|
STOP NATO: �NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
ListBot Sponsor
Macedonia...?
Read this... and you're reading what actually happened in Kosovo too!
Just read "KLA" for NLA - and there... essentially - you have it...!
(And - so far as most people in the West, who read it, are concerned -
they'll probably learn something about Kosovo for the very first time!)
John Jay
----------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [TIME] How NATO Failed Macedonia Commentary by Tony Karon [WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Date: Thu, Jun 28, 2001, 6:31 am
<A HREF=""aol://4344:2595.NTmain.27983934.561503242">" AOL News: Opinions</A>
What's your opinion? <A HREF=""aol://5863:126/mB:459547">Share" it here.</A>
How NATO Failed Macedonia
Commentary by Tony Karon for <A
HREF=""aol://4344:2573.TIMEhome.7668202.647972117">TIME.com</A>
There is more than a little irony in the fact that Macedonia came apart at
the seams in the same week that Yugoslavia moved to send Slobodan Milosevic
for trial in the Hague. Milosevic may be history, but Macedonia now appears
irrevocably bound to repeat the horrors of the Balkan wars of the last
decade. Milosevic, of course, has had no hand in the Macedonian tragedy. The
same, unfortunately, cannot be said for NATO.
The Western security alliance's overriding concern throughout its tenure as
the Balkan constabulary has been the safety of its own personnel. And in a
mean frontier town, a sheriff whose priority is keeping out of harm's way is
always in danger of being ineffective — or worse. NATO feared that aggressive
peacekeeping and enforcement would provoke attacks on its troops not only in
Macedonia but back in Kosovo; by dithering — and legitimizing the rebels by
pushing the Macedonian government reluctantly into cease-fire agreements — it
has all but ensured the territorial divisions it desperately wanted to
prevent.
The Macedonian mob that drove President Boris Trajkovski from the parliament
building late Monday was enraged that NATO and the European Union had forced
him to adopt a new cease-fire with a rebel movement that NATO's own leaders
had dubbed "terrorists," "extremists" and "murderers" only a few weeks ago.
But the mob wasn't simply calling for a more robust counterinsurgency effort
against the ethnic-Albanian guerrillas that had menaced the capital for
weeks; they were baying for blood and vowing to drive all ethnic Albanians
out of the city. If that hatred translates into random attacks on
ethnic-Albanian communities, a civil war will have begun that will ultimately
carve up the territory and force NATO into yet another permanent peacekeeping
mission.
A territorial division, of course, is exactly what the guerrillas want,
despite all protestations to the contrary. The idea that the hard-eyed men in
the hills have launched an armed insurgency in order to achieve
constitutional changes and greater civil rights for Albanians in Macedonia
is, frankly, preposterous. This was no mass civil-rights movement that bumped
into an unyielding state and then took the fateful decision to respond to
violence with violence. This began with small bands of armed men dispatched
from NATO-controlled Kosovo by the advocates of a Greater Albania (comprising
Albania, Kosovo and those pieces of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and even
northern Greece populated by Albanian majorities), and has ripened into a
situation dangerously close to civil war.
These insurgents, calling themselves the National Liberation Army, launched
attacks on government forces, hoping to provoke a ham-fisted response that
would drive Macedonia's Albanians — who have plenty of political, economic
and social grievances — into the movement's arms. They also hoped to repeat
the success of their de facto parent organization, the Kosovo Liberation
Army, which managed to provoke such extreme brutality from the Serb
authorities that NATO eventually intervened on the Albanian side.
Guerrilla warfare is not a tactic of civil-rights movements; it is a tactic
used by liberation movements whose objective is to free a particular piece of
territory from the control of an existing authority, and (replace it with a
new ruling authority). There is plenty of significance in the rebels calling
themselves the National Liberation Army, not least because the acronym, in
Albanian, is UCK — the same as the KLA. NATO's firm opposition to any further
redrawing of Balkan borders prompted the NLA to hurriedly proclaim itself a
civil rights movement, but its strategy and tactics — even its negotiating
positions — make clear that the objective is to divide Macedonia on ethnic
lines.
That, of course, is precisely what NATO has hoped to avoid throughout the
past decade. But the fact that such an eventuality now appears to be upon us
is in no small part a product of NATO's failure, out of concern for the
safety of its own personnel, to do two things: Tackle the Albanian extremism
incubated in its Kosovo protectorate, and lend a firm hand to Macedonia's
efforts to stop it from taking root.
NATO was certainly well-advised to press Macedonia to begin addressing the
grievances of its Albanian minority — after all, it is those grievances that
have created fertile soil for the extremists to grow their insurgency. NATO
was also aware that the ham-fisted Macedonian military might make a mess of a
counterinsurgency campaign against the lightly-armed but mobile guerrilla
forces and cause civilian casualties that would irreversibly radicalize the
Albanian population.
Sound advice, but what about the guerrillas? And what about the possibility
that the Macedonian majority, faced with an armed insurgency that neither
NATO nor their own government appears capable of ending, might begin casting
about for a Milosevic of their own?
The combination of NATO's squeamishness and the opportunism of the
ethnic-Albanian politicians in Skopje has created a situation where the
guerrillas are increasingly being treated as a legitimate party to an armed
conflict. That situation was once intolerable to both NATO and the majority
of Macedonians; now the alliance appears to have rethought its position.
By essentially elevating the status of the NLA to that of a legitimate
protagonist in Macedonia's future, NATO and the European Union may have
already effectively conceded the carving up of Macedonia on ethnic lines. And
that's another great victory for the hard men in Kosovo dedicated to the
pursuit of a Greater Albania through guerrilla warfare. By looking more to
the safety of its troops than the accomplishment of its mission, NATO has
made sure it will remain reluctantly engaged in the Balkans for the next
decade — with the real victims the region's long-suffering people.
Copyright 2001 TIME Inc.
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
|
