The drab railway settlement of Kosovo Polje outside the Kosovo capital, Pristina, has long been a totemic place in Serbian national myth, ancient and modern. It was on the heath outside the village that the Serbs fell to the Turks in 1389. On the same spot, 600 years later, Slobodan Milosevic launched his campaign to take over Yugoslavia.
In June 1989 he delivered a tub-thumping nationalist message to a million Serbs gathered on the heath. He went on to establish an anti-Albanian police state in Kosovo, launch the wars of the 1990s and end up in a prison cell by the North Sea.
Now there are virtually no Serbs left in Kosovo Polje. The last ones left last week, among the 3 600 Serbs driven out of enclaves scattered across Kosovo by young Albanian toughs who sought to create facts on the ground. Torching Serbian homes, schools and churches, they sought to herd the Serbian minority towards the north and Serbia proper.
The three days of riots that started in the divided northern town of Mitrovica and left 28 dead, hundreds injured and thousands homeless were a disaster for Nato and for the United Nations administration of the majority Albanian province.
Five years after 60 000 Nato troops poured into Kosovo, expelling the Milosevic regime and returning the Albanians to their homes, the international mission in Kosovo has hit a crunch point, its credibility sapped, denounced for complacency by both Serbs and Albanians.
Albanians hailed the troops as saviours in 1999. Now down to a third of their initial strength, last week they were attacked by Albanians who now see them not as protectors, but as obstacles to independence.
Last week’s violence and the political responses to it highlight the larger dilemmas over Kosovo’s future. While diplomats and commentators complain that the international civil servants running the ”international protectorate” have been too slow to define Kosovo’s ”final status”, thus feeding the Albanian outburst, others, including the new Nato chief, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, contend that the violence shows that the Albanians are not yet fit to govern themselves.
The Serbs lost Kosovo in 1999. That was Milosevic’s legacy. Short of a bloodbath, they will not get it back. Besides, the dwindling Kosovo Serb community is ageing, while the 1,8-million Kosovo Albanians are the youngest and fastest-growing population in Europe.
The new nationalist government in Belgrade under Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica knows that Kosovo is lost, despite the daily nationalist rhetoric aimed at domestic consumption. In order to minimise that loss, it is advocating ethnic partition to retain a slice of northern Kosovo abutting Serbia including the town of Mitrovica.
Despite the mouthings of outrage in Belgrade, the Serbian elite is not so dismayed to see Kosovo Serbs driven out of their villages. It thinks this will reinforce the case for partition. Albanians, too, may ultimately back a partition that maximises their territory and entrenches an independent Kosovo. With a few exceptions, they want Kosovo ethnically pure.
In the middle stands the Nato-led international administration that for five years has been pushing a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Kosovo that neither side wants. Serbia frustrates that effort by maintaining ”parallel structures” that defeat integration — running health care, schooling, courts and police structures from Belgrade for the Kosovo Serbs.
The Albanians, meanwhile, exploit every opportunity to emphasise Albanian ascendancy. The foyer of the new Kosovo Assembly, for example, was recently decorated with three large Albanian nationalist murals. Serb representatives predictably responded with a boycott.
In December, the UN governors issued a wish list of eight ”standards” that the Albanians have to meet before they can negotiate Kosovo’s ultimate status. The disciplines include observance of human and minority rights, rule of law, democratic institutions and so on. Last week’s events showed how far off the Albanians are from meeting them.
The Serb-Albanian conflict differs from the other wars that tore Yugoslavia apart. The others, involving Serbs, Croats and Bosnians — all southern Slavs — were between people very similar to one another, living together, inter-marrying, attending the same schools, speaking variants of the same language, and reading the same papers.
The Serbs and Albanians are ethnically distinct, barely communicate, live in separate communities, speak different languages. They don’t want to live together. They just covet the same territory.
But if both sides ultimately agree to some form of partition and population exchange, such an outcome would be a defeat for more than 10 years of international policy-making in the Balkans.
Such a ”solution” must not be seen in isolation, given the intricate inter-relationships that characterise former Yugoslavia. A Kosovo partition could trigger a chain reaction. It would set back the reintegration programmes in Bosnia, encourage Serb and Croat separatists there, perhaps embolden the Croatian government to resist international pressure for the return of Serb refugees, and reward Albanian hardliners who would then be expected to set their sights on the large Albanian minority in neighbouring Macedonia.
That, in turn, would open up prospects for ”Greater Albania” linking Kosovo, western Macedonia, and Albania proper, when Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia programmes have been dispelled.
In short, a messy disaster for nation-building projects everywhere. Nato has acted to stamp out the violence. But nothing is solved. Kosovo needs a historic compromise. — Â