TIME Magazine, April 03, 2001
The Next Nightmare
http://www.time.com/time/europe/eu/magazine/0,9868,103998,00.html
EUROPE
The experts warned 10 years ago that the Balkan conflict would spread into
Macedonia, and now it has. What should Europe and NATO do about it?
BY JAMES GRAFF
From the beginning of Yugoslavia's violent dissolution a decade ago, the feared
endpoint was war in Macedonia. Every knowing pundit said the conflict that first
grabbed the international community's attention in Slovenia in June 1991
would roll
inexorably eastward. In time, they said, it would run up against the uneasy
ethnic mix
in Macedonia, the Yugoslav republic cursed with a contested name and surrounded
by historically ill-willed neighbors. Match Macedonia with "powder keg" on an
Internet search engine and you'll get 1,340 matches; "tinderbox" yields 332.
Plenty of
less shopworn slogans were brought to bear by diplomats and human rights
monitors
who made the same plea: we've got to do something.
So the international community did something, but perhaps not enough. They
ladled
an alphabet soup of international bureaucracy onto the potential trouble spot,
beginning with "fyrom," the initials of the awkward circumlocution - Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - meant to assuage the Greeks' opposition to the
use of the very name Macedonia. Then there was unprofor, the United Nations
Protection Force - later unpredep, for U.N. Preventive Deployment - which put a
Nordic battalion and an American task force along Macedonia's northern and
northwestern borders from 1992 until 1999. There was the OSCE - the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - and its presciently named
Spillover Monitor Mission to Skopje. There were dozens of worthy initiatives to
bolster democracy, promote understanding, and damp down ethnic strife. But now
tank shells are flying again, and the real prospect of more widespread
killing looms.
So what came of all that effort to make Macedonia the star pupil of the troubled
western Balkans? Was the problem intractable? Or was the response inadequate?
There's no simple answer, especially now that the most recent conflict - between
Kosovo-backed Albanian insurgents and Macedonian forces around the northwestern
town of Tetovo - is smoldering rather than blazing. What is certain is that
nothing
highlights Macedonia's problems as starkly as armed conflict, which is why the
international community is scrambling to prove that whatever its grade on
conflict
prevention, it can do better in conflict management.
There are some encouraging signs, especially the near unanimity in
condemning the
use of force by ethnic Albanians in Macedonia. "This situation in Macedonia
could
spell strike three for the Albanians altogether," says Baton Haxhiu, editor
of Kosovo's
leading daily Koha Ditore. "Our reputation is being ruined. Our Western
friends are
turning into enemies." Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Stockholm to
meet with
leaders of the 15 E.U. countries, said - with an eye to his own problems in
Chechnya - "these aren't rebels, but terrorists."
Putin is not alone in thinking the Americans have given Albanian terrorists
too much
succor. But across the international community there was general agreement
on the
best holding pattern: keep arms and men from Kosovo out of Macedonia, back the
Macedonian government in its fight against the insurgents, and hope the
government
wins.
NATO's Secretary-General George Robertson last week agreed with E.U. foreign
ministers on a clean division of labor: NATO's prime focus is to patrol the
border
between Kosovo and Macedonia and offer intelligence and other support to
Macedonian armed forces. The E.U., meanwhile, is concentrated on lowering the
political temperature in Macedonia itself. "We can't fall into the trap of
over-reacting
and following the rebels' tracks into a broadening of the conflict," said
Wolfgang
Petritsch, the former E.U. negotiator on Kosovo and now the High
Commissioner for
Bosnia-Herzegovina. "We'll see soon enough what effect cutting off the
border will
have."
It won't be easy. The mountainous, heavily forested terrain is tailor-made for
insurgency, and some of the trails and networks the Kosovo Liberation Army
(k.l.a.)
used to transport arms into Kosovo in the late 1990s can be followed the
other way.
Robertson issued a call for more troops to strengthen the stretched
resources of the
42,000 kfor troops currently in Kosovo, but none of the countries deployed,
least of all
the United States, expressed any enthusiasm about beefing up their presence
there.
NATO officials say they're "not talking about thousands of troops," and that
they're
confident someone will pony up; in the meantime, patrols along the border have
already been increased. The U.S. has the additional political task in Kosovo of
convincing Albanian leaders, including former k.l.a. chief Hashim Thaci, to
discourage their followers from heading south. "The discrimination that the
ethnic
Albanians face in Macedonia cannot match up to what the Serbs have had to endure
here in Kosovo," said a senior American official. "The strategy of extremism
can no
longer be replicated."
In Macedonia the lead actor for now is the European Union. The full panoply
of the
E.U.'s unwieldy foreign policy apparatus was funneled into Skopje last week:
High
Representative Javier Solana, Commissioner Chris Patten, Swedish Foreign
Minister
Anna Lindh and Bodo Hombach, special coordiNATOr of the Stability Pact. All left
behind strong messages of support for the Macedonian government, while
urging it to
speed up its desultory efforts to meet longstanding Albanian demands for better
political and economic standing in the country.
Obviously that crucial message is more easily delivered when bullets aren't
flying.
When Macedonia was the sole ex-Yugoslav Republic untouched by conflict, no one
wanted to rock the boat, despite ample warnings that relations between the
majority
Slavs and the 23% Albanian minority were volatile. "It was not the
international will
to hold the Macedonian government strictly to account on human rights," says
Mark
Thompson, Balkans program director for the International Crisis Group. Observes
Henryk Sokalski, the Polish U.N. special representative who headed unpredep from
1995 to 1998: "We got a lot of visits and many great words complimenting
Macedonia. But it was more verbal support than anything else."
"Conflict prevention isn't sexy," sighs one official of the OSCE. "If it's
successful,
nothing happens." Ibrahim Mehmeti, director of media projects for the
non-governmental Search for Common Ground, has worked the last seven years to
promote multi-ethnic journalism in Macedonia. "If we're successful only as
long as
we don't have conflict then we've failed, along with the OSCE, the U.N. and
everybody else," he says. But he's convinced that the media in Macedonia
would be
even more inflammatory than it is now if not for efforts like his. "The
tension is
growing, unfortunately. But we think the citizens on both sides are more
mature than
the politicians." Perhaps. But unless the weapons fall silent, maturity will
not be
enough.
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