The New York Times

Wednesday, June 9, 1999

Independence for Kosovo

By NOEL MALCOLM

LONDON -- If war is the continuation of policy by other means, then it helps to know what the policy is and whether it makes sense. Most of the debate about Kosovo until last week concentrated on military and moral issues -- the need for ground troops, the justifiability of bombing, and so on. Even during the now stalled peace talks, questions about the long-term political future of Kosovo have received little attention. Yet these are the most important questions of all.

The official line of the NATO governments goes something like this: Under the protection of an international force, Kosovo will develop its own autonomous administration, while remaining within the federal Yugoslav state. This means that the Kosovars will have Yugoslav passports, be liable for call-up to the Yugoslav army, pay Yugoslav taxes and pass through Yugoslav controls at the borders (the same borders where the Yugoslav police robbed them and drove them through minefields a few weeks ago).

Meanwhile, say the NATO politicians, Slobodan Milosevic will have fallen from power and a new, democratic leadership in Belgrade will recognize the rights of the Kosovo Albanians, no longer regarding them as second-class Yugoslav citizens.

Unfortunately, no one has yet told us which of the available political leaders will take on this enlightened task. Certainly not Vojislav Seselj, the fanatical Serb nationalist who has publicly advocated infecting Kosovo Albanians with the AIDS virus. Not Vuk Draskovic, whose political career arose from his notoriety as a mouthpiece of anti-Muslim prejudice. And probably not Zoran Djindjic, the Democratic Party leader, who gave unstinting support to the Bosnian Serb extremists during the Bosnian war.

As we know, most Serbs do not wish to see the Kosovars as equal partners in a Yugoslav state; they would rather not have them in their country at all. The sad truth is that Mr. Milosevic's overall policy on Kosovo -- keeping the territory and getting rid of the people -- continues to be genuinely popular in Serbia.

Once it finally becomes clear that this policy has been thwarted, Serb politicians will start working toward a scaled-down version of the same goal: a partition of Kosovo, whereby Serbia will keep the northern half of the province and eject all the Albanians from it. If the deployment of an international force involves creating a special zone for Russian troops in the north, de facto partition will quickly follow, as few Albanians will be willing to return to their homes under the "protection" of Belgrade's closest allies.

Some Western commentators are already advocating partition as the best long-term solution. The argument is usually dressed up with assertions about the northern half of Kosovo's being more of an ethnically Serb area anyway, or with references to the Serbs' "holy places." But in fact the northern half of Kosovo was just as much an Albanian-majority area as the south: in the last reliable census (in 1981) the large northern municipalities of Vucitrn and Podujevo, for example, had Albanian majorities of 88 and 96 percent.

As for the use of churches and monasteries to justify partition, this is merely a pious fiction: Mr. Milosevic's real interest in northern Kosovo is economic, not monastic. He wants the rich mines of the Trepca district and their associated factories and power plants -- the essential assets without which any independent southern rump of Kosovo would not be economically viable at all.

Of course the monasteries and churches should be cared for, and the rights of those who worship in them (a small minority of the Serbs, whom all surveys before the war showed to be the most nonreligious population in the former Yugoslavia) should be respected. But it is hard to believe that, in the late 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar citizens might be told that they must permanently abandon their homes in cities like Vucitrn and Mitrovica simply because of the physical presence of a monastery building 20 miles down the road.

If partition is unjustifiable, and if the reintegration of Kosovo into Yugoslavia unworkable, what long-term options remain? There are only two possibilities. Either the situation stays frozen after the deployment of tens of thousands of NATO troops, who are then committed to exercising a permanent de facto protectorate over Kosovo, or Kosovo is allowed, eventually, to become independent and to guard its own borders with its own army.

In the long term, the second option is more in the interests of the West. It is certainly the strong preference of the Kosovo Albanians themselves, who voted overwhelmingly for independence as long ago as 1991. It is what the volunteer soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army were fighting for; without some assurance on eventual self-determination, they will be very reluctant to give up their weapons, and their leaders will become more radical, not less.

Such an assurance on self-determination (albeit in ambiguous phrasing) was included in the Rambouillet accord; otherwise the Albanians would never have signed that document. Their acceptance of the Rambouillet plan is taken for granted today. And yet that key assurance clause was dropped from the plan put forward last week by the Russian envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland.

Western governments have always said that they are against the idea of independence for Kosovo. Why are they so keen to rule out the one long-term option that offers a genuine, and just, solution? Although I have discussed this question with many politicians, diplomats and academics over the last few years, I have never heard a convincing (or even a well-informed) answer to that question.

One standard response is that granting independence to Kosovo would encourage the Albanians of Macedonia to demand a territorial carve-up of that state, too. This is to misrepresent the aims of the Macedonian Albanian politicians, who have always campaigned for greater political rights within Macedonia, not separation from it. And in any case, the biggest threat to Macedonia's stability today is the sheer presence of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees -- people who will not return to Kosovo if they think they will eventually be subjected, once again, to Yugoslav rule.

The other standard reply is that an independent Kosovo would set a precedent for all kinds of other breakaway ethnic groups: Basques, Kurds or whatever. This is to misunderstand the basis of Kosovo's legal claim to independence. In the old Yugoslavia, Kosovo functioned as a federal unit and was formally defined not just as a province of Serbia but also, and more important, as a component of the federation.

When that federation dissolved in 1991 and '92, each unit had a legal right to self-determination. Independence for Kosovo would thus follow an old precedent: the one set by Slovenia and Croatia. And no other places could follow this precedent unless they were federations in a process of complete dissolution -- a rarity in modern political history.

The only dangerous new precedent here is the one the West is actually planning to create: the permanent NATO occupation of one part of a sovereign state. Such an outcome is not in the interests of the West, and will certainly never satisfy the Kosovars, whose interests this entire Western policy was designed, allegedly, to protect.

Noel Malcolm is the author of "Kosovo: A Short History," a new edition of which has just been published.