The New York Times

Tuesday, February 15, 2000

Dividing Kosovo Won't Bring Peace

By TIM JUDAH

There was so much fog when I crossed the bridge in Kosovo's divided city of Mitrovica a few days ago I could barely see 10 yards ahead. Heavily armed French soldiers loomed as vague shapes. Coils of barbed wire looped into the mist. Self-appointed Serbian "bridge keepers" kept watch in case Albanians tried to infiltrate the city's northern districts, which the Serbs have made their own.

Almost eight months after NATO troops were deployed in Kosovo, those pessimists who say that the war will never end look as if they might be right. The violence in Mitrovica over the weekend -- French, Italian and British troops came under fire, and two French peacekeepers were wounded -- will only add to the growing impatience among Western powers for a solution. To that end, some Western voices say, Kosovo should be partitioned, giving the Serbs the north of the province and the Albanians the rest.

True, there will be plenty of messy conflicts in the coming months. But these will require steely nerves on the part of NATO, because standing back and letting the Serbs and Albanians carve up Kosovo into two ethnically "pure" sectors would create more problems than it would solve.

Mitrovica, a grimy industrial town on the Ibar River in northern Kosovo, has become the eye of the storm. Before the war the vast majority of its 100,000 inhabitants were Albanians, and they and the Serbian population were spread across both the northern and southern sides of the river. When French peacekeepers settled in the area in June, after NATO's 78-day bombing campaign, a de facto partition took place. Serbs fled northward, and the Albanians who had been expelled by Serbian forces or fled during the bombing were mostly unable to return to the north.

Serbs in northern Mitrovica are far from reconciled to losing the whole of Kosovo to the Albanians. But that does not mean to say that they (and Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader, whose influence in Kosovo can't be underestimated) don't have a Plan B up their sleeves just in case. Many Serbs I spoke to in Northern Kosovo said quite openly that if Kosovo became fully independent from Yugoslavia, they would seek to secede from Kosovo.

In turn, a seductive notion has begun circulating among the Western powers. Since northern Mitrovica is one of the few places that Serbs feel safe in the new Kosovo, and since all of Kosovo north from the city to the Serbian border has long been almost entirely ethnic Serbian territory, why not just sacrifice the homes of northern Mitrovica's Albanians, partition the province at the Ibar River and get "our boys" home where they belong?

Some even see a possible inducement for the Kosovar Albanians to go along with such a deal. Just over Kosovo's eastern border with Serbia proper, a new conflict is brewing between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in the areas of Bujanovac and Presevo. So, this line of realpolitik goes, could we just ask the Serbs and Albanians to exchange northern Kosovo for these parts of Serbia?

Well, if life were that simple, people would not fight wars in the first place.

The first obstacle to any easy partition plan is that the area around Mitrovica is ringed with mines producing gold, zinc and other precious minerals. These mines, coveted by Hitler in World War II and vital to Yugoslavia's economy during the cold war, have taken on an unjustified mythical importance to the locals. Western experts may throw up their hands and pronounce the mines tapped out and uncompetitive in today's global economy, but Serbian and Albanian leaders would more likely return to war than admit any such thing.

The larger problem is that even if a deal over the mines could be worked out, partitioning the north of Kosovo would set a dreadful precedent. In Montenegro, which is edging toward a civil war between those who would remain Serbia's partner in the Yugoslav federation and those who would break with Belgrade, there is already talk of pro-Serb regions seceding and joining with Serbia. What message would NATO send to the Montenegrins if it was complicit in carving up Kosovo?

Dividing Kosovo might also spur Albanians who live in western Macedonia to act on their threats to secede from that republic. So too the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia. And these secessions would likely come at the price of new wars.

Since no one can put the Balkan Humpty Dumpty together again, the Western countries have two unappealing choices. They could just withdraw their troops from the region and let new borders be formed in new wars which would risk drawing in Greece and Turkey. Or they can continue to hold the line, trying as best they can to ensure security for all in Kosovo and working hard to prevent more Balkan wars.

Since this is not really much of a choice, Americans had better get used to something that Europeans adapted to years ago. If American soldiers are still in Germany 55 years after they arrived, and a decade after the Berlin Wall came down, it is more than likely that they are still going to be in the Balkans in 2055.

(Tim Judah is the author of the forthcoming "Kosovo: War and Revenge.")