Three Ways to Handle the KLA
by Srdja Trifkovic
September 4, 2001

On the eve of the War in Kosovo, I wrote in the Times of London that NATO support of ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo would unleash a chain reaction whose first victim would be Macedonia, because "once KLA veterans acting as policemen start to patrol Kosovo, the rising expectations of Macedonia's Albanians will be impossible to contain."

"Nonsense," a U.S. State Department official snapped at a conference in Washington a few days later. "The problem in Kosovo is Milosevic. In Macedonia the Albanians don't need to make trouble because their rights are respected." The issue was that of "human rights," he said, not nationalism: the notion of Greater Albania was a Serb paranoid invention.

Two and a half years, one bombing, and $100 billion later we know the score. The same pattern of NATO blunders is continuing. To correct it, we need to recognize that no institutional arrangements short of ethnic partition will assuage Albanian separatism.

There is nothing remarkable, or inherently reprehensible, about such behavior: Premodern nations and tribes have been at it since time immemorial. The Albanians differ only in that they have perfected the art of using foreigners – sultans, kaisers, duces, führers, and most recently the Clinton administration – to get the job done for them. Indeed, the mess in the Balkans is likely to be Clinton's most enduring legacy.

The Bush administration now faces three alternatives. All of them are unpleasant, although not equally so.

Becoming a truly honest broker and acting robustly to disarm the KLA (or whatever label it chooses to use in Macedonia today, or Montenegro or Greece tomorrow) is a nonstarter. Truly disarming the KLA, not merely collecting an arbitrarily determined and suspiciously low number of easily replaceable weapons, would mean American casualties, leading to a hasty withdrawal of the U.S. contingent – with or without prior agreement with our European allies – and the loss of credibility that this administration would never allow. It knows that the only reason that ethnic Albanians still tolerate NATO's presence in Kosovo, now that it is no longer needed to defeat the Serbs, is that it has not seriously attempted to declaw the KLA.

The present course – pretending to restrain the KLA while effectively appeasing it – is the worst of all options. The deployment of 3,500 NATO troops, supposedly for 30 days so the KLA may hand in its weapons to them, is a stopgap measure divorced from any meaningful strategy. It will also bring an all-around loss of American credibility (with the Macedonians this has already happened) and no gain. Ethnic Albanians will continue to use Kosovo as their safe haven for hit-and-run attacks against Macedonians, with NATO either reduced to passive observers or forced into an open-ended mission creep, and with American diplomacy permanently stuck in a deadend not of this administration's making.

The third option, least odious by far, is to disengage. During last year's campaign, candidate Bush and his aides – notably Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and others – claimed that it was time to turn over the task of policing the Balkans to the Europeans. Since the United States has intervened needlessly and harmfully in the Balkans for the last decade, the task of sorting out the mess should be left to our NATO allies, if they are keen to stay. Bush should call Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder and give them the glad tidings: The hour of Europe has come. If your Eurocorps is to have any meaning, gentlemen, it is now – in the hills around Tetovo, on the road from Skopje to Kumanovo, and inside Kosovo – that its worth may be proven.

Perhaps the Europeans will have the sense to decline this gift. Ultimately the Albanians may even have to face their long-abused neighbors without foreign cover. That will present them with an unexpected problem, but its resolution is unworthy of the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier or Texas Ranger.

Srdja Trifkovic is the foreign affairs editor of Chronicles and Executive Director of the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies. He received his BA in 1977, at the University of Sussex; his BA (1987), from the University of Zagreb, and Ph.D. (1990), from the University of Southampton. He was a broadcaster, producer, and news sub-editor at BBC External Services, London, 1980-86, and then went to work for the Voice of America, and was also South-East Europe correspondent for the US News & World Report. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution & Peace, in Stanford, California, 1991-2.