The Silent Issue: Greater Albania

By Joseph Fitchett International Herald Tribune

PARIS - Refugees have become an instrument of war that Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader, is using to unleash a specter haunting the Balkans: Greater Albania. An explosive issue little discussed in the West, the prospect of a nationalistic surge for unity among the roughly 8 million Albanian-speaking people throughout the region fills most governments there with apprehension about a chain reaction starting in Macedonia. The repercussions could shatter the veneer of states and boundaries across this least-developed corner of Europe. President Bill Clinton evoked this risk at the start of NATO's campaign, saying that Kosovo, in contrast to Bosnia, was not confined by natural borders but instead could evolve into an open-ended conflict liable to spread through the southern Balkans and ultimately involve two North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, Greece and Turkey. Belgrade's ferocious campaign to empty Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians, and NATO's determination to preserve their future place in their home

land, are both dictated by the possibility of a polarizing confrontation across the fault line in the southern Balkans. On one side are Orthodox Christian groups in charge of Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece. On the other are Muslim Albanian-speaking minorities in all these countries, with an impoverished motherland in Albania, an ally in Bulgaria and an ultimate protector in Turkey. In spawning refugee flows that strain economies and ethnic coexistence around Kosovo, Mr. Milosevic seeks to trigger a chain reaction of confrontations multiplying faster than NATO's ability to contain them, Western officials and specialists say. His strategic goal is to consolidate Serbia, by overthrowing the government in Montenegro to drive out its Albanian minority, they say. He plans to repopulate a partly emptied Kosovo with Serbs, according to NATO officials, who said that Belgrade would bus in Serbs who were ousted in the early 1990s from their homes in Krajina and eastern Slavonia in the fighting accompanying Yu

goslavia's collapse. The explosive trigger of a wider Serbian-Albanian confrontation is the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia - ''the powder-keg of the Balkans'' that has ignited conflicts over the centuries that ended with World War I. A coveted regional intersection, it remains a potential prize in a four-sided tug-of-war among Greece and Serbia and their Muslim neighbors, Bulgaria and Albania. Macedonia's ethnic patchwork includes a Serbian majority and an ethnic Albanian minority estimated at 25 percent to 40 percent, already concentrated near the Kosovo frontier where the Albanian refugees have gathered. The influx has created a dire predicament for President Koro Gligorov of Macedonia, 80, a former Communist, amid mounting panic in the ruling Serbian majority about a potential tilt in the country's ethnic equilibrium. If Macedonia starts collapsing amid internal conflict, the position of NATO forces there, currently 12,000troops waiting for peacekeeping duties in Kosovo, would be untenable, Western

officials said. Greece, Macedonia's biggest neighbor, would almost certainly be sucked in, crossing Macedonia's southern border in a bid to grab its share of territory and the pro-Greek population. Athens reluctantly recognized Macedonia's independence five years ago when the republic was carved out of the former Yugoslavia. Only strong U.S. pressure overcame Greek hopes of controlling its land gateway to Europe. And Greece has been feuding with Albania, with incidents sometimes approaching the boiling point. The hypothetical situation could play out as follows: Bulgaria would come to the rescue of the Bulgar minority in Macedonia, confronting the Greek push. At that point, Turkey could not stand aside because the Turkish armed forces, struggling to fend off Islamic fundamentalism, would have to back Bulgaria and Albania, officially secular but historically Muslim countries. The crisis between Greece and Turkey would wedge apart the alliance's southern flank, weakening NATO's ability to project stability in

to the eastern Mediterranean and protect Western interests. Similarly, Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in the federation, could be targeted by Belgrade for a coup to overthrow the pro-Western government helped into power last year by the United States and Germany, according to National Security Council officials in Washington. If Mr. Milosevic's surrogates gained control, they would drive out Montenegro's ethnic Albanian minority, increasing pressure on Macedonia and Albania. In effect, Mr. Milosevic, in hammering out his Serbia, including parts of Kosovo and Macedonia, would also raise fears and possibly the reality of Greater Albania as the rallying cry of increasingly desperate Albanian-speaking Muslims. Evoking that outcome, John Meersheimer, a Europe expert at the University of Chicago, said that the West could welcome a Greater Albania as a pro-Western bastion - and perhaps the launching pad of future operations against Mr. Milosevic's Serbia. A darker reading came from other analysts, who agreed t

hat Mr. Milosevic was exploiting fears of a Greater Albania in an effort to destabilize neighboring countries but warned that his success would shatter the West's position in the Balkans. In a regional realignment, Serbia would emerge in an unofficial alliance with Greece, a tandem backed by Russia, according to Stratfor, the U.S. strategic consultant group. The key to the lives of the Kosovars, the U.S. analysts wrote last week, lies ''in Belgrade and Moscow: Serbia wants guarantees of a unified, sovereign nation, Russia wants a sphere of influence.'' In other words, they said, the Kosovo issue masks a wider potential drive by Serbia, Greece and Russia, cemented by their Orthodox heritage, to oppose U.S. global authority, a drive that could attract support from China and Iraq if it succeeded in the Balkans. Using Albanians as the threat capable of creating this anti-American alliance may seem irrational in the light of the situation of Albania, Europe's poorest economy whose gross national product is smalle

r than the $2.2 billion price of a B-2 bomber. Albania's weakness actually deepens the fragility of the southern Balkans, complicating NATO's efforts to stay on solid ground in opposing Serbia, Balkan experts said. The combination of poverty and galloping birthrates among Albanians could producea diaspora of refugees festering on Kosovo's borders, breeding insecurity in the way that Palestinian refugees undermined stability in Israel and the surrounding Arab states. The unspoken proportions of the Albanian issue help to explain some often-baffling features of the Kosovo war, including the apparently wanton Serbian ferocity in emptying Kosovo and Western insistence on preserving Kosovo as the homeland for its ethnic Albanians. Understanding Mr. Milosevic's strategy, centered on the Albanian question, explains why he was so impervious to international pressure. ''He only had to give an inch, at Rambouillet or later in Paris, to be spared the NATO attacks,'' a French policymaker recalled this week. But his baff

ling, suicidal-seeming stance was part of a strategy in which Serbia hammered itself into shape on the anvil of fears of Albanian nationalism. In this calculation, Serbia would emerge as the bulwark of Europe against Balkan turbulence, with Mr. Milosevic possibly being courted for help against the threat of Greater Albania that Mr. Milosevic played the major role in creating. Tensions around the Albanian question could also change Western attitudes toward Kosovo's independence, U.S. officials said. Until now, conventional wisdom has held that recognizing Kosovo would alarm governments in the region as a step toward Greater Albania. That view is being reconsidered, they said, as Serbian ferocity has made it increasingly unthinkable for ethnic Albanians to return under even nominal Serbian sovereignty. If that perception takes hold, immediate recognition of Kosovo's independence could help convince people in the region that the Kosovar Albanians are going home - and not staying in the region as ethnic tinder.

British leaders have insisted strongly that the Kosovo refugees must go home - a point echoed by Paris in resisting calls to offer even temporary asylum. Similarly, German officials said, Kosovo cannot be partitioned. That would push a rump Kosovo-Albania merger and fulfill Mr. Milosevic's scenario of a consolidated Serbia facing the threat of Albanian nationalism. Superficially, this scenario sounds similar to the ''domino theory'' used, and discredited, during the Vietnam War. This facile image proved faulty when Marxist ideology proved less powerful than individual countries' differing national identities. But in the Balkans, many borders are recent and often demarcate historically unstable territories disputed by the ethnic groups that coexist in and around each country. Long a latent problem, the threat of Albanian nationalism burst into the open as a destabilizing pressure at the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, a mini-empire of races, languages and religions held together with dictatorial communism that s

tifled any chance of learning Western-style pluralism. The last avatar of Serbian nationalism that survived the interlude of Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia, Mr. Milosevic apparently thinks that the West might finally be forced to recognize what seems to be his mythic view of Serbia: a rampart of Christendom against the hordes of the Muslim East. Resembling Western prophecies of a clash of civilizations as the threat to peace in the post-Cold War world, it would, in fact, only be Mr. Milosevic profiting from the specter he created.