The New York Times

Tuesday, June 8, 1999

ELDER STATESMAN

Revered Serb Sees No Kosovo Peace

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Dobrica Cosic, a former president of Yugoslavia and a figure revered among Serbian nationalists, says that any peace in Kosovo will be illusory, and that the reputation of the current oresident, Slobodan Milosevic, will suffer badly because of Serbia's defeat.

Cosic, a former Partisan fighter and a popular novelist of Serbian history, sees Kosovo as lost to Serbia. He judges the outcome of "this unequal and senseless war" as a historic tragedy that cannot endure, because it is not based on any real democratic or territorial compromise. And he predicts that despite the presence of international troops, Kosovo will destabilize the Balkans for many years to come.

"The Kosovo crisis has not been solved with this American diktat and the European Union's obedient concurrence," Cosic said in a rare interview. "This will be an illusory peace that will endanger the stability of the Balkans and of Europe itself."

Cosic, 78, is a compact man with thick white hair, who is wary of the press and who is guarded by his daughter, who also works as his secretary.

As early as 1968, Cosic challenged the notion that the nationalities question had been solved in Tito's Yugoslavia. He argued that Kosovo remained a terrible dilemma, and he was the first person from inside the Communist Party to say what many knew: that the majority Albanians were pushing out the Serbs.

For his outspokenness, he was purged from the party Central Committee and stripped even of his party membership. He became a well-known writer and gave moral and monetary support to dissident intellectuals representing a variety of points of view.

For nearly 20 years, he has called for a negotiated division of Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians, but neither side has been interested in giving up its claims to the whole province. Still, he says, "a just and lasting solution of the Kosovo crisis can only be found in a compromise between the two antagonistic national interests -- Serbian and Albanian."

In 1992, with the support of Milosevic, who was in political difficulty after the imposition of international sanctions and needed nationalist cover, Cosic was elected president of Yugoslavia. But he was not a hardened politician, and Milosevic maneuvered Parliament into impeaching him on June 1, 1993, in a single day.

Some dissident intellectuals now resent him for setting the nationalist stage for Milosevic, by reviving the importance of Kosovo and making it new for this generation of Serbs.

In the interview, Cosic said an artificial protectorate over Kosovo would not resolve the fundamental clash of ethnic interests there or produce democracy in a province that most Serbs will now abandon, he said.

Asked if Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo can reconcile, after so much violence and ethnic purging, Cosic said: "It cannot be a serene life, not even under the protection of NATO and a U.N. gendarmerie. All the displaced Albanians will not return to their burned homes, nor will displaced and desperate Serbs return to live under the rule of the majority Albanians."

More bluntly, he said, "Only a lunatic could believe that after such a terrible civil war and terrible destruction that the two nations can live together." The fate of the Serbs in Kosovo "is no longer a political or a psychological question," he said. "There will be revenge, and it will be impossible for NATO to stop it, even if they sent in psychologists instead of policemen."

Just as the 1995 Dayton accords did not produce a multi-ethnic Bosnia, he said, this new protectorate "will not result in a multi-ethnic Kosovo, and the province will inevitably separate from Serbia."

The Albanians have the right to create their own unified state, he says, while the Serbs must have the right to protect their holy sites and interests. He sees the best outcome in a sort of Scandinavia of the Balkans, where small, mostly Serbian states are created around Serbian monasteries and enclaves, on the model of Andorra or the Vatican.

Among his books are a well-received trilogy, "Time of Death," about Serbia's terrible history in World War I, when as many as one in every four people died. Cosic also wrote "Divisions," considered the best tale of the royalist Chetniks, who lost to Tito's Partisans. A novel about a young Partisan fighter, "The Sun is Far Away," was required reading in high schools.

The hero of that book is ordered by the Partisans to leave his village to fight the Germans. He chooses to fight them at home, but is executed for violating communist principles and caring too much about his family and land. Cosic was praised for at least showing the moral dilemma of party discipline.

No fan of Milosevic, Cosic believes that no Yugoslav politician involved in this Kosovo defeat will emerge with his reputation intact. But how long Milosevic remains in power, he said, greatly depends on the policies of the West. "While Serbia is kept isolated and under a blockade, while the Serbs are demonized in the media, while there is no justice for Serbs in the international community," he said, "Serbia cannot be constituted as a modern democratic state with new politics and new people."

A well-known Serbian nationalist poet, Matija Beckovic, who refused to be interviewed by this correspondent, once said that "Kosovo is the most expensive word in the Serbian language."

With so many deaths, the word has become even more expensive.

But this defeat, and Serbian ethnic purging of Albanians, may also puncture the romantic notion of Serbian history that all Serbian wars are ones of self-liberation or self-identity, and not wars of conquest. The loss of Kosovo, some suggest, may force the Serbs to seek another form of self-definition as a more typical, largely homogenous European state.

"I believe Serbs are entitled to their sense of an honorable defeat," Cosic said, but they will also feel that their ideology contains "a certain anachronism."

"It will only be peace that will show us what this war really meant and the consequences it has produced," he said. "It is the first international conflict to resist the post-communist, triumphalist hegemony of the U.S.A."

But the real challenge for the future, Cosic said, is how democracy will deal with the demands for statehood from every minority. Kosovo, he says, is an example of the global rhetoric of human rights' justifying and cloaking a new separatism.

Even the nonviolent Kosovo Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova, "is regarded in the West as a fighter for human rights, while he was simply smuggling in his separatist ideals."

"I'm very afraid of the retrograde energy of all these particularisms and of the artificial unification that globalization brings," he said. "The 20th century will end trying to resolve these contradictions."