Justice Does Not Mean Vendetta
by Lucio Caracciolo
LiMes geopolitical quarterly Editor-in-Chief
La Repubblica (Rome)
6/28/99

It is a time for settling scores in Kosovo. After all the violence and the slaughter perpetrated by the Serbs, the Albanians are clamoring for justice. They are right to do so. Not only is it their right, it is also our duty. And it is a right and a duty of the Serb nation to identify and to punish the perpetrators of such horrendous crimes. Failing that, the democratic rebirth of that country will never be possible. But justice does not mean vendetta. Indeed it means the exact opposite. It is a system of procedures that the civilized nations have built up in order to prevent the law of the jungle from prevailing. Rancor, the instinct of revenge, and the desire for rough and summary justice, all these are understandable in people who have lost everything that they held dearest in life. The international peace force's task, however, is to prevent as far as possible the inferno which the Albanians had to put up with throughout the war from now being unleashed on the small Serb and gypsy minorities.

Unfortunately, painful reports are coming in from Kosovo right now. Reports that tell of summary executions, of death chambers, of burning and looting being perpetrated against Serbs and against groups of gypsies suspected of collaborating with Arkan's murder squads and with Belgrade's militiamen during the two months of ethnic cleansing. It is almost always the KLA's (Kosovo Liberation Army) men, sometimes still in uniform, who distinguish themselves in these endeavors. The KFOR's commanders, after a period of initial tolerance, are beginning to get tough on these gangs of criminals that are certainly not a credit to the Kosovar cause.

It is in such circumstances that the KLA's ambiguous and murky nature is revealed. Indeed the KLA is not so much an army as an assembly of armed groups, and in some instances no more than the village militia. There is no authoritative political and military leadership, because young Hashim Thaqi, self-proclaimed leader of the Kosovo provisional government, is certainly not in a position to provide such leadership. But quite apart from the questionable figure of Mr. Thaqi, better known as "the Snake" and who rose to power as the KLA's supreme leader by physically eliminating several rivals for the post, there remains the difficulty in managing an army comprising both sincere patriots and common criminals.

The KLA's roots consist of the so-called "Enverists," the followers of former Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, die-hard Marxist-Leninists who began to get organized in the early eighties thanks to support from Tirana. Their declared objective is ethnic Albania, in other words a state comprising all the Albanians in the Balkans, including not only Albania and Kosovo but also a part of Montenegro and western Macedonia (FYROM). This original hard core has been joined in recent years, especially over the past year, by thousands of volunteers hailing either from within the province of from abroad. The result is an amalgam of groups united in the struggle against the Serb oppressor but divided over just about everything else.

Last spring the United States, which up until then had branded the KLA as a terrorist organization, decided to use the Kosovo Liberation Army as its spearhead against Milosevic's Serbia. Some people had even thought of turning the KLA into "NATO's infantry," even though Thaqi's men played a rather limited role in the course of the recent air strike campaign that lasted two and half months.

Today, now that the war is over (but without any of the related political and geopolitical problems having been resolved), the matter of the KLA is emerging in all its virulence. Now that the Serbs have been defeated, the various Albanian factions are engaged in an internecine struggle for power with no holds barred. On one side we have Thaqi and his armed militia supported by the government in Tirana; on the other we have Rugova, his prime minister Bukoshi (the Kosovars' treasurer), and former Albanian President Sali Berisha, who still has not come to terms with leaving power in Tirana in the Socialists' hands. And all this, against a background of illegal trafficking, principally of drugs, which used to move through Kosovo before the war and in which Serb and Albanian nationalists often used to cooperate quite merrily.

The danger is that Kosovo may turn into a new Afghanistan. Once the Serbs, the gypsies, and all the other unwanted minorities have been eliminated by this ethnic cleansing process in reverse, this unhappy country could generate an ethnic statelet in which the various Albanian clans would engage in settling scores to the accompaniment of machine-gun fire. That is a scenario that, for us, would be both intolerable and highly dangerous. After all this profusion of humanitarian rhetoric, how would we explain such a result, first and foremost to ourselves? No, this cannot be the reason why we fought this war.