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| October 23, 2003 | ||||
No Second Kosovo |
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| by Christopher Deliso | ||||
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As the situation in Iraq continues to worsen, amidst daily reports of new American and civilian deaths, the administration is embarking on a whitewashing campaign designed to prove that things aren't so bad in an occupied country that offers no exit for the US. However, due to its dizzying speed, today's global media – so useful for governments' propaganda purposes – can turn on its masters, without even having to try very hard. Unfortunately for the War Party, there really is nowhere to turn for good news. The victorious occupation of Afghanistan is being tainted by charges of sleaze, rampant corruption and pesky resurgences from the old Taliban gang. And, much further afield, an even earlier failed intervention is unraveling, having arrived at its logical conclusion. Kosovo Protests: 'Out With the UN! We Don't Need You Here!' The internationals really should have known better. Protected by special badges, shiny cars, air-conditioned offices and plenty of disposable income, the UN corps in Kosovo presumed some sort of inviolability, some dispensation from on high that would leave the Kosovars eternally awe-struck and grateful. This wasn't the case, as an eye-opening recent dispatch from the Guardian indicates. Kosovo's Albanians are sick and tired of being babysat by internationals who they've found to be both callous and corrupt. They blame them for misappropriating large sums of money from public coffers, for fueling the explosive increase in prostitution and other mafia-supported services, and for prolonging the status quo of limbo, one that prevents the resolution of vital issues like property ownership and privatization, all of which have kept foreign investors at arm's length from Kosovo. As the Guardian's Helena Smith reports: "…the first chant came from the back of the crowd. 'Go home!' yelled a youngster, as he stood in Pristina's dusty Mother Teresa Square, the site last week of Kosovo's first post war demonstration. 'Out with the UN!' screamed an elderly woman, producing a placard that conveyed the same message. 'We don't need you here!' As locals grapple with price increases and worsening poverty, it is the 'internationals' who have become symbols of the contradictions threatening to tear the UN protectorate apart. Across the province, men and women appear disgusted by their foreign guardians' 'corrupt' beneficence and depraved 'colonial' ways. 'They came to keep the peace and now they're causing tensions,' said Qamile Blakcori. 'We are very grateful that Western forces saved us from the Serbs, but now it's time they go.'" According to the report, everyone from the street all the way to the highest political offices has reason to criticize the internationals – an ominous sign for the UN mission: "'…last week's protest, timed to coincide with the start of historic but widely unpopular reconciliation talks in Vienna with the Serbs, is just the beginning,' says Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi. 'Being ruled 5,000 miles away from New York is simply not working,' he snapped. 'With no road maps, or political deadlines, or sense of resolving their unclear international status as a non-state entity, Kosovars are fast losing hope.' 'What was especially galling to Kosovars was the brazen "corruption" within the mission,' said Rexhepi, who was elected in March 2002. He added that not only was the UN refusing to grant his people more self-rule, it was also abusing power 'at the highest levels.' The malpractice – reluctantly confirmed by Western diplomats – had made him 'feel very ashamed'. A lot of the misplaced funds, he suspected, were local taxes. 'Unmik claimed it has zero tolerance for corruption and organised crime, but there is serious corruption involving huge amounts of money right at its core,' he lamented." A Hydra's Head of Complexities However, the situation is more complicated still. Were the foreigners to immediately pull out of the province, and were the issue of Kosovo's final status to be decided, would the economy suddenly start to grow? Or would the sudden removal of Kosovo's economic life-support apparatus swiftly bring about the patient's demise? There is the additional complexity of negotiating sovereignty – a total mess in the case of Kosovo. Regarded as a Serbian province by both Serbia and (in theory, at least) the UN, Kosovo is regarded as a shining example of a 19th-Century nation-state by Albanian nationalists, some of whom also see it as merely a sub-state of a larger hypothetical Albania. But Serbs are reluctant to let it go, and it is not unlikely that in the end it will be partitioned – making an already puny, untenable nation even smaller. As the Guardian relays, the West is beginning to understand that Kosovo is setting the precedent for a future of failure worldwide: "…officials readily admit that any of the alternatives – independence, partition, continued international stewardship – are unlikely to satisfy everyone. 'It's just like Iraq, whatever we do is going to affect the entire region,' said one senior EU diplomat. 'Kosovo is a perfect example of the confusion the West is likely to get into if it doesn't think through the political implications of its military strategy. If we go on like this we're going to have to set up a colonial service.'" We shouldn't forget the silent majority of decent, common Albanian people who just want to live in peace, without headaches and intimidation from mafia groups and militias. Yet the economic and political dislocation that will accompany any international withdrawal is only likely to put more of these thugs, not less, into power. The Kosovo experience since 1999 has been of a timid UN rewarding former militants and war criminals by keeping them armed and in power – through just changing their uniforms. And the same timid, unaccountable UN has allowed this unsavory bunch to run roughshod, driving out or exterminating Serbian, Roma and Macedonian Muslim minorities. Where to Turn Now? In short, we have a situation whereby a large, frustrated group of people have found a common enemy to replace their previous one. However, they needed – and still need – both. The Serbs gave Kosovo's Albanians a feeling of nationhood, a strident victimology and a common cause. As predicted, this sentiment of Albanian unity proved an evanescent one, collapsing immediately after NATO's bombing campaign ceased. At that point, with nationalistic unity no longer necessary, Kosovo's Albanians turned to settling their own internal scores. And, as said above, the Albanians also need the internationals. They provide a lucrative market for the legal and illegal service industries alike, as well as employment in NGO's and other aid groups. Kosovo has also received generous international grants, and its international limbo has shielded it from some of the most common coercive measures in the Western arsenal. Kosovo may be "freed" soon, but what will happen to its hard-won sovereignty when its political decisions are made by groups like the IMF? Currently, Serbia is still responsible for Kosovo's international debt – though it doesn't pay any taxes to Belgrade. Indeed, being a protectorate or a province is sometimes more comfortable than having to go it alone. That said, Kosovo – whether partitioned or not – will have to come crawling back to someone. But to who? Certainly not Serbia. Even though a majority of the people in both places may not want it, joining the even-poorer Albania may be Kosovo's only hope. The West failed to understand that if a province has historically been poor, there is usually some good reason why – and not merely, as Albanian nationalists claim, that it was forever ignored by Belgrade. In fact, part of the reason Yugoslavia split was that more affluent regions like Croatia and Slovenia were fed up: they felt their tax remittances were disproportionately being siphoned into poor Macedonia, and sucked into the vertiginous black hole of Kosovo. Into the Vortex And that's pretty much the only way to describe it. Kosovo embodies all of the worst Balkan qualities. It is like a centrifuge, a vortex in which all of the incongruent discourses of the region and the West have come to jostle and grate, with increasing speed and volatility. That the West even thought it could successfully intervene there in the first place was sheer folly. It has caused far more problems than it solved – though it has made many people very rich while doing so. Looking back, one is baffled at the stupidity of the "experts" who launched this adventure. At how they could possibly have failed to see the necessary outcomes of the intervention: the destruction of minorities; the destabilization of Macedonia; the reversion to mafia rule; the corruption, Western and domestic; the lack of long-term economic viability, and most crucially, the lack of a clear exit strategy. Violence Surges, But the Truth Speeds Up Too In the end, considering the wide knowledge and experience of the war planners, it becomes hard to believe that the Kosovo job was done for any other reasons than political posturing, corporate war profiteering, manipulating cheap nationalism, and giving NATO a reason to live. Luckily, as Iraq is now showing, history won't let the world get away with the same thing twice. In Iraq, popular dissent arrived so fast that we might say the events themselves have sped up. They are impatient, having gotten used to all the same characters – the international aid groups, the opposition leaders, the ethnic infighting, the foreign contractors – previously encountered in Kosovo. They don't waste time anymore, as they did in Kosovo, in guarding their secrets in seed form. Now, in the age of terror, they bloom forth immediately and die just as fast, stripping themselves of any meaning or significance – save to remind us that invading Iraq was a really bad idea. Indeed, there will be no second Kosovo. This time it will be much worse. Yet with the acceleration of volatile events, fortunately, we will also see an acceleration of truth. The one that reminds us that, when planning folly abroad, there is a basic need to plan for all eventualities in advance, and to not undertake a course of action if it is likely to end in disaster. This is the truth that the Bush Administration is so feverishly trying to obscure right now. Unfortunately for everyone now in Iraq, we can have faith that the events there will violently outpace them – but so will the truth, eventually. |
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Christopher Deliso is an American journalist, travel writer and author concentrating on the Balkans and Southeast Europe, where he has lived and traveled for almost a decade. His criticisms of interventionist foreign policy can be found in his writings for Antiwar.com, and in his recent work on the West's failures to eradicate foreign-funded Muslim extremists in the Balkans, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (Praeger Security International, 2007). Mr Deliso directs the Balkan-interest news and analysis website, Balkanalysis.com and is also the author of a travelogue, Hidden Macedonia (Haus Publishing, London). He holds an MPhil with distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University.
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