Here's an interesting opinion from the March 5 LA TIMES:
U.S. Must Stop Being a KLA Pawn
Kosovo: An ongoing guerrilla campaign to provoke Serbian retaliation is
intended to draw NATO into renewed fighting.
By CHRISTOPHER LAYNE
Kosovska Mitrovica--scene of ethnic fighting between Serbs and Albanians
and violent attacks on NATO peacekeepers by both groups--is just the most
recent flash point in Kosovo. The United Nations reports that ethnic
Albanians continue to use terror to drive Serbs out of the province, and
U.N. and NATO officials now are worried that the supposedly disbanded
Kosovo Liberation Army is waging a separatist guerrilla campaign within
Serbia in the hopes of drawing NATO into renewed fighting.
Coming nearly a year after the U.S. and its European allies intervened in
the civil war between Serbia and Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, the current
crisis illustrates: the illusory nature of the Clinton administration's
goal of transforming Kosovo into a multiethnic democracy; the fact that the
administration has naively allowed the U.S. to be manipulated by the KLA;
and the fact that KLA is as much or more of a threat to Balkan stability
than the regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
NATO is poised to end Kosovo's de facto partition by resettling ethnic
Albanian refugees in the northern (Serb) sector of Kosovska Mitrovica. This
is a short-sighted decision that would trigger the exodus of most of the
province's remaining Serbs, thereby undercutting Washington's stated policy
of creating a multiethnic, democratic Kosovo. If NATO goes ahead with this
policy, it will again become the unwitting tool of the KLA, which never has
wavered in its determination to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of its Serb (and
other minority) populations.
The continuing ethnic violence in Kosovo underscores the fact that there
never has been even a remote possibility that Serbs and ethnic Albanians
can live together in a society shaped by the values of democracy, diversity
and tolerance. In Kosovo as elsewhere in the Balkans, ethnic fragmentation,
competition for power and the intermingling of populations (which creates
real, not imagined, insecurity) are a combustible mix. Invariably, Balkan
conflicts are "zero-sum" struggles in which rival ethnic groups can be
secure only by attaining physical control over the territory in dispute.
For the rest, see
http://www.latimes.com/news/reports/yugo/comment/20000305/t000021307.html
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
