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The
Arabs used to have a saying about the British, the grim truth
of which Albanians would now do well to heed in their dealings
with the West in general: "It is better to be an enemy of
the British than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might
try to buy you; but if you are their friend, they will most definitely
sell you." After only a few weeks of television pictures
showing Macedonian soldiers lobbing mortars into a hill, Western
policy has swung gracefully though 180 degrees. Two years ago,
the Albanians were the West’s greatest friends in the Balkans;
now they have been dumped.
While
the Albanian insurgency in Western Macedonia and Southern Serbia
is an exact carbon copy of that waged in Kosovo from January 1998
onwards, the West’s reaction is the very mirror image of what
it was before. Whereas in 1998 and 1999, the Albanian rebels were
depicted as innocent victims, fighters from the same army are
now "extremists" who must be isolated and crushed. Although
the Albanians in Macedonia and Serbia presumably have the same
right to autonomy from their Slav Christian overlords as their
neighbours in Kosovo, the thousands of Albanians who have fled
the fighting in Tetovo recently are ignored and dropped down the
memory hole: unlike the refugees in 1998, they no longer fit Nato’s
script. There has not been a swifter renversement des alliances
since 1984, when Oceania suddenly announced that that it
was not after all at war with Eurasia but with Eastasia instead.
Although
in gestation for some months, the change in policy was formally
announced by the Secretary-General of Nato in Washington on 8th
March. Lord Robertson said, "These ethnic Albanian armed
groups – and others – know that their time is coming to an end."
He meant that any aspirations Albanians entertained for Kosovar
independence were to be crushed. Nato has announced the opening
of its "Yugoslavia office" in the Kosovo capital Pristina,
not Belgrade, in order to underline its commitment to keeping
Kosovo within Yugoslavia, while the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia – ever Nato’s faithful poodle – has
announced investigations into crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation
Army against Serbs. CNN has even changed its maps of the region
to show Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia. On Tuesday, the
EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Javier
Solana, used language worthy of Milosevic when he called the insurgents
"terrorists" who had to be isolated and with whom it
would be "a big mistake" to negotiate. This is precisely
the opposite of what he and the rest of the international community
was telling Serbia to do in 1998 and early 1999.
In
a truly hallucinatory statement, George Robertson added that the
Yugoslav army, whose re-entry into the Albanian-populated buffer
zone around Kosovo Nato had just authorised, would show "moderation
and sensitivity". I must have blinked in the nanosecond during
which the Yugoslav army switched from being a band of genocidal
Nazis to a group of sensitive and moderate peacekeepers. This
transformation is all the more impressive since its Chief of Staff,
General Nebojsa Pavkovic, is the same man who commanded the army
during the so-called "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo in
1999. The language of the new government in Belgrade towards Albanian
insurgents is also the same as that of its predecessor: the new
Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, has categorically ruled
out any peace negotiations with "Albanian terrorists,"
while one of his defence ministers, General Momcilo Perisic –
a veteran from the Bosnian war who attacks Milosevic for conceding
too much to the West – has threatened to deal with the Albanian
insurgency in Southern Serbia "in a matter of hours."
Nato’s
pretence that its opposite approach to Macedonia is justified
because that country is a democracy, whereas Serbia under Milosevic
was not, is little more than a sick joke. In nearly a decade of
election observing, I have never witnessed such grotesque election
fraud as in Macedonia. The present Macedonian president, Boris
Trajkovski, was brought to power last November by unbelievable
levels of cheating, especially in the Albanian populated Western
part of the country. If the Albanians there really wanted independence,
why did they not vote for the Albanian nationalist candidate last
November? Instead, the real reason for our new anti-Albanian policy
is that the West has succeeded in installing a compliant regime
in Belgrade.
With
their usual nose for the way the wind is blowing, our media have
swung in effortlessly behind the new party line. The same pleureuses
in the Financial Times who sobbed at the suffering of Albanians
in 1998 and 1999 now warn of "the dangers of Albanian nationalism;
in the pro-bombing and anti-racist Guardian, we read that
"a Bulgarian sociologist" has shown that "Albanians"
demonstrate "impulsiveness, lack of objectivity and limited
concern for the welfare of others"; for the Sunday Times,
the Kosovo Liberation Army is no longer a valiant group of
amateur freedom-fighters but instead a brutal band of drug-runners,
pimps and racketeers, funded by a Mafioso diaspora bent on creating
a Greater Albania; The Observer now informs us that Tetovo
University in Western Macedonia, for years the very emblem of
the Albanians’ struggle for cultural rights, is "a centre
for young Albanian radicals." Among all this, the silence
is deafening from those historians who could always be relied
upon in the past to produce books showing the ancient historical
justification for the rights of Balkan Muslims to statehood. Is
Tetovo: A Short History about to roll off the press? I
doubt it.
As
ever when trying to make sense of these confusing events, the
right question is: cui bono? The West has certain geo-strategic
goals in the Balkans, including the desire to build an oil pipeline
to carry Caspian oil from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, through
Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania and bypassing the Bosphorus. General
Jackson, the former Kfor commander, has openly stated that, "We
will be here in Macedonia for a long time, guaranteeing the security
of energy corridors."
Divide
et impera has always been a handy rule of thumb in such situations,
while a little provocation which invites a response is one of
the oldest tricks in the book. The more chaos there is in the
Balkans, the more our compliant media demand intervention. More
troops for Macedonia means fewer in Kosovo. Who can fill the gap?
Now that Belgrade is back in the Western fold, there is no reason
why the Serbs should not be part of the new "regional security
structures" for which Prime Minister Djindjic called recently
in Berlin, and which are in any case a key part of the EU’s plans
for a Balkan "Stability Pact" The end-game, in other
words, should be obvious: Yugoslav troops will be back in Kosovo
quicker than you can say George Robertson and the new euro-Serbia
will become the West’s favourite Ordnungsmacht in the Balkans
– at least until the next turn in Nato’s wheel of fortune, that
is.
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