Reality and Reconciliation: Urgently Needed in Kosovo

John Zavales

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to witness real, indisputable evil.  On a visit to Rwanda, my hosts brought me to a site unlike anything found outside that tragic country.  I had been to Auschwitz, where the deeds of half a century ago are commemorated by museum displays and a somber atmosphere, but I was unprepared for what I now saw.  The new Rwandan government decided that the most effective way to remember the million people who perished in the 1994 genocide was to leave a number of massacre sites throughout the country in the state in which they were discovered. 

The site I visited had been a college, where tens of thousands of Tutsis were lured with the false promise of protection, in order to efficiently concentrate them for mass murder.  Now, three years later, several thousand bodies remained in the rooms in which they had died, coated with a preservative that turned them into desiccated mummies.  Room after room was filled with men, women, and children, often in the poses in which they had died, flinching from a bullet or raising their arms against a machete.  The stench of chemicals and decay was almost unbearable.  Tens of thousands more lay buried in nearby mass graves, identifiable only by gently sloping mounds and tiny signs marking the number of victims.            

I’ve written frequently about Kosovo, and until recently saw no reason to include a discussion of Rwanda.  What changed my mind was a comment I read, in the aftermath of the pogrom that occurred in March.  Following this well-orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing, designed to rid central Kosovo of all Serbs, a UN representative (who, I believe, was not quoted by name) observed that he had seen more forgiveness in Rwanda, one year after the genocide, than he now saw in Kosovo.  It’s easy to dismiss his remark as hyperbole, but unfortunately it contains a great deal of truth.

What, exactly, are the differences between these two places?  The most obvious is that in Rwanda, actual, unquestionable genocide occurred, an attempt to exterminate an entire ethnic group.  The Kosovo crisis was far more ambiguous.  What began as a guerilla campaign by the Kosovo Liberation Army targeting Serbian security forces (and civilians) escalated into widespread ethnic violence.  Hundreds of thousands of Albanians fled, or were forcibly driven, to neighboring countries.  There is no doubt that in some places Serbian troops and paramilitaries killed unarmed Albanian civilians, just as the KLA killed unarmed Serbs. 

In order to mobilize support for military intervention, Western political leaders deployed the word “genocide,” in a way that we now know to have been cavalier and misleading.  The number of Albanians allegedly murdered in the course of Milosevic’s campaign has steadily dropped, from the hundred thousand spoken of during the war, to ten thousand in its immediate aftermath, to a final estimate of perhaps a few thousand, including many killed by ground combat and NATO bombing.  Mass gravesites, claimed at the time to contain thousands of victims, were investigated and found to have been either exaggerated by orders of magnitude or entirely fictional.        

The second difference is that the international community intervened militarily in Kosovo, while doing nothing in Rwanda, where experts believe that a minimal use of force could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.  Frustrated friends of Africa know that a double standard applies to humanitarian intervention.  It is not hard to conclude that Kosovo, like Bosnia before it, merited international intervention because the threatened population was white.  Now, in 2004, Africa watchers fear that the crisis in western Sudan will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, with many words of outrage by the international community, but no forceful action against a regime whose crimes have far surpassed those of Milosevic.  Ironically, the “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo was justified by many supporters at the time as somehow making up for international inaction on Rwanda.     

What is most striking today is the different degree of reconciliation and forgiveness between these two places.  Colin Prentice, the director of a nongovernmental relief organization in New Zealand, put it this way: “The level of acceptance of the past in Rwanda, both among Hutus and Tutsis, is remarkable.  I don't think I saw anything like it in Kosovo, yet the killing in Rwanda was worse.”  Prentice quotes a Rwandan Tutsi, whose family was murdered in the genocide: "People can live together here if Hutus accept that the bad Government did this and if there is some attempt at restitution.  Then we can live in peace. If we are patient, we can tolerate this pain."  Now imagine, if you will, a Kosovo Albanian, either a politician or a man on the street, saying:  “We recognize that only a small number of Serbs were responsible for crimes against us.  We appreciate that the Serbian people ousted Milosevic in a democratic election.  Today’s Serbia is different, and we welcome the opportunity to live in peace with our neighbors of all ethnic groups.”  Need I say more?   

Despite the unrealistic optimism projected by UNMIK and many other observers (at least publicly; I suspect that in private they are more candid), there is an overwhelming inability on the part of the Kosovo Albanian community to forgive what was done to them, atrocities that while indefensible came nowhere close to those in Rwanda.  Five years after the war, characterizing the murder of Serb teenagers and 80-year old pensioners and the burning of medieval churches as “revenge” is wearing rather thin.  Clearly, the attitude that collective guilt should be levied against the entire Serbian people is not appropriate for those who aspire to be modern Europeans. 

This view has been fostered by the elected Kosovar political leadership, and abetted by their sympathizers in the U.S.  In the aftermath of the March pogrom, some editorialists had the audacity to blame the violence on Albanian impatience over having to wait for final status determination (i.e., independence).  I would like to see these same individuals blame the next Hamas bombing that kills Israeli civilians on frustrated Palestinian national aspirations.           

I’ve met a number of Kosovo Albanians, and found them to be very decent people.  So it pains me to say, that I believe no other ethnic community in the world has, in the aftermath of international intervention on its behalf, behaved as badly, with as much vindictiveness and unwarranted sense of entitlement.  Many commentators believe that a “winner take all” attitude prevails in Kosovo.  Such an attitude would be objectionable enough if the Kosovo Albanians had actually won on their own, but in fact they are only in a position to repress and attack others because the international community did the “winning” for them.  Every murder of a Serb or Roma civilian is attributable to the demand for the removal of all Serbian troops and police in 1999, and the failure by UNMIK and KFOR to maintain public security.       

The question of why the U.S. and its allies intervened in Kosovo continues to haunt us.  The stated rationale at the time was humanitarian, to prevent ethnic cleansing and other atrocities against civilians.  UN Security Council Resolution 1244, under which Kosovo remains a part of Serbia, is consistent with this rationale.  Unfortunately, to the Kosovo Albanian leadership, most of their population, and, depressingly, many in the foreign policy elite here in the U.S., the humanitarian goals of the intervention are inseparable from the national goal of an independent Kosovo.  This is why the Kosovar leadership is so dismissive of the standards before status argument.  Apparently they believe that the objective of the 1999 war was to give them their independence, and that Resolution 1244 was simply a fraud to hoodwink the Serbs and the Russians.

Far from being modern democrats ready to join the European Union, the Kosovar leaders are 19^th century nationalists, who believe they have found in the United States a Great Power patron.  They feel they are a chosen people who can do no wrong.  While Serbs are facing up to the guilt of Milosevic and Karadzic, there is no comparable process among Kosovo Albanians.  In the rare cases in which Albanians are charged with war crimes, it is for the murder of other Albanians, and never for killing Serbs or Roma.  To take the most egregious case, Agim Ceku, who should be in the Hague for crimes against Serb civilians in Croatia, still enjoys a position of prestige and leadership in Kosovo.  Because of this sense of national privilege, the Kosovar leadership sees no contradiction in demanding independence for Kosovo and maximum autonomy for Albanians in Macedonia, while rejecting cantonization for Kosovo Serbs or independence for Serbs in Bosnia.         

Unfortunately the international community has indulged this sense of impunity.  UNMIK, with strong support from the EU and the U.S., must begin instilling some sense of reality in the Kosovar leadership.  Rexhepi, Rugova, Thaci and their colleagues must understand that independence is not guaranteed, and is probably less likely today than in 1999.  They should prudently plan for how Kosovo might function as an autonomous province of Serbia, since that is a possible outcome.  They must be told, in no uncertain terms, that they have not made a more compelling case for independence than dozens of other ethnic groups in the world, and that rioting and burning churches does not make their position more convincing.  In fact, the Kurds, who number twenty million, have no nation of their own anywhere, and suffered much worse violence under Saddam Hussein, have a far stronger case—and the international community has discouraged their independence in the interest of regional stability. 

The truth is that the current Kosovar leadership has proven incapable of effectively running the province and providing basic services, much less of guaranteeing minority rights.  They have failed to rein in extremists, failed to create a tolerant society and barely even pay lip service to the notion of a multiethnic state.  For this performance, they expect to be rewarded with independence.  The incoming head of UNMIK must try to break through this wall of delusion.  Reconciliation will be impossible until Kosovo Albanians accept that the rules apply to them as well, and that the Serbs and other groups have been in Kosovo for centuries and intend to stay.  Here in the U.S., policymakers focused on Iraq, both supporters of that war looking for a useful model to follow and critics hoping to contrast how the two crises were managed, should be extremely wary of pointing to Kosovo as a success story in any meaningful sense of the word.    

John Zavales served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1991 to 2001.  During the 1999 Kosovo crisis he was based in Albania as a part of Operation Shining Hope, the relief operation in support of Kosovar refugees.  He later served as the OSD desk officer for a number of Balkan and Central European countries.