http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsViews.htm
CHRONICLES, Thursday, May 6, 2004
Kosovo: A Failed Potemkin Village
by Srdja Trifkovic
Excerpts from the introductory remarks at The Rockford Institute’s
conference on the future of Kosovo, held in Chicago on Friday, April 23,
2004
Most Western visitors to the USSR, until the mid-1980s at least, were
subjected to a barrage of “facts” and figures from their hosts designed to
prove that the Soviet Union was an efficient, highly developed economy, and
a stable and happy society. Moscow’s diplomatic and trade representatives
abroad and Intourist guides at home were well versed in the technique of
conjuring data to prove that the reality was vastly superior to the evidence
of one’s own senses. But in the end they could not conceal the crumbling
blocks of flats, empty stores, long lines for scarce commodities such as
sausages and shoes, and a sullen populace steeped in quiet desperation or
stupefying drunkenness. Around 1986 it finally became acceptable to talk of
the “problems,” and to discard the pretense that had become as embarrassing
to the hosts as it was useless in fooling the guests.
After visiting Kosovo in the second week of April I can report that some
officials of the “international community” there are also finally on the
verge of discovering the virtues of Glasnost, and may be even ready for the
Perestroika.
Judged by any rational standard, after five years the NATO-UN mission in
Kosovo is an unmitigated disaster—but until the Kristallnacht of March 17,
2004, one was not allowed to say so. Under a string of Euro-leftist
Gauleiters—Kouchner, Haekkerup, Steiner, Holkeri—the pretense of progress
was maintained, amidst murders (“revenge killings”) and ethnic cleansing of
hundreds of thousands of non-Albanians, the destruction of over a hundred
Christian Orthodox churches and shrines, rampant crime, prostitution,
drug-smuggling, and general dysfunctionality of a thoroughly failed polity.
The visitor is nevertheless greeted after the first checkpoint with a huge
billboard proclaiming the sanctity of the “standards.” The artist could have
come from Comrade Zhdanov’s art
academy: only on UNMIK’s posters does one see smiling Serbs and Albanians in
friendly discourse.
The “international community’s” pretense of “progress” in Kosovo, as
sordidly dishonest as it was insulting to the victims of Albanian terror,
finally collapsed on March 17. It is now legitimate to be unkind to the
“Kosovars,” and to allow for the possibility that this time their fury was
not justified by the lust for revenge. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer thus said on April 22 he was “disappointed” with the failure of
Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leaders to stop last month’s violence. Wishy-washy
and weak words, but light years away from anything uttered in Pristina by
any official of equivalent rank over the past five years.
On the same day, Britain’s minister for European Affairs, Denis MacShane,
rebuffed Albanians’ claim to independence, and lectured them that European
politics was based on interdependence. Speaking after talks with Belgrade
officials he also brushed aside calls for the United Nations to decide
quickly on its political future. “There is just one final status and that is
when we are all dead,” he said, invoking Keynes. Admiral Gregory Johnson,
the overall NATO commander, started the new trend by stating that the latest
violence was “orchestrated and well-planned ethnic cleansing.”
All that is a breath of fresh air after years of pro-Albanian Agitprop, but
off-the-record, many Westerners are far more outspoken. On April 17 I
attended a party at the Arts Centre in Toronto at which the former commander
of UN forces in Bosnia, Gen. Lewis McKenzie, mentioned many messages of
support he has received from active duty officers serving with K-FOR after
he published an op-ed in The National Post on April 6 with the
self-explanatory title “We Bombed the Wrong Side in Kosovo.”
In his piece the General noted 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.” The fact
that the KLA was universally designated a terrorist organization and known
to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was conveniently
ignored. Since the NATO/UN intervention in 1999, Kosovo has become the crime
capital of Europe, McKenzie further noted, the sex slave trade and smuggling
of drugs to Europe and North America are flourishing, with the KLA running
the show. McKenzie went on to give a grim but accurate summary of Kosovo’s
recent history. The objective of the Albanians, he says,
"is to purge all non-Albanians, including the international community's
representatives, from Kosovo and ultimately link up with mother Albania
thereby achieving the goal of "Greater Albania." The campaign started with
their attacks on Serbian security forces in the early 1990s and they were
successful in turning Milosevic’s heavy-handed response into worldwide
sympathy for their cause. There was no genocide as claimed by the West—the
100,000 allegedly buried in mass graves turned out to be around 2,000, of
all ethnic origins, including those killed in combat during the war itself.
The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized
and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and
independent Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of
the violence in the early '90s and we continue to portray them as the
designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary."
When the Albanians achieve their independence with the help of our tax
dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, McKenzie concluded,
“just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other
terrorist-supported independence movements around the world.”
That, indeed, is the story of Western intervention in a nutshell. So what
are we to do about Kosovo, before it is too late? And it may be too late
soon: let us remember that, until around 1690, the Serbs were over 90% of
Kosovo’s population, now they are less than 5%. On March 17 we’ve witnessed
only the latest episode in a continuum of anti-Serb and anti-Christian
violence and ethnic cleansing that have been the hallmark of life in the
Province for centuries.
The near-terminal Serb exodus of 1999, under NATO-led occupation and UN
administration, was followed by almost four years of carefully administered
Albanian violence against the remaining Serbs, and—especially—against those
who dared come back. That violence was lethal enough to deter the Serbs from
returning, and sufficiently low-lever to escape any serious condemnation
from the “international community” whose representatives were only
interested in building a “multiethnic” Potemkin’s village anyway, even with
no Serbs left in it.
By 2003 it looked as if the independence of Kosovo was a done deal, that the
combined pressure of Albanian-paid advocates and their media cohorts would
yield the ultimate dividend. In Washington a dozen or so KLA friends,
apologists, and lobbyists acting in the guise of think-tanks experts and
policy specialists—the names of Bugajski, Serwer, Dobbins, Kupchan,
Abramowitz, Holbrooke, come to mind—clamored for Kosovo’s independence in
near-unison. Their points that were similar in their distortion of reality
and the absence of logic, honesty, and truthfulness.
It is curious that most of these people are Democrats, Clintonites and
one-world multilateralists, yet they support unilateral violation of UNSC
Resolution 1244 and the presenting of a fait accompli to America’s European
friends and partners. Especially galling is their claim that independence is
“inevitable”; in any other respect the disciples of Messrs. Soros and Popper
would dismiss any claim of inevitability as historicist rubbish. Even after
March 17 they have a creative explanation for the violence: it was rooted in
the Albanians’ justified frustration over the failure of the “international
community” to give them their independence. This time, however, they are
encountering a harder sell than ever before.
This time the “realists” have ample arguments against Cilnton’s model of the
new Balkan order that seeks to satisfy the aspirations of all ethnic groups
in former Yugoslavia, all except those of the Serbs. A Carthaginian peace
imposed on Serbia today will cause chronic regional imbalance and strife for
decades to come. That is not in America’s, or Europe’s interest, and
therefore should not be condoned.
The short-to-medium-term model for Kosovo’s future may follow the Cyprus
precedent; if it’s OK for an ethnically divided Cyprus to join the EU, if
its de facto ethnic partition into two self-governing entities has been
additionally condoned by the UN and the US, then it should be an acceptable
model for Kosovo, too. The status of religious shrines surrounded by
Albanian-controlled territory—Decani, Prizren, Gracanica—could follow the
Vatican model.
And finally, the status of Kosovo vis-à-vis Belgrade could be based on the
status of the Åland Islands vis-à-vis Finland. Helsinki’s claim to these
Swedish-inhabited islands in 1919 was far weaker than Serbia’s right to
retain Kosovo, yet in June 1921 the Council of the League decided that
Finland should receive sovereignty over the Ålands in order to maintain the
integrity of international frontiers. Finland undertook, however, to
guarantee the inhabitants their Swedish language, culture and customs. A
treaty between Finland and Sweden on how the guarantees were to be effected
is still in force. Today, the Aland Landskapsstyrelsen (Government) has
responsibility for all domestic affairs, with only defense and foreign
policy remaining with the Government in Helsinki.
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.
If the Serbs don’t sign on the dotted line under pressure now, they will
retain a valid title and they may get Kosovo back one day, when the
geopolitical environment improves. Perseverance, unity of purpose, patience,
and skill are the key. There had been no Jews in Jerusalem for centuries
until Balfour, and now Ariel Sharon dictates the terms of pax Israelianna—in
the Holy Land and in Washington, D.C. France lost Alsace and Lorraine in
1870 but for almost 50 years kept them in its heart—not on its lips—and got
them back in 1919. A century ago Poland did not exist on the political map,
and now it reaches almost to Berlin’s eastern suburbs, on the other side of
the Oder.
The outcome will be ultimately a matter of spirit; and I would not exclude
the possibility that even in Washington—after the War on Terror escalates
into a global crusade against Jihad, perhaps—the Serbs’ claim to Kosovo will
be finally accepted as a righteous one, in line with America’s interests,
and in accordance with the time-honored principles of law and justice that
it had once respected.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.antic.org/
