With
Macedonia Do We Have
to Have Another Balkan War?
By JONATHAN
POWER
March 28, 2001
LONDON - After ten years of Balkan sectarian madness
the outside world thought it had caught its breath. The
hard-line nationalist president of Croatia, Franjo
Tudjman, died in 1999. Last year the ruthless Bosnian
Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic resigned due to old age.
Most marvellous of all in October Slobodan Milosevic, who
began the Balkan wars, was finally voted out of office.
Yet as the new fighting in Macedonia abundantly makes
clear the forces of disintegration in the region remain
stronger than those of integration. It takes a quarter of
a million Nato soldiers to hold the ring and still there
is no peace.
The issue posed by President Boris Trajkovski of
Macedonia hangs in the air, imperfectly answered. "We
cannot redraw borders and boundaries, making smaller
units of ever purer ethnic states. We cannot survive as a
region if ethnicity becomes the sole defining
justification of statehood."
But why not? Go back no further than the Dayton
agreement that ended the war in Bosnia. As Carl Bildt,
the former Swedish prime minister and now the UN
Secretary General's Special Envoy to the Balkans, has
pointed out, the key to Dayton was the American
acceptance of a highly autonomous Republika Srpska within
the framework of a very loose Bosnian state. "The deal
met the minimum demands of everyone", says Bildt "and the
maximum demands of no one."
Indeed, if the Americans had accepted the concept of
an autonomous Republika Srpska earlier the bombing by
Nato could perhaps have been avoided.
The Balkans is the last part of Europe to come to
terms with the Wilsonian principle of self-determination,
the idea of the ethnically homogeneous nation-state, a
transition brought to fruition by the Treaty of
Versailles at the end of the First World War. It caused
immense upheaval in Europe at large, but the nation
state, for the most part shorn of strong ethnic
minorities, was some sort of solution to the empires,
dynasties and feudal states that preceded it. It made for
a more harmonic and sustainable development of democracy
than had been possible before.
The Balkans is both the end of this process and its
most difficult. Nowhere else in Europe was there such a
mosaic of peoples, cultures and languages.
The initial impulse of the United States, after
Milosevic's concessions following on Nato's bombing over
the issue of Kosovo two years ago, was to renege on the
promise it had just made in the peace agreement and give
the Albanian Kosovars the independence they sought. But,
constrained partly by the agreement and partly by its
European partners and later by the fall of Milosevic, it
backed away from this. Now all the Nato countries
together with Russia, anxious to secure a peaceful
transition in the new Yugoslavia, stand shoulder to
shoulder against its further break up. Indeed, they have
gone so far as to allow the essentially Serbian army of
ex-Yugoslavia into the largely Albanian-inhabited buffer
zone that lies north of Kosovo just inside Serbia, in an
attempt to push the Kosovar Albanian guerrillas back into
Kosovo proper.
Yet the historic argument for keeping Kosovo inside
the new Yugoslavia is thin indeed. In the last century
alone there were six wars between Kosovars and Serbs.
Before that there had been 500 years of Ottoman rule,
during the latter part of which the Albanians of Kosovar
had asked unsuccessfully for autonomy. Moreover, Tito
himself promised them the right to unite with
Albania.
The truth is the insurrection of the Albanian
militants inside Macedonia is most likely a feint by the
extremist wing of Kosovar nationalism. Feeling they are
in danger of being sidelined after the fall of their bete
noir, Milosevic, which made the world sympathetic to
their cause, combined with the political resurrection of
the once dismissed pacifist-inclined Kosovar leader,
Ibrahim Rugova, they have opened up a new flank inside
Macedonia.
Nato would have an uncomfortable choice if the war
escalates. Either to back the Macedonian forces and do
battle with the insurgents or to defuse the issue by
re-opening the question of Kosovo's future destiny, which
means in effect discussing the destiny of the whole
Albanian Diaspora, including the part which hitherto has
resided reasonably happily within Macedonia, (but not for
much longer if the central Slav-dominated government of
Macedonia goes for overreaction and bloody crackdown as
is the norm in this part of the world). The question of a
united Greater Albania and a rump Macedonia that is
incorporated into Bulgaria, its historical homeland,
perhaps cannot be deferred much longer.
As Mr Bildt argues, what Nato needs at this juncture
are "smart ideas not smart bombs", one of which should be
to underline to all the parties in a substantive way that
their real future lies in a united Europe where tribal
and ethnic allegiances count for less. Otherwise it could
be another horrible round of war making.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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