BY MICHAEL KARADJIS
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has turned to the Yugoslav regime of Vojislav Kostunica to help enforce stability in the south Balkans region.
In late January, British and French troops fought pitched battles with Kosovar Albanians in the northern Kosova city of Mitrovica, where French troops and their local Serb allies have enforced a partition, which awards mineral-rich northern Kosova to Serbia, since June 1999.
After a Kosovar boy was killed in Serb-ruled northern Mitrovica, thousands of Albanians took to the streets, setting fire to French military vehicles and smashing the windows of the NATO building. Protesters threw stones and Molotov cocktails at French troops, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. More than 100 civilians and 22 troops were injured. NATO then dispatched British and other troops, who also used tear gas, plastic bullets and dogs.
In February, NATO facilitated the entry of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army into the buffer zone in south Serbia along Kosova's eastern border. NATO and the Yugoslav army are coordinating operations against the ethnic Albanian guerillas led by the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB). The name of the army refers to the three small regions of southern Serbia, collectively known as the Presevo Valley, where ethnic Albanians are the overwhelming majority of the population.
In early March, NATO aided the Macedonian army's crackdown on an armed ethnic Albanian group calling itself the National Liberation Army (NLA) in the remote village of Tanusevci, on the Kosova-Macedonia border.
It appears that the overreaction of the Macedonian police has turned an isolated event into a significant revolt of the country's Albanian-speaking population. While there had been no fighting in Tanusevac, it was declared the nest of the NLA, which had claimed responsibility for one attack elsewhere. The village of several hundred inhabitants, who have all fled in terror to Kosova, is far from the main Albanian-Macedonian population centres, but is integrally connected to Kosovar villages just across the official border.
By attacking the village, the Macedonian government appears to have fallen into a trap hatched by NATO and Yugoslavia (the federated state that unites the republics of Serbia and Montenegro, but is dominated by Serbia) to seal the border and root out Albanian fighters from nearby south Serbia who may have been using the region as a rear base. The village had just been marked as part of Macedonia after Yugoslavia and Macedonia signed a treaty delineating their border in February. Albanians in Macedonia and Kosova denounced the treaty as it implied Macedonia's support for Yugoslav rule in Kosova.
Roots of the south Serbia revolt
NATO, the UN and Western governments continue to insist that the Kosovars are only entitled to an undefined "autonomy" within Serbia-dominated Yugoslavia, the state that has tried to annihilate them. This is despite the clear fact that Kosovars universally support complete independence for Kosova.
Western governments and their media have presented the UCPMB as "terrorist" remnants of the former Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), who have extended their struggle into southern Serbia and Macedonia to pressure their NATO and UN overlords into allowing independence for Kosova.
This theory ignores the fact that in this area repression by the Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitaries during and after the Kosova conflict drove some 20,000 Albanians — a quarter of the region's population — into Kosova. Repression was particularly acute when vengeful Serbian forces were withdrawn from Kosova and deployed in the region. In December alone, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported 4900 people seeking refuge in Kosova from the Presevo Valley.
The desire to return to their homes has provided recruits to the UCPMB, which calls for autonomy for the region within Serbia, on the basis of a referendum organised by the local population in March 1992. However, increasing repression has increased support for the region to be united with Kosova.
Following the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosova in June 1999, the cease-fire agreement included a five-kilometre-wide buffer zone along the Kosova border to separate the forces. Neither NATO nor the Yugoslav army were to enter the zone. However, the unintended consequence was that the zone became a safe haven from which the UCPMB could launch operations against the Yugoslav army elsewhere in the Presevo Valley.
In fact, US/NATO forces did enter the buffer zone last year to crack down on the guerillas and seize weapons.
Scrapping the buffer zone
Since late last year, a rising chorus among European NATO powers has called for the scrapping of the buffer zone. This has been combined with greater pressure being applied to Kosova's leaders, who are being blamed both for igniting the struggle in south Serbia and for their inability to stem revenge attacks on Serb civilians within Kosova. Kosovar leaders respond that they have been given no administrative or security powers to stop anyone doing anything — that is supposed to be NATO's job.
In early January, Dmitry Rogozin, chair of Russia's parliamentary committee for international affairs, announced a delegation from Germany, France and Russia would visit Kosova to "establish how provisions in UN Security Council Resolution 1244 are violated". Given that French troops and their Serb allies are the leading violators in Mitrovica, this presumably refers to Albanian violations. For Russia, the fact that Yugoslav troops have not yet returned is also seen as a "violation".
The European Union in January declared its opposition to any further "fragmentation" of Yugoslavia, telling Montenegro and Kosova to forget any ideas on independence. Notably, referring to recent Yugoslav negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, Yugoslav minister Miodrag Kovac revealed that the IMF's conditions for lending money included that Yugoslavia must guarantee that it will implement federal laws on its entire territory, meaning in these two regions.
Until February, the new US administration, wary of the strongly pro-French orientation of the Kostunica regime and examining its options, was considering withdrawing from the Balkans. The sudden rise of the Albanian national movement forced Washington to change its tune, particularly after the February 2 meeting in Washington between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.
On February 16, Yugoslavia presented a plan "for the solution of the crisis created by the activities of Albanian extremist groups" to NATO headquarters, which proposed the abolition of the buffer zone and NATO approval "for the entrance of appropriate police and army units". NATO chief George Robertson said NATO "strongly welcomes the initiative".
In Skopje on February 23, leaders of the Balkan and European Union states "strongly condemned the violent and illegal terrorist actions, by the ethnically motivated extremist armed groups in South Serbia, which could have the effect of destabilising the situation in the region".
The declaration was signed by leaders of Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey and Romania, European commissioner for foreign policy Chris Patten and EU foreign policy chief and former NATO boss Javier Solana.
Solana threatened to cut off international assistance to Kosova because of Albanian guerilla actions in Macedonia and south Serbia, and a terrorist attack on a passenger bus in Kosova which killed 10 Serbs (an act of terrorism that was forcefully condemned by all Kosovar Albanian parties). Patten warned that attacks in southern Serbia may jeopardise the "broad autonomy" promised to Kosova but so far blocked by the UN and NATO.
Following NATO's February 27 announcement that it was scaling back the buffer zone, Yugoslav forces began to pound rebel positions with heavy mortars and artillery. The Yugoslav army entered the area on March 14 following a NATO-Yugoslav agreement four days earlier.
Yugoslav troops were escorted to the zone by chief of staff Nebojsa Pavkovic, who led the depredations in Kosova in 1999, despite alleged NATO "advice" that Belgrade not include units or officers who served in Kosova.
While in the zone, Serb forces are theoretically not allowed into Albanian populated towns. In their place, US, British, Scandinavian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian forces are attempting to "coordinate operations with Serb forces in the Presevo Valley ... to contain the militants in their strongholds and to rout them from towns under partial control", according to the pro-imperialist Stratfor intelligence consultants. "But the guerillas will target the Serb patrols entering the zone, as well as US KFOR (NATO) units", the Stratfor warns.
"With no leaders in Kosovo who can stem the violence against the Serbs, UN and NATO officials must seek administrative authority in Kosovo", Stratfor further recommends with colonialist vigour. "The position of the United States and NATO is a move toward the complete isolation of the current group of Kosovar officials."
NATO's aggression against Serbia in 1999 was in part motivated by its desire to stem the Kosovar national movement after the terror tactics of Slobodan Milosevic's regime had driven larger and larger numbers of Kosovar Albanians into the arms of the KLA. NATO disarmed the KLA after its forces entered Kosova.
At the heart of the continued fighting in southern Serbia is the unsolved Albanian national question. Albanians, living in a compact area but split between five countries, regard the division to be an historical injustice. Western imperialist powers, on the other hand, regard the Kosovars' struggle as a threat to "regional stability".
As Chris Hedges wrote in the US ruling-class journal Foreign Affairs during the 1999 war, "with most ethnic Albanians concentrated in homogenous areas bordering Albania, the drive to extend Albania's borders remains feasible. That drive is not only a wider threat to European stability but also to Albanian moderation. Many KLA commanders tout themselves as a 'liberation army for all Albanians' — precisely what frightens the NATO alliance most."
In particular, if uncontrolled, the NATO powers fear that if this movement leads to a partition of Macedonia, it may result in intervention from surrounding countries who have long disputed that country's legitimacy. This "nightmare scenario" could then see historic rivals but official NATO allies, Greece and Turkey, embroiled on different sides of the conflict, as well as igniting further ethnic struggles in the southern Balkans.
While the spread of Albanian national movement into Macedonia appears to legitimise NATO's fears, what it really reveals is the fact that NATO's military intervention in the Balkans has done nothing to solve the Albanian national question.