ILLYRIA

August 1-3, 1998

PRESIDING OVER GENOCIDE: THE SHAME OF THE WEST

By Shirley Closey

"We have a moral obligation to identify with the people of Kosova. They have been persecuted discriminated against and killed by a police state. Kosovar Albanians have suffered enough."

So said Congressman Tom Lantos at a hearing of the House Committee on International Relations on March 12. As a child of the Nazi Holocaust, Lantos, a California Democrat, meant what he said and knew whereof he spoke, but he is joined today neither by the majority of his colleagues in the U.S. Congress nor by most Western governments, who have embraced a misguided, foreign policy that has the potential, in the words of former State Department official John Fox, "to make Bosnia look- like a warmup."

We do not yet know how many Albanians have died in Kosova after almost five months of round-the-clock shellings, bombings, sieges, torture, massacres of women and children, forced expulsions, and leveled homes and villages at the direction of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. The casualty figures remain understated. More than 400 Kosovar Albanians are "officially" dead, and 300 are listed as "missing."

Meanwhile, eyewitnesses have reported a mass grave in Decan - eventually we will find it and others, as we did in Vukovar and similar bloody places in Bosnia. Survivors have also given harrowing accounts of summary executions and of the burning of hundreds of corpses by the Yugoslav Army and the "special police." Today there -are more than 100,000 refugees inside Kosova and more than 40,000 who have fled over the border into Albania and Montenegro under the onslaught of thousands of Serbian police and troops.

For those of us in the United States who have been involved in the struggle to save the Albanian. people of the Balkans and to resolve the Albanian national question in our time, there has been an excruciating disconnect between America's professed adherence to international standards of human rights and our foreign policy, as it has been executed by President Bill Clinton and his special envoys to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard and Richard Holbrooke. Each new moment in Milosevic's genocidal war against the Albanian majority of Kosova, who have lived for 10 years tinder one of the most brutal occupations that the world has seen since the Nazi era, has been greeted with waffling, posturing and saber rattling.

From the time that Drenice was attacked at the end of February by Milosevic until the June decimation of the villages of Decan by Serbian military and paramilitary forces using helicopters and heavy artillery, the Western response has been to discuss, threaten, impose and then withdraw sanctions against Belgrade. Four months of empty threats culminated in NATO air exercises on the border between Kosova and Albania in June - a pathetically transparent attempt to create the appearance of resolve in the absence of resolve

Indicative of the perfidy that lies at the bottom of this conflict, we have failed to act in the name of preventing another Bosnia-style "ethnic cleansing" campaign. But Kosova has been another Bosnia for quite some time, and we have never had any intention of taking the steps necessary to stop the carnage. Instead of using force or the credible threat thereof, we have given the green light to Milosevic: We have abandoned the Bush Administration's "Christmas warning" against expanded Serbian military action in Kosova; we have elevated the ineffectual LDK party leader Ibrahim Rugova as the voice of Albanian "moderation," while branding the Albanian self-defense forces - the Kosova Liberation Army - as terrorists; and we have publicly rejected independence for Kosova.

While some in the Clinton Administration have accurately forecast the dire outcome of inaction in tire face of the "ethnic cleansing" of the Albanian population of Kosova (Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, for example, said last winter that the challenge is "to prevent the brutal policies of Belgrade from triggering a fourth Balkan war in this century"), the strategy of appeasement and containment has prevailed. This strategy was born of Holbrooke's pact with Milosevic: Dayton would proceed if Holbrooke would exclude the Albanians, the third largest ethnic group in the Balkans, from the negotiating table and not make a resolution of the Kosova conflict a condition of the accords.

In the final analysis, the Dayton agreement was settled on the backs of the Albanian people. Dayton transformed Milosevic, the war criminal, into the solution for Bosnia. Holbrooke conferred the mantle of peacemaker on Milosevic, enabling him to pursue his nightmarish vision of an "ethnically cleansed" Greater Serbia and relied on Albanian acquiescence to oppression to avoid a spillover of the war into southern Europe. Robert Gelbard followed in lockstep.

Why anyone in the U.S. government would believe that we could avert a wider war in the Balkans by requiring 2 million ethnic Albanians in Kosova to become "human sandbags," in the words of author Alice Mead, is destined to remain one of the mysteries of our time. As history, has repeatedly shown us and as the emergence of the Kosova Liberation Army should remind us, oppressed peoples cannot endure barbarous treatment, selectively meted out to them on the basis of race and ethnicity year after year, without ultimately rising tip to stop their tormentors. They will not give up their lives, their land, their schools, their homes and their children's futures without a struggle.

Precisely because we have refused to uphold the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and have insisted that Albanians remain under the yoke of their oppressors, the wider war that we have feared is already upon us. And yet we refuse to abandon the strategy that has brought us to the brink. So convinced are we that the victims of genocide pose a greater threat to security in the Balkans than the perpetrators, that we have abandoned our insistence on the withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosova. And now that the KLA has managed to seize control over a reported 30 to 40 percent of Kosova, we have declared that Kosovar Albanians need no help from NATO and we are busy pressuring individuals and countries to stop the flow of arms to them.

So convinced are we that support for Kosova's independence is the problem instead of the solution in the Balkans that we have gone to elaborate lengths to misrepresent the history and nature of the conflict. U.S. government officials and our media continually refer pejoratively to the KLA as "terrorists," as "separatist guerrillas" and as "rebel forces," with no mention of the cruel 10-year occupation that preceded the genocidal war now in progress.

Our policy makers have attempted to establish a false parity between Serbia, a military power engaged in state terrorism, and the KLA, a grassroots self-defense force surviving on money and arms from the Albanian diaspora. Again and again, the United States and the rest of the West have had the temerity to suggest that the KLA, which is fighting to stop the annihilation, of the Albanian people, bears responsibility for the conflict and its potential to expand into neighboring countries.

On June 25, in the wake of the destruction of Decan, German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel called on the Kosova Liberation Army to "stop spreading the conflict and to refrain from violent acts." Four days later, European foreign ministers met in Paris and declared that "all those in a leadership role in the Kosovar Albanian community should "make clear their commitment to dialogue and their rejection of violence and acts of terrorism."

Why the onus could be placed on the KLA, when it is Milosevic's war to make or break, was clarified that same day by former State Department official Stefan Halper, who wrote in the pages of The Washington Times that "Belgrade, objectionable as it may be, is all that prevents the pan-Albanian movement from challenging both the Macedonian and Albanian borders - which, in turn, would trigger another Balkan war, possibly involving NATO allies Greece and Turkey on opposite sides."

It is disingenuous at best for the West to justify its complicity in the destruction of Europe's Albanians by hiding behind the threat of a "Greater Albania." As the international community has witnessed since 1989 in Kosova, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, the only genuine drive for hegemony in the Balkans is the drive for a Greater Serbia spearheaded by Belgrade and supported by Russia. And the recent ad hoc pronouncement by one of the five members of

the KLA's supreme command that the KLA seeks to liberate all Albanians living under Slavic rule does nothing to change this reality.

The specter of Albanian unification has fueled the West's vigorous opposition to the independence of Kosova and unleashed a barrage of concern about preserving Serbia's "territorial integrity" and its status as a "sovereign state." We are told that there must be no redrawing of borders. And yet there are no borders to be redrawn. Kosova has been home to the Albanians, the indigenous Illyrian people of the Balkans, for thousands of years before the Serbs arrived in the seventh century A.D.

After World War I, the West carved up Albanian lands under pressure from hostile Slavic regimes, ultimately leaving 3.5 million Albanians inside what became the state of Albania and close to 4 million outside it, in Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro, southern Serbia and Greece. In the early 1970s, Kosova became one of eight, equal political units that made up the former Yugoslavia - a status that it retained until 1989, when Milosevic illegally overtook it and stripped it of its autonomy as part of his surge to power on a platform of anti-Albanian racism. There was no outcry from the international community over this violation of Kosova's "territorial integrity" and no attempt to restore Kosova's legitimate right to self-determination. How are we to reconcile this with the creation in 1996 through the Dayton Accords of a phony territorial entity called the Republic of Srpska ?.

Since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, we have "allowed" the Croats, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Moslems, Slovenians and Macedonians, to choose their own destinies, but not the, Albanians of Kosova - even though under international law, the Kosovar Albanians meet all of the criteria for the right to independence. These criteria were set forth compellingly last spring in Foreign Affairs by Hurst Hannum, professor of international law at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Hannum, who believes that "neither sovereignty nor self-determination is an absolute right," nevertheless argues that when a group with a common racial background, ethnicity, religion, language, history and cultural heritage are subjected by the

dominant culture to human rights violations on a scale approaching genocide, or when their reasonable demands for self-governance or minority rights are rejected, they have the right to secede.

Under this rubric, in which protection of human rights is the litmus test, it is Serbia, not Kosova, that has abdicated its right to sovereignty.

The West's insistence on "enhanced autonomy" rather than independence for Kosova, as well as "peaceful negotiations between the waning parties," grows more politically untenable and

morally objectionable by the day. Especially since the recent bloody fighting in Rahovec that forced 20,000 Albanians to flee for their lives, it should be clear that a position that sets the ceiling for Kosova at autonomy, when this would mean leaving Albanians under the control of their murderers, cannot work.

Autonomy will never be accepted by the people of Kosova, and neither will "peaceful" negotiations made in bad faith by, a diplomacy community that watches and waits as the slaughter continues.

And this is why our State Department and our intelligence community, now that they have decided that the KLA deserves a place at the negotiating table, cannot find anyone within the leadership of the KLA to negotiate with. The problem is not that the Kosova Liberation Army is unorganized or politically unformed. Far from it. The problem is that the United States no longer has any credibility.

The U.S. stands at a crossroads, and it must make a choice: It can continue to prop up the irreparably weakened Kosova President Ibrahim Rugova; it can continue to pursue its recent attempts to "divide and conquer" the KLA; it can continue to try to persuade everyone who has been working for a just and lasting solution to the Serbian-Albanian conflict to settle for less; it can continue to preside over genocide.

But it will do so at its peril: Macedonia, with its large Albanian population, will enter the war and then the rest of the region will follow. Or the United States can recognize that independence for Kosova is the only politically and morally sound outcome, and, with NATO, stop Milosevic by removing Serbian troops from Kosova and supporting the KLA. -

Only this approach will prevent the conflict from spreading to Macedonia. Only this approach will stop the war.

Shirley Cloyes is Balkan affairs adviser to the Albanian American Civic League.