the European Community
declared under German pressure that Yugoslavia was untenable and its
constituent republics were encouraged to seek independence on the basis
of self-determination. At the same time the boundaries of those
republics were declared inviolable, even though they did not correspond
to the ethnic map and although they had been arbitrarily fixed by a
communist dictator whose objective was to cut down in size the most
numerous of the country's constituent nations.
The pattern of Washingtonian responses was established in,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, a microcosm of Yugoslavia itself. When it
disintegrated in 1992 into three ethno-religious units, under the
pressure of those same centrifugal forces that had been deemed
irresistible in Yugoslavia's case, the administration of Bush-father
declared that it had to be put together again in the name of
'multiethnicity.' This played right into the hands of the Muslim side,
which on the strength of its numeric plurality expected to have the
upper hand in a centralized Bosnian state. In the name of
'multiethnicity' and respect for the Communist-drawn internal
boundaries of Yugoslavia's constituent republics, both democracy and
self-determination were denied to the Christian majority of Bosnian
citizens - i.e. Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats - who did not want
to be Bosnified under Alija Izetbegovic, the fundamentalist leader of
Bosnia's Muslims and author of The Islamic Declaration. In that name
Bosnia has been run for the past decade by a series of European
administrators as an international protectorate, with the Muslims as
the favored party and the key Jihadist base in Europe effectively
inviolable.
Now all along it was obvious to any sober Westerner that Muslims did
not want a multiethnic liberal democratic society: An astute American
military officer warned in 1995 that 'President Izetbegovic and his
cabal appear to harbor much different private intentions and goals.'
But the demonization of the Serbs proceeded nevertheless, a schooltext
case of media-induced pseudo-reality in the service of a flawed
strategy. An orchestrated campaign soon followed, to contextualize the
brutalities of the former Yugoslavia with the horrors of the Holocaust.
Once the paradigm was successfully planted in Bosnia, the possibilities
for Kosovo were limitless. The Albanians are supported in their bid to
secede ('self-determination') although that violated the borders of
Serbia, but the Krajina Serbs were expelled in the biggest act of
post-1945 ethnic cleansing in Europe, rather than allowed to secede
from Croatia ('inviolability of borders'). Macedonia was effectively
partitioned between Slavs and Albanians in 2001, but no such
arrangement is allowed in Kosovo, where under NATO occupation
three-quarters of Christians were expelled and over a hundred of their
shrines put to torch. While The Hague Tribunal continues its frenzied
quest for the remaining two alleged war criminals from Pale, three war
criminals par excellence, Agim Ceku, Ramush Haradinaj, and Hashim
Thaci, run Kosovo as their criminal little fiefdom with the blessing of
the "international community."
The result of Clinton's Balkan policy is a vibrant jihadist base in the
heart of Europe. The collusion between Muslim terrorist groups and
criminal gangs in the Balkans has also spawned a criminal network with
jihadist sympathies that currently supplies Western Europe with tens of
thousands of smuggled humans (most of them Muslims) and with the bulk
of its top-quality heroin, mostly of Afghan origin. The Interpol and
European security agencies know, and occasionally are allowed to warn,
that the trade is controlled mainly by Albanian Muslims from
Kosovo-with the mujahedeen providing the logistics.
The denial of this reality is continuing, as we've seen in the
remarkable Clinton interview with Mike Wallace on Fox News (September
24). Succumbing to tantrums worthy of a schoolyard bully, Clinton
indignantly stressed that he could 'simultaneously be trying to stop a
genocide in Kosovo and, you know, make peace in the Middle East, pass a
budget.' He'll never admit that Kosovo was a serious and perhaps a
fatal detraction. In the words of Dimitri Simes, not only is Clinton
trying to rewrite history-there was no genocide in Kosovo to justify
the NATO attack-but he continues to gloss over the heavy price of his
aggression for U.S. national security. Thanks to his war America
squandered a real chance to get bases in Uzbekistan by cooperating with
Russia, and its cooperation with China - another key player in central
and south Asia with considerable influence over Afghanistan's neighbor
Pakistan - suffered another heavy blow. Concludes Simes, 'If Russia and
China were in America's corner in 1999 and 2000, the U.S. could have
taken action against the Taliban and either driven them from power or
at least severed their links to al Qaeda. This would have made the
September 11 attacks much more difficult to organize.'
The war was ostensibly waged for human rights, but - judged by any
rational standard - even on that front the NATO-UN mission in Kosovo
has been and still is an utter, unmitigated disaster. Under a string of
Euro-Gauleiters (Kouchner, Haekkerup, Steiner, Holkeri, Petersen...)
the pretense of progress is still maintained, amidst murders,
unreversed ethnic cleansing, rampant crime, prostitution,
drug-smuggling, and general dysfunctionality of a thoroughly failed,
violent, and dysfunctional polity devoid of a single redeeming feature.
The former commander of UN forces in Bosnia, Canadian Gen. Lewis
McKenzie, knows the score in the Balkans better than any think-tank
'expert.' He notes that, back in 1999, 'those of us who warned that the
West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant,
Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers' -
while the fact that the KLA was universally designated a terrorist
organization and known to be linked to al-Qaeda was conveniently
ignored. And yet, the Albanians 'have played us like a Stradivarius,'
he says. If the Albanians achieve their independence with the help of
our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, McKenzie
warns, 'just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other
terrorist-supported movements around the world.'
Yes, do. It is high time for the realists with no axes to grind in this
conflict to resist the curiously undead Clinton model of the new Balkan
order - known to its proponents as 'the unfinished business' - that
seeks to satisfy the aspirations of all ethnic groups in former
Yugoslavia, all, that is, except those of the Serbs. A Carthaginian
peace may be imposed on Serbia today, but the Radicals will be in power
in Belgrade next year as a consequence, and the resulting upheaval will
merely contribute to chronic regional imbalance and strife for decades
to come. That is not in America's interest. It is in the interest of
Islamists in general and Islamic terrorists in particular, and
therefore it should not be condoned.
The short-to-medium-term model for the future of a fully autonomous,
but certainly not sovereign, Kosovo and Metohija should be based on the
Cyprus precedent; those who lament the 'boundary' on the Ibar in
Mitrovica should recall that it was acceptable for an ethnically
divided Cyprus to join the EU in 2004, and that its de facto ethnic
partition into two self-governing entities has been effectively
condoned by the UN and the US. The status of Serbian shrines surrounded
by the Albanian-controlled territory - Decani, Prizren, Gracanica, Pec
etc. - should follow the model of exterritoriality of the Vatican,
Castel Gandolfo, and St. John in Lateran vis-a-vis Italy. And finally,
the status of Kosovo itself vis-a-vis Belgrade should be based on the
status of the Aland Islands vis-a-vis Finland. The precedents exist,
and the problem of Kosovo is neither so unique nor so intractable as to
warrant a solution outside the parameters of established practices in
other places where different ethnic and religious communities vie for
the same space.
No effective anti-terrorist strategy is possible today without
recognizing past mistakes of U.S. policy that have helped breed
terrorism. Eight years of the Clinton team's covert and overt support
for the Islamist camp in the Balkans have been a moral disaster and a
foreign policy debacle of the first order. Its fruits are visible in
the world-wide threat that America faces today. Its chief beneficiaries
were the upholders of global Jihad and their co-religionists in
Sarajevo, Novi Pazar, Tetovo, Tuzi, and Pristina. The problem of
Islamic terrorism may not be resolved short of a major restructuring of
the current Balkan architecture that would entail splitting
Bosnia-Herzegovina into three ethnically-based cantons, decentralizing
Kosovo and Metohija on the basis of pre-ethnic-cleansing population
patterns, and vetoing its independence. The alternative is to create a
lawless black hole, centered in Pristina, that would destabilize not
only Serbia but also Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as
Bosnia-Herzegovina by providing the Republika Srpska with a valid
precedent for secession from the Dayton edifice.
If the Bush Administration is half-serious about the GWOT, it should
(1) Fire Nicholas Burns,
(2) Reverse its current support for Bosnia's centralization, and
(3) Accept that Kosovo should be autonomous but not independent.
To continue encouraging the global Muslim sense of righteous victimhood
partly embodied in the myth of the 'genocide' in Kosovo - as Bill
Clinton tried doing last Sunday in his memorable interview with Mike
Wallace - is to feed would-be suicide bombers with a political pap that
nourishes their hate. If the war on terrorism is to be meaningful, that
idiocy must stop. Pandering to Islam's geopolitical designs - in the
Balkans, or anywhere else - is not only bad, it is counterproductive.
To deal with the terrorist threat effectively and on the basis of
leadership willingly accepted, the United States should discard the
pernicious notion of its exceptionalism. This will be resisted by the
advocates of 'benevolent global hegemony,' of America's open-ended and
self-justifying world mission and its supposedly unfinished business in
the Balkans. They need to be confronted, because their mindset and
their policies are contrary to the American interest in general, and
detrimental to the specific goal of defeating jihad.
The cultural context of that policy needs to be changed, too. As the
shadow of global Jihad grows darker, that elite class is following in
the footsteps that are 800 years old. When they sacked Constantinople
during the Fourth Crusade, the Franks did not understand, or care, that
the New Rome on the Bosphorus was the guardian and protector of the
West against the same enemy we all face today. Their treachery opened
the way for the Jihadist onslaught against Europe that did not stop
until it reached Vienna in 1683. Replicating the same folly with Serbia
today, by condoning the creation of an independent Muslim statelet that
embodies everything that America does not stand for, brings to mind
Talleyrand's comment on Napoleon's execution of the Duc d'Enghien: 'It
is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.'
This article was first presented as a paper at the international
conference 'Reconsidering Kosovo' organized by Christian Solidarity
International and the American Councuil on Kosovo, at the Capitol Hill
Club, Washington D.C., on September 28, 2006.
Dr. S. Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor
CHRONICLES, 928 N Main Street, Rockford, IL 61103, USA
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