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Serbia Builds Support Over Kosova Suppression
By Omer Bin Abdullah
03/03/2001
The most recent Anglo-American bombing of Iraq has a connection to events in Kosova and new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica's campaign to cleanse his country's bloody image - at least in the West - and to provide a fig leaf so the West can start openly doing business with his country.
According to reports, former president and war criminal, Slobodan Milosevic, had sold military equipment to Iraq, and Kostunica offered these plans to the British in exchange for not only good graces, but also greater support to the Yugoslav objective to keep Kosova under occupation.
The Iraqi bombing came at a time when the Kosovars, who are being subjected to a regime that is not so dissimilar from the Zionist regime occupying Palestine, are being increasingly blamed for the violence in Kosova.
For instance, Serbia has created a five-kilometer buffer zone between it and Kosova, effectively cutting off Kosova from the three largely Muslim provinces of Presevo, Medveda and Bujanovac. This has obliged the Muslims in the liberation army of those provinces (UCPMB) to smuggle arms from Kosova into the security zone. The UCPMB is fighting to unite three largely ethnic Albanian regions of southern Serbia with Kosova.
Belgrade has warned that another Balkans war could erupt if the NATO-led Kosova force (Kfor) fails to stop attacks from within the security zone. Soon after, British troops took up positions near the southern Kosova border, which overlooks the disputed Presevo Valley, in order to separate the Muslims from the American and Russian troops that control that southern section.
NATO is considering allowing Serbian forces back into the buffer zone on the Kosova border so they can patrol the area themselves in order to suppress the increasing incursions by former members of the Kosova Liberation Army. Under the terms of the Military Technical Agreement between NATO and the Yugoslav army, only lightly armed Serb police and NATO forces are presently allowed in the zone.
Another idea is to do away with the three-mile-wide zone altogether, which was designed to act as a buffer between Kosova and the rest of Serbia at the end of the war and to ensure that any attack by Serbian troops or paramilitary police could be forestalled.
Despite Serbia's unwillingness to accept Kosovar's desire for independence and its efforts to put an end to their freedom campaign, Western governments have adopted a more relaxed approach to the situation, citing the "encouraging attitude" now emanating from the new government in Belgrade. However, the "peace plan" put forward by the Serbs is merely a replay of their stated position that the UCPMB must give up its arms before there is a withdrawal of Serb military from the area and the reintegration of the ethnic Albanian community, "with full respect for human rights," into Serbian society.
The leaders of Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, and Romania met on February 22nd in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, with Croatia as an observer. They adopted a summit declaration that addresses three main points of the latest Balkan instability: the renewed violence in Kosova, related clashes in southern Serbia, and Montenegro's drive towards independence. The document urges authorities in Serbia and Montenegro, the two remaining republics of former Yugoslavia, to reach a mutually acceptable solution and stresses "the importance of avoiding unilateral actions which may jeopardize negotiations."
Plans by Montenegro's government to hold an independence referendum later this year are being opposed by Belgrade, which has offered talks on a looser federation, and have alarmed the West. For some diplomats, changing any border in the Balkans now is a recipe for trouble - a move that could encourage breakaway movements in Kosova, Bosnia, and Macedonia.
The leaders expressed "deep concern over the recent ethnically motivated violence and extremism." Kostunica blamed "Albanian extremists" for the attack, saying they threaten the stability of the Balkan region.
The draft declaration states, "We firmly denounce violent and illegal acts by Albanian extremist groups in southern Serbia which may lead to the destabilization of the situation. We call for an immediate and complete halt to violence in this region."
The Muslims maintain that they are fighting Serbian repression and, so far, they have ignored both appeals from Belgrade for dialogue and a blunt demand by NATO to stop. During the Kosova war, the Yugoslav army robbed and damaged their property and their police settled in the area, bringing with them anti-Muslim feeling and the psychosis of war.
The Serbian leadership was apprehensive that the Muslims were trying to recover the international support they have lost, and place the conflict in the Presevo Valley high on the international agenda, to be resolved with foreign intervention like Bosnia and Kosova.
Yugoslavia's new political leaders are having none of it. They have launched a peace process based on improved rights for the 70,000 ethnic Albanians in the area and gradual demilitarization. The international community broadly supports their plan, and all parties are now trying to agree on the composition of the negotiating teams, the location for talks, and a date. However, the intelligence services offered by Serbia against Iraq seem to be the clinching factor for the Anglo-American support rather than their vague promises of "improved human rights."
In order to defend their grounds, the Serbs are arguing that the Muslims are trying to overrun their land and create a Greater Albania stretching from Kosova and southern Serbia to the western part of Macedonia, where there have been recent clashes. They feel under protected by the Yugoslav forces in the area and, perhaps for the first time in their lives, powerless. They want the army to move in and wipe out the rebels.
Western governments find nothing objectionable in dealing with Kostunica even though he has taken no steps to repatriate declared war criminal Milosevic. Ironically, the same governments have clamped severe sanctions on Afghanistan for playing host to Usamah Bin Laden, accused of crimes by the U.S.
The Kosovars reelected Ibrahim Rugova of the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK). Like all the Muslim parties who contested the election, the LDK is in favor of unconditional independence from Yugoslavia of which it remains legally - if not for the moment, in reality - a part.
The LDK's two main rivals at the polls were the two big parties to have emerged from the former guerrilla group, the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA). Hashim Thaci of the Democratic Party of Kosova (PDK) argues that Rugova's period as undisputed leader of the Kosova Albanians from 1989 to 1998 and his policy of passive resistance to the Serbs failed.
Serbian voters boycotted the poll and Kostunica has said he does not recognize its outcome. He has said he wants to reestablish Yugoslav sovereignty in Kosova, something rejected by all Kosova Albanians.
While diplomats and officials from the U.N. administration in Kosova might believe that a compromise for Kosova's future will be easier to work out with Rugova, in fact, his election may make little difference. If, in the future, he is seen as being soft on Belgrade, the post-KLA hardliners may just get the opportunity they need to make a comeback.
The Western countries have found, in Kostunica, a good excuse to not help Kosovar's struggle for independence. In Bosnia, they were able to fall back on the Croats and create a joint country - a maneuver that helped stave off a purely Muslim republic in Bosnia. In the case of Kosova, they have no such leeway; supporting freedom there would only increase a possibility that the West will never accept - a Muslim republic in Europe.
Fallout of War
Another heartbreaking aspect of the Balkan tragedy is that Muslim women are being forced into prostitution, either voluntarily or through trickery.
The Independent newspaper in London estimates that three-quarters of the prostitutes now active there are from Eastern Europe, mostly from the Balkans. Most of them have entered the country illegally, and many are the innocent victims of vice rings.
Women's groups in Bosnia report that agents regularly make rounds in the war-torn countryside, offering work to young girls as maids or au pairs and then shipping them off to striptease bars. Some victims are only 14-years-old.
Those who think they are going west for a "real job" will typically pay between $900 and $1,200 for transport and visas. After they arrive in the west, the gangs take their passports and money, and put them in guarded apartments - leaving no room for doubt about what will happen if they fight back or go to "those caring, sharing police officers."
Besides dealing with these political and social challenges, the Kosovars also face daunting health challenges. The American and British forces that came to end the violence in Kosova used depleted uranium (DU) weapons in the form of tank shells or airdropped cannon shells. During the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia (in particular, against Serbian tanks and other armored vehicles), the Americans fired 31,000 DU rounds. They landed on 112 sites in Kosova, mainly in the south, and on ten sites in southern Serbia in the Presevo Valley area. No other NATO country fired DU rounds during the campaign.
NATO tanks did not fire tank shells because they entered Kosova only as part of a peacekeeping force once the air campaign was over.
Pekka Haavisto, the leader of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) team that checked sites for radiation left over from the NATO attacks, said, "It was a little bit disturbing, an uncomfortable feeling that people were just living their normal lives in the middle of all this mess after the war."
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