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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Interview Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A difference of destiny
By Gamal NkrumahIt is almost the end of the beginning for Yugoslavia. In terms of sheer political weight, intensity of nationalist feelings and persistence of negative prejudice, perhaps no Balkan political entity has had to carry a heavier burden of Western persecution than this one country. Small wonder, then, that the Serbian-led former Yugoslavia was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the only European country to join the consortium of former colonies from Asia and Africa. Today, NATO's assault only serves to reinforce the long-standing fears of an embattled community.
The images projected by the international media are horrifying. The Yugoslav capital Belgrade was reportedly enveloped in a fearsome toxic cloud of chemicals released when the Sremcica factory, together with its stock of missile fuel, was razed to the ground. The city's civilian population was advised to don gas masks, or failing that, cover their faces with wet towels. The authorities also announced that a special unit responsible for protecting the public against chemical, radioactive and biological hazards had been deployed.
Impact on Serb civilians has already been described as a "real humanitarian catastrophe" by Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic, speaking to CNN. At the same time, the bombardments have provoked the wrath of the targeted nation, and full-scale Serb reprisals against Kosovo's ethnic Albanians are underway. Towns controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), such as Orahovac and Suva Reka, have been singled out for the bloodiest retribution. British Defence Secretary George Robertson described the reprisals as "savage genocidal attacks". Meanwhile, refugees are streaming out of the province in ever increasing numbers. By Monday morning, the UNHCR estimated that as many as 500,000 people may have been made homeless since the air strikes began. What started as a "surgical intervention" has already turned into a human cataclysm.
However, for the Americans and their European allies, the greatest cause of concern is not the suffering of the Kosovars, but the possible spillover effect of their own actions, and the fear that the war might spread to embroil Yugoslavia's neighbours. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the ethnic Albanian refugees have, quite literally, nowhere to go. Albania, by far Europe's poorest country, is unable to support them, and few would want to go there anyway. It is barely two years since Albania itself was labouring under a state of emergency after waves of political unrest had threatened to drag the country into a bitter civil war. Macedonia, too, is understandably uneasy about the influx of Kosovar Albanians and the impact it might have on its own delicate ethnic balance, in which ethnic Albanians already number 750,000, or 23 per cent of the country's total population.
But even as NATO airstrikes against Serbian targets expand from "phase one", focusing on military installations and industrial plants, to "phase two", aimed directly at the armed forces themselves, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic shows no sign of buckling under, and has instead dug himself into his Belgrade bunker. Even that might not prove a safe haven for long, however. Last Friday Topcinder, a wooded area close to the Belgrade suburb of Dedinje where Milosevic has gone to ground, was insistently bombarded by NATO aircraft.
Yet things have not got off to a good start for the Western allies, who seem to have been hoping to be able to impose their will without committing any forces on the ground. The chances of this strategy working now seem increasingly remote. Will the US and its allies be able to extricate themselves with their honour intact? Or will they find themselves drawn ever deeper into the quagmire, without being able to offer any substantial relief to the populations they are supposed to be defending? NATO leaders have already conceded that Milosevic cannot be bombed to the negotiating table. Washington says it is making a principled stand in support of peace, human rights and democracy. America and its European allies also claim that they wish to uphold the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and are against the country's dismemberment. Yet they seem paradoxically intent on destroying the Yugoslav military machine, with all the consequences that will inevitably have. Last week NATO commander General Wesley Clark explained that the strategy of the airstrikes was to "grind away" at Milosevic's capacity to make war. The logical result of a sustained NATO blitz would be to equalise the terms of battle between the Kosovars who are fighting for their independence and the Serbs who are desperately trying to hold on to Kosovo. If the Kosovars then go on to win the war, Yugoslavia will certainly fall apart. The Hungarian minority concentrated in the autonomous province of Vojvodina in northern Serbia will probably decide to secede and join with Hungary, while Montenegro, the republic which along with Serbia constitutes the Yugoslav federation, might well opt for independence.
There are already signs that the latter scenario may be underway. Following the launch of the NATO strikes, Belgrade promptly severed diplomatic relations with the United States, Britain, France and Germany. However, despite strikes against a military airfield on the southern fringe of the Montenegrin capital Podgorica, the junior republic's government has defied Belgrade and refused to break off diplomatic links with NATO countries. "We are not in a state of war with anybody," said Montenegrin deputy premier Dragisa Burzan.
The emotional resonance which surrounds the history of the Balkans is matched by a systematic, and often misleading, myth-making. The name Yugoslavia, "Land of the Southern Slavs", is itself a misnomer. The former Yugoslavia was already the most ethnically and religiously diverse of the Balkan countries, and the successor federation has inherited the old nation's tradition of ethnic diversity. Serbs and Montenegrins account for some 66 per cent of the country's 10 million people, while a total of 26 ethnic minorities make up the remainder. Ethnic Albanians, for their part, constitute 16 per cent of the population. None of this makes the country particularly "Slavic". The ethnic Albanians, for instance, are not a Slavic people, and nor are the country's Turkish, Hungarian, Gypsy and Jewish minorities. Shorn of Kosovo and Montenegro, Serbia would simply be Serbia, and not the pretentious all-embracing Yugoslavia it aspired to embody in the past.
Yet even this reduction in the republic's ambitions would not necessarily resolve the problem of Kosovo. This disputed province is the Serbs' Jerusalem. The Serbian nation, together with the national church, were founded in 1198 in the provincial backwater of Pec, a small town nestled deep in Kosovo's mountainous heartland. Today, Albanians make up some 90 per cent of the province's population, but the Serbs do not see that as any reason to relinquish control. "The Americans don't want us to have a military or police presence in Kosovo. But no country can allow limited sovereignty on its own soil," Vladimir Nesic, the Yugoslav chargé d'affaires in Cairo, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
"Today it is Kosovo, tomorrow it might be Tibet," Nesic warned. "A multipolar world is a good world. A unipolar world run by the US will not be free and fair," he added. It is reasoning such as this which has led the Chinese, Indians and Russians to voice their concern over the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. "Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative," explained US President Bill Clinton last week. "Painful, but inevitable," said Italian Premier Massimo d'Alema. "An unavoidable step to prevent a humanitarian atrocity," concurred Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. Yet despite this apparent consensus, there are many in the international community who sympathise with Yugoslavia. Moscow in particular is outraged. "Russia is deeply upset by NATO's military action against sovereign Yugoslavia, which is nothing more than naked aggression," cried the furious Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
A German C-130 on its way to the Balkans battlefront overflies a road sign at the San Damiano NATO airbase, Italy (photo:AP)
None of this outrage, however, can offer much in the way of hope to those civilians and soldiers who are caught up in the fighting. The war threatens to be drawn out, ugly and very costly. Meanwhile, the Serbian economy is reeling from the adverse effects of long-standing international sanctions. The Balkans are no Russia, but the Russian and Balkan economies are tarred with the same brush, and it will be years before they are able to shake off the legacy of their command economies. Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia -- all Roman Catholic nations pursuing decidedly pro-Western policies -- have shown it is possible to succeed in tapping the capital markets of the West. However, the fine spreads they have won on development loans in the post-Cold War period are still denied the Muslim and Christian Orthodox states. For them, Western capital seems likely to remain out of bounds for the foreseeable future. By the same token, the benefits of EU membership may be just around the corner for the Balkan's Catholics, but Europe's doors seem set to remain firmly closed to both Muslims and Orthodox nations.
As far as Western Europeans are concerned, the otherness of the Balkans has never been in question. It is the only part of Europe that is home to significant historic Muslim minorities, and it is this Islamic influence which is commonly blamed for the region's underdevelopment -- an accusation which conveniently ignores the pivotal role of Islamic culture in the great flowering of mediaeval Spanish civilisation. History such as this neatly encapsulates why the language of otherness, of absolute difference, has always exercised such a powerfully attraction over the warring peoples of the Balkans. Yet today, this fascination simply plays into the hands of Washington.
In New York last week, the Security Council turned down a request from Bosnia for an urgent meeting to discuss its complaint that Yugoslav warplanes had violated its airspace. NATO headquarters in Brussels had earlier announced that two Yugoslav MiG-29s, Serbia's most sophisticated aircraft, were shot down over Bosnia by US fighter-jets. The UN Security Council also rejected by 12 votes to three a Russian resolution calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities.
It is a striking anomaly that today, for all the talk of a secular world, and just as we stand at the junction of two (Christian) millennia, international politics should seem to be as fiercely divided by religion as it was in the days of the crusaders. Yet how else to explain why Belgrade's closest allies are its co-religionists in Athens and Moscow -- notwithstanding the fact that Greece is a NATO member?
Of course, even in Yugoslavia, there are exceptions to this rule. By far the most important single figure in the indigenous development of a political alternative to Serbian ultra-nationalism is the young pro-Western Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic. At 36, Djukanovic, a former student leader and democracy activist, now nicknamed the "Blade" in tribute to his razor-sharp intelligence, is the antithesis of the middle-aged and mulish Milosevic.
"Milosevic is an autocrat and a man of the past," Djukanovic said recently. "Montenegro's place is in Europe, and we intend to push the rest of Yugoslavia in the same direction," he added.
With a mere 600,000 people, Montenegro is no match for Serbia, neither demographically, nor militarily. But Djukanovic has succeeded in privatising 90 per cent of the Montenegrin economy and has included representatives of several ethnic minorities -- including ethnic Albanians -- in his cabinet. He is now pressing ahead with his campaign to market Montenegro as the Monaco of the Balkans.
There is no "ethnic" reason for the Montenegrin "difference". Indeed, in ethnic terms, Montenegrins are practically indistinguishable from Serbs. They share a common language and a common religion, Orthodox Christianity. The only obvious difference between them is geographic -- they live on different sides of the Balkan Mountain ridge. While the Montenegrins inhabit the western side that slopes down towards the Adriatic Sea and Italy, the Serbs live on the eastern slopes and the plains that lie in their shadow. Without Montenegro, Yugoslavia would be landlocked.
Yet perhaps this accident of geography has moulded the two peoples in more ways than one. The Montenegrins like to see themselves as Western-oriented, open and politically moderate, while the Serbs are widely regarded as an inward-looking and hardy mountain people with a siege mentality, who all too easily see themselves as hemmed in by their traditional enemies -- the Western Europeans and their Catholic Slav allies on the one hand, and the Balkan's Muslims on the other.
Can the Serbs shake off the yoke which such traditional stereotypes foist upon them? If they are to do so, then Milosevic and his ilk must understand that even if the myth of Serbia's historic victimisation by the West contains a substantial truth, it cannot provide the foundation for a forward-looking politics. At the same time, it is the West's responsibility, given its present military preeminence, to allay traditional Serb suspicions. Only then is there some chance that the Serbian people can be brought to realise that ultra-nationalism is a symptom of -- not a cure for -- desperate economic and political problems. The West, for its part, has strong motives for trying to achieve this, for the alternative is the creation of yet another belligerently anti-Western nation that can act as a feeding ground for terrorist groups targeting Westerners and Western interests.
If a new Yugoslavia emerges from the ashes of war and ethnic conflict, a Yugoslavia that takes as its model Montenegro and chooses as its leader a man like Djukanovic, then the country may yet prosper. However, if the war leaves only a defeated Serbia which has retreated into anger and bitterness, a pariah nation which continues to foment trouble in the region, then it is likely to find itself ostracised and hounded into submission by the last surviving superpower. It is the political will of the Yugoslav people, and not the NATO airstrikes, that will ultimately seal the fate of their country.
