NATO in the Balkans

The (conservative) Times of London blurts out the truth about the biggest
cause of instability in the Balkans...

--

WEDNESDAY MARCH 21 2001

Nato prepares to reap the Balkan whirlwind

SIMON JENKINS

A strange transformation is overtaking Tony Blair’s great Balkan crusade.
The opportunistic Anglo-Albanian alliance of 1999 is crumbling fast, to be
replaced by its bizarre successor, a new Anglo-Serbian alliance. This bond
promises to be longer-lasting, but if I were a Balkan politician I would not
hold my breath. Put not your faith in Nato princes. Their whim is as chaff
in a storm. 

Take our erstwhile friend, Shefket Musliu, a freedom fighter for the army
for the liberation of the Albanian population of Presevo, Medvedja and
Bujanovac (the UCPMB). His territory had been designated by Nato the Charlie
East buffer zone of southern Serbia and thus a no-go area for Serbs. A year
ago Mr Musliu would have counted Mr Blair a buddy and been toasted by every
hostess across Manhattan. Nato’s Secretary-General, Lord Robertson of Port
Ellen, would have called him a Byronic hero and offered to lend him an
Apache gunship or two. Bombers and troop carriers would have been at his
disposal to crush the hated Serb, as they were for his KLA compatriot,
Hashim Thaci, inside Kosovo. 

So why, Mr Musliu is asking, has Nato suddenly allowed the Serb Army to
return to Presevo, under the triumphant banner of General Nebojsa Pavkovic,
the notorious ethnic cleanser of Pristina? Why have Serb forces been allowed
back into the three-mile-wide northern buffer zone? Why has his war-lordship
suddenly turned against the KLA’s surrogates, the National Liberation Army,
in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia? Whose side is he on? It would
be idle these days to seek consistency in Nato’s policy in the Balkans. It
lurches from photo opportunity to photo opportunity, depending on who is in
town. Mr Blair and the former US President, Bill Clinton, could at least
argue that they had other things on their minds. Lord Robertson has less
excuse. He is in charge. During the 1999 war, he was the most fanatical
supporter of Mr Thaci in ousting the Serbs from Kosovo and letting him seize
the initiative from the moderate leaders in the Kosovan capital of Pristina.


Since then the Nato powers have poured money, which means weapons, into the
KLA’s ever deeper and more corrupt pockets, enabling it to carry the
struggle for Greater Albania into neighbouring Serbia and Macedonia. Nato’s
cackhanded aim, declared privately, was to counterbalance any possibility of
Serb revanchism. 

Nato must now reap this whirlwind. On Monday Lord Robertson called the
National Liberation Army that is stirring pro-Albanian civil war in
Macedonia a bunch of “localised extremists”. Nato would take any military
measures necessary to curb them. A unit of British troops, outside the UN or
Nato mandate, is even proposed to “advise the Macedonian Government” on
countering the Albanian threat. The unit will be just 20- strong but, like
all British deployments of this sort, it will go weighed down with
ministerial mission creep. 
Lord Robertson is clearly serious. Every student of the Blairite lexicon
knows that its two most contemptuous words are local and extremist.
Yesterday’s Albanian freedom fighters are today’s localised mischief-makers.
Yesterday’s bulwarks against Hitlerian aggression are today’s bloody
nuisance. Last year Nato backing for Greater Albania was “crucial to Balkan
stability on Europe’s doorstep”. This year it is no longer crucial, indeed
it is possibly catastrophic. 

To Nato, civil war meddling is foreign policy for slow learners. Lord
Robertson was Britain’s gung-ho Defence Secretary during the Kosovan
adventure. His objective in bombing Serbia, he said, was to halt ethnic
cleansing, install multi-ethnic democracy in Kosovo and restore stability to
the region. He did not halt ethnic cleansing. He did not install
multi-ethnic democracy. Now his third objective has also failed. The region
faces unprecedented instability, possibly sucking in Greece and Bulgaria as
well as Macedonia. This is precisely what Britain’s interventions in Bosnia
and then Kosovo were supposed to forestall. 

In Montenegro, a Serbia weakened by Nato may yet be unable to resist local
separatism. A bloodbath here would be truly awful. Will Nato, which has done
so much to encourage Montenegran separatism from Belgrade, now intervene to
stop it? In western Bosnia, the Croats are cutting loose from Sarajevo and
running to join Greater Croatia. This will leave Bosnia as a mostly Muslim
statelet, under an army of occupation of thousands of UN personnel. Will
Lord Robertson regard these Croats as “localised extremists”? Will he
threaten to bomb Zagreb if it continues to encourage territorial
expansionism? Most serious of all is the looming civil war in Macedonia,
hard not to regard as a direct consequence of Nato support for Albanian
nationalism in Kosovo. Despite reverses in recent elections, the KLA has
been allowed to become an arrogant regional bully-boy, bloated with Western
aid and from trafficking in drugs and asylum-seekers. The organisation, with
its roots in separatist terrorism, has long been the vanguard of Greater
Albania. This land is intended to embrace not just Albania and Kosovo but
bordering areas of Serbia, such as the Presevo Valley, and of Macedonia. A
third of the Macedonian population claims Albanian descent. If regional
stability was truly Nato’s concern, backing these Albanians against their
Slav neighbours was always stupid. 

Of course Macedonia is not like Kosovo. Lord Robertson will protest that in
Kosovo Nato sought to re-establish the rights of the local Albanian
majority, which were being monstrously abused by the central Government of
Yugoslavia. In Macedonia, the Albanian majority is not being abused, at
least not in Lord Robertson’s view. So it was OK to bomb Belgrade in 1999,
but not the Macedonian capital of Skopje in 2001. Kosovo has good Albanians,
Macedonia has bad ones. That is the joy of dabbling in other people’s
conflicts. You can treat right and wrong as black and white. One gets a
million dollars, the other gets cluster bombs. 

Nato is now playing with fire. These Albanians know from experience how to
win friends in the West. They terrorise the ruling power and provoke it into
retaliatory suppression and atrocity. They raise the tempo of this atrocity
until it is noticed by the Western media, which is the catalyst to panicking
politicians into “something must be done”. Then they sit tight and await the
bombs and aid. Already the Albanian publicity machine in Macedonia’s Tetovo
is depicting the local Albanians as victims of a Fascist Slav regime.
Albanian class sizes are 50, they cry, as against 30 for native Macedonians.
Give us arms. We must kill them. 

This has proved too crude even for Lord Robertson. He is finally doing what
was inevitable from the moment he first went to the Balkans. He has had to
acknowledge the reality of Serb power. He has allowed the Yugoslav Army back
into the border regions round Kosovo and Macedonia. He will eventually have
to permit Yugoslav troops to do what he has failed to do, which is defend
Serb enclaves and historic sites within Kosovo. Meanwhile, having supported
the KLA to the hilt, he now feels he must support the (pro-Serb) Skopje
Government against the KLA’s proxies in northern Macedonia. 

This madcap adventure thus approaches its denouement. Nato’s intervention
will have partitioned the whole of former Yugoslavia on ethnic lines. It
will have left a patchwork of insecure statelets as mafia fiefdoms or UN
colonies (or both). Not content with this, the most powerful military force
in the world will find itself having supported every side in a series of
petty civil wars, which seem destined to roll everlastingly round the
Balkans. Slobodan Milosevic was not the destabiliser of this region. That
title belongs to Nato. 
Rather than leave local civil conflicts to burn themselves out, Nato and its
cheerleaders on the British Left are still pouring guns, money and threats
of “decisive action” into this theatre. I sometimes think that Lord
Robertson will not stop until the Balkans are ablaze from the Adriatic to
Istanbul. The only hope is that President Bush has more sense. His Secretary
of State, Colin Powell, said last week: “We went in together and we will
come out together.” 

Tomorrow, please. 





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