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>The War In Kosovo Is Not Over Yet
>Foreign Affairs News
>Cleveland Plain Dealer
>February 24, 2000
>Elizabeth Sullivan
>To hear United Nations officials here talk, the recent violence in
>Kosovo's divided northern city of Mitrovica is just some leftover ethnic
>unpleasantness after last year's war.
>The city's problems can be solved with "money and understanding," as
>U.N. administrator Bernard Kouchner puts it. Violence that has left a
>dozen dead is merely a small dust-up that European reason and
>enlightenment will solve.
>Kouchner, a slim former French health minister and charity founder,
>likes to point to his friendship with the imposing, white-haired German
>commander of NATO troops in Kosovo, Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, as an example
>of the ethnic amity that Serbs and Albanians should emulate after 100
>years of on-and-off war.
>"We are, Klaus and I, dedicated to peace," he says, "and we are coming
>from two countries who have been devoted to making war against each
>other for centuries."
>"Arch-enemies," puts in Reinhardt, on cue.
>"And look at us now," says Kouchner. They smile at one another.
>The two men, continues Kouchner, were born just six months apart in "a
>very difficult time in Germany and France," although he later refuses to
>say which year that was.
>But Kouchner professes to know how to solve what troubles this grim
>mining town where the two sides can't even agree on its name. Serbs call
>it Kosovska Mitrovica ("Kosovo's Mitrovica"). Albanians call it
>Mitrovice, using the Albanian spelling, although the pronunciation is
>similar. In Communist times, it was "Tito's Mitrovica" after the late
>Josip Broz Tito, the Communist founder of postwar Yugoslavia.
>Kouchner's solution, he said, is to ask the international community for
>"a Mitrovica package of money and understanding."
>That means more U.N. police, more rebuilt homes, more face-to-face
>meetings to counter intolerance and hate, he says.
>NATO's position is just as smilingly beneficent.
>After spending three weeks and thousands of dollars using extra NATO
>troops from a dozen countries to battle Albanian protesters and face
>down gunmen determined to storm the Ibar River and force Serbs from
>northern Mitrovica - and after doing so behind coils of razor wire and
>rows of armored vehicles on the two vehicular bridges over the river -
>NATO has come up with the idea of building a third bridge so Albanians
>can come and go more freely.
>Agence France-Presse reports that French troops will build the
>pedestrian bridge in the next two to three weeks.
>Despite the local ill will, the secret arms stocks and the conflicting
>territorial aims of Serbs and Albanians here, local NATO officials
>apparently do not believe military engagement is inevitable in
>Mitrovica, the last front line in Kosovo. So their solution to the
>tension is to build a new bridge.
>Helpfully, the folks at NATO and U.N. headquarters have even announced
>this week who was responsible for the current flare-up in Mitrovica,
>where 11,000 Serbs and 1,000 Albanians live uncomfortably together in
>the northern part of town, facing 80,000 angry Albanians across the
>narrow river.
>The culprit? Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade.
>Never mind that most of the violence this month has been sparked by
>Albanian attacks on Serbs - starting with the rocketing of a U.N.
>refugee bus that killed two elderly Serbs. Never mind that most NATO
>soldiers here have no doubt about who are the most culpable "extremists"
>in a place of rabid and untamed extremism.
>"I think there is no question who is responsible for it: It's Belgrade.
>The leadership in Belgrade is fomenting trouble north of the Mitrovica
>bridge," says U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke in
>New York.
>He doesn't say why 11,000 Serbs would want to provoke 80,000 Albanians.
>Granted, Milosevic gains from unrest in Kosovo. It helps him hold power
>and keep political opponents in check in the rest of Yugoslavia.
>But the potential for the conflict spreading is great - and it's not
>just Milosevic pulling those strings.
>NATO Secretary-General George Robertson warns in Brussels that "large
>numbers of additional Yugoslav troops have moved into" southern Serbia
>near the Kosovo border, where many ethnic Albanians still live. NATO
>"will not tolerate action" by either side, he adds.
>NATO officials don't mention that many Kosovo Albanians also have
>territorial designs on the predominantly Albanian villages that lie just
>over the Kosovo border in Serbia.
>In truth, the Kosovo war - and the wider Yugoslav wars of which it was a
>part - are not over. Not by a long shot.
>There has been no Dayton-style peace treaty to define new front lines,
>no overall compromise on war aims, political goals or territorial
>desires.
>One army - the Yugoslav one - was chased out of Kosovo, but with the
>promise, written into a U.N. Security Council resolution, of the right
>to return. It has never been honored.
>The other army - the Albanian guerrilla one - was supposedly disbanded
>and replaced by a "protection corps" that seems to include many of the
>same guys. There was no promise of Kosovo independence for them. Here,
>it's just taken for granted.
>Serbs, who 50 years ago made up more than a third of the population of
>Kosovo, are conspicuously absent from the local security equation.
>Except in Mitrovica, they're practically absent from the landscape.
>The clear message of the last few days is that the Serbs had better have
>their bags packed, because no one is guaranteeing them long-term
>protection. The best they can hope for from the United Nations is a
>nice-sounding lecture about co-existence that will remain meaningless to
>a people still living in fear.
>Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs correspondent.
>
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