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COMMENTARY
February 23, 2008
Kosovo
Readers with exceptionally tenacious memories will recall that this pundit was opposed to the NATO intervention in Kosovo, nine years ago. This may come as a surprise to readers without tenacious memories, since it is widely believed that I never saw a war I didn’t like. Yet believe it or not, I was opposed not only to the wanton bombing of Serbia, but also to the whole “inevitable” project of carving a new European Muslim state out of the flesh of that Orthodox Christian country.I was not without sympathy for the “plight of the Kosovars,” however. Like virtually all journalists at that time, not of Serbian ethnicity, I fell for a great deal of typically Balkan propagandist rubbish that has since been quietly withdrawn. My rule of thumb, on wars, is to fight them with your enemies, when absolutely necessary; but never with your friends, and in particular, never in order to create new enemies. True, as we all know from personal experience, sometimes your friends are more irritating than your enemies, and the temptation to bomb them is always there. It is a temptation that must be resisted, however. This temptation was surely in play with the Serbians, under the late Slobodan Milosevic, who seemed determined to inspire loathing and distrust, when not pointed suspicion that he was doing in Kosovo precisely what his nationalist allies had done in Bosnia: i.e. “ethnic cleansing,” also known as the massacre of innocents. Although not nearly as monstrous as, say, Saddam Hussein, nor anything like Saddam’s threat to the West, Milosevic missed as many opportunities to come clean with his diplomatic interrogators. The Serbs who allowed this vicious old Communist, turned chauvinist demagogue, to remain in power, showed very poor judgement. But the fact that Kosovo had a significant ethnic majority of Albanian Muslims over Serbian Christians was not, in itself, sufficient argument to detach it from Serbia by main force. For if that is the argument, the state system which provides the only international order the planet currently enjoys will tend to disintegrate. Strange to say, I am with Vladimir Putin on this one, and against George W. Bush. Mr Putin’s remarks on the inspiration Kosovo’s independence has given to violent separatists in Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and elsewhere, are entirely to the point. Verily, driving the Serbian government and people into the protective embrace of ex-Soviet Russia, and ultimately her ex-KGB strongman, was among several counter-productive dimensions in the war that Madeleine Albright organized, along with other ruinous Clinton interventions in areas of peripheral interest to the U.S. (Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, etc.) The NATO action in Kosovo brought Mr Putin -- the hammer of the Chechens -- to power, by demonstrating that force and force alone will decide secession struggles, East or West. It restored anti-Americanism to its place in the Russian national security consensus, indirectly bringing an end to the Yeltsin reform era. It was an incredibly stupid war to wage, and the product was on display in Brussels, yesterday, where the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogovin, actually threatened the use of force to prevent Kosovo’s declaration of independence from going any farther. President Bush, who was prompt to recognize the self-declared Kosovar state (together with most European powers), feels obliged to accept the fait accompli he inherited from the preceding administration. He, or his successor, will then try to resist the next stage of demands, for a Greater Albania in which Albania and Kosovo attempt to merge, and insurrections begin in the adjoining Muslim-majority districts of Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Greece, as each asserts its “right” to join them. By recognizing Kosovo, Bush et al. have validated exactly that: a deadly new round of Balkan troubles, ripe for Islamicization. We could not afford to validate the principle of armed insurrection, whether in Kosovo or Chechnya or Palestine or Kashmir or northern Sri Lanka or southern Thailand or the southern Philippines, or in any of the many other places where terrorism seeks to be rewarded with an independent state. Nor could we afford to feed the Islamist triumphalism, that has received each report of Kosovo's advance as another victory for Islam over the infidels of the West. For this is exactly how the story is reported in media across the Muslim world: as a victory for Jihad. And within Europe, a couple thousand EU policemen -- about to be installed without United Nations cover, and in defiance of agreements with Serbia -- cannot guarantee order in a territory that is already a European refuge for radical Islamist cells, and threatens to become Europe’s terrorist safe house. (There were organizational and supply links to Kosovo in the huge terror attacks on both Madrid and London.) There is a deeper history here, for the understanding of which we would have to review the legacy of Ottoman imperialism in the Balkans. But that is, alas, something the Serbs understand a lot better than we do. We refuse to even think about the history. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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