Kosova: independence not ethnic cleansing
25 March 2004

In 1999, the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic began a murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Albanian majority in Kosova, in an effort to crush Albanian demands for independence from Serbia. The NATO imperialist powers exploited the crisis to launch a war against Serbia and occupy Kosova. In the aftermath, two-thirds of Kosova's Serb minority fled, leaving 100,000 Serbs surrounded by about 1.8 million hostile Kosovan Albanians.

The events of the few weeks have demonstrated that revolutionary socialists were right to support the right of the Kosovan Albanians to self-determination. They were also right to oppose an imperialist intervention that has done nothing to advance this right, despite the "humanitarian" gloss placed on it by British and US politicians.

On 17 March, ethnic Albanians rioted in the divided town of Metrovica after the drowning of three Albanian children apparently chased by Serbs into a nearby river. As the violence spread to other areas, including the Kosovan capital, Pristina, NATO announced that it would send reinforcements to "keep the peace" and separate Serbs from Albanians.

An estimated 31 people have been killed and hundreds injured in the tit-for-tat incidents that followed. In the Serbian capital Belgrade, nationalist mobs clashed with riot police and torched a 17th century mosque - the only place of worship for Muslims in the city. Meanwhile, Albanians in Kosova burned down Serb homes and 15 churches, including a 14th century Serbian monastery.

That sections of the Kosovan Albanians are conducting what amounts to a pogrom against the Serb minority is something that socialists should condemn. Serbian forces today no longer control the territory, are not killing Albanian civilians or suppressing democratic freedoms, and are not enlisting the support of Serb civilians to do so. However, we should also recognise that these events are themselves the product of Albanian frustration at the denial of their national rights - not by the Serb minority, but by the NATO imperialists.

Kosova remains technically a part of Serbia, albeit governed by a United Nations interim administration pending a decision on its final status. Despite election results in 2002 that returned a large majority for pro-independence candidates, independence for Kosova does not feature on the agendas of the NATO imperialists, who have wrestled with various formulas that would allow its return to Serbia with some form of negotiated autonomy.

Recent elections in Serbia produced a victory for extreme nationalists determined to keep Kosova part of Serbia, but without enough seats to form a government. The more moderately nationalist government of Vojislav Kostunica, supported by members of Milosevic's former ruling party, came to power calling instead for the ethnic partition of Kosova. This has prompted Albanian hardliners from the KLA, the former guerrilla force that fought Milosevic's regime, to talk of forming military units in response.

This is what lies behind the recent violence on both sides. The Serb nationalists (both those in government and outside) hope to exploit the suffering of their co-nationals to press their case for the restoration of Serbian authority, at the very least in the half-Serbian town of Metrovica and the northernmost part of Kosova, where most of its Serb minority are concentrated. The calculation of some Albanian nationalists is evidently that the more Serbs that are forced out of the rest of the country, the more land will be left over for them when NATO and Serbia negotiate a carve-up.

This is a dangerous and bloody dead-end for Albanian national rights in Kosova. The partition of the territory - regardless of who is given the greatest share - will not lead to national self-determination for the Albanian majority, but to ever-increased dependence on the imperialist powers, who will pose as the "protectors" of whichever national group is being targeted for violence, and as the guardians of "peace and stability" in the Balkans.

In particular, the denial of Serb rights in Kosova - to remain peacefully in the country, to use their own language and maintain their own cultural institutions - can only have the same effect for the Albanians as the previous denial of Albanian rights by the Serbs had for Serbia. The Albanian majority will be able to assert its own national rights only to the extent to which it denies outside powers the pretext to interfere with them, by extending the same rights to Serbian and other non-Albanian minorities.

Even an undivided and "independent" Kosova under Western "protection" will remain an unstable and impoverished statelet, in which the frustration of the national rights of all will find occasional outlets in the form of senseless internecine blood-letting. Under Lord Paddy Ashdown's overlordship in neighbouring Bosnia, the city of Mostar remains divided between Croats and Muslims, Muslim refugees are unable to return to their former homes in the Serbian region ("Republike Srpska"), and the economy has plummeted.

The real enemies of all the peoples in the Balkans are the Western multinationals and the armies that serve to protect their interests in the name of "humanitarian" concerns, and who encourage national hatreds by playing off one small nation against another.

Ultimately, the only way to assure the national rights of all of the Balkan peoples will be through a federation of workers' states. The first step in this direction will be a resolute struggle to end imperialist intervention in the region. While the nationalists of various stripes will use this crisis to advance their plans for partition and ethnic conflict, and the liberal imperialists will use it to demonstrate the increased need for their "peace-keeping", we should use it to renew our demand for imperialism to withdraw from the Balkans.

Those of us in Britain can start by demanding the withdrawal of British troops from Kosova and Bosnia, and by supporting Albanian national self-determination.

Now read: The break up of Yugoslavia