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World Policy Journal
Volume XV, No 3, Fall 1998
An Independent Kosovo: Waiting for Another Navarino?
By Nicholas X. Rizopoulos
One of the enduring paradoxes of contemporary American history, and of a nation perpetually glorifying its own revolutionary war against Great Britain, is Washington’s chronic reluctance to come to terms with the legitimacy of any number of independence movements that have come to life, in Europe and elsewhere, during the past decade—some (though by no means all) driven by the Soviet Union’s dramatic disintegration.
To be sure, normal prudential considerations, having to do with the anarchic nature of the international system, suggest that there is almost always something to be said against the breakup of long-recognized political entities or the redrawing of national boundaries: all the more so when such breakups threaten a whole region’s stability, result in a massive, painful, and invariably unfair displacement of local peoples, or are the by-products of quixotic and unreasonable demands by a militant ethnic (or religious) minority more power-hungry than genuinely motivated by considerations of security or social justice.
Still, such is not always the case. Even putting aside situations where states once independent, then occupied (and enslaved) by a foreign power, properly regain their former status (if only with the delayed approbation of an international community finally confronted with a fait accompli), there have been other cases—the still unresolved struggle in Chechnya comes immediately to mind—where calls for independence were justified from the beginning, and for any number of compelling reasons: the old Wilsonian principle of national self-determination being only one.
Be that as it may, the horror-filled recent history of the former Yugoslavia, an artificial and rickety sovereign edifice even in its earlier incarnation as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, serves to underline one inescapable truth of international relations: there are times, when, after years of discrimination, an unquestionably oppressed ethnic group, fortuitously constituting an overwhelming demographic majority in a given area, becomes convinced of the utter futility of trying to extract any meaningful concessions from its overlords by peaceful means. At that point, some form of “balkanization” (dreaded word!) may perforce become unavoidable. Nowhere is this more true today than in Kosovo.
Who Is to Blame?
As of the time of this writing, the escalating Kosovo crisis—with daily reports of full-scale guerrilla warfare, massive Serbian counterattacks, general mayhem visited upon unarmed civilians, and bloodcurdling atrocities committed both by Serbian security forces and the (by now perhaps 30,000-strong) Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—appears to have reached the stage where “reasonable” compromise solutions that might have worked even as recently as six months ago are no longer feasible. In apportioning blame for a war that need not have happened it is easy enough to point a finger at Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and his crazed, superpatriotic allies in Belgrade and Pristina; or at the (still largely pseudonymous) leaders of the KLA who intentionally abandoned the pacifist, Gandhi-like stance previously followed by Ibrahim Rugova’s “parallel government” in favor of full-scale military rebellion and terrorist tactics. That said, the international community—the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, and the United States—is itself largely responsible for much of the current mess, having cried wolf for seven long years about a “Third Balkan War” originating in Kosovo, while doing very little to stop the Kosovar tinderbox from exploding.
Far too late in the day, the international community calls for Milosevic to return Kosovo to its erstwhile autonomous-province status within Serbia; or to grant it constituent-republic status (à la Montenegro) within the rump Yugoslav federation—though without the right of secession. Such bien pensant “solutions” are by now doomed to failure. This is so not so much because Belgrade wants to hold onto its monopolistic control and exploitation of Kosovo’s massive mineral wealth (lead, zinc, and nickel reserves, valued in the billions of dollars); not even because international guarantees for the preservation and protection of Serbian “holy places” (monasteries, historical monuments, and the like), and of the civil rights of the Serbian minority choosing to remain in Kosovo, might be difficult to come by; but primarily because the very large majority of Albanian Kosovars have by now resoundingly opted for full independence—by violent means, if need be, and irrespective of the unavoidably painful short-term costs.
One of the “less absolute outcomes” (in the words of former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann) envisaged at times in certain Serbian nationalist circles would involve the partitioning of Kosovo: the Serbs would get “all the cultural and mineral wealth...the Albanians would get most of the territory.... The Serbs would get land containing some of the medieval monasteries, while the others would be put under international protection.” 1 But partition is itself a “compromise” solution unacceptable to most Kosovars, who rightly fear that it would simply lead to the entire territory’s division and absorption by Serbia and Albania.
The “Untoward Event”
We are, in fact, facing today a situation in Kosovo eerily reminiscent of the series of events surrounding the Greek War of Independence against the Turks, after 400 years of Ottoman rule, which unfolded in the decade of the 1820s. Then, too, the international community—meaning the conservative, post-Congress of Vienna “Concert of Europe” dominated by Prince Metternich, Viscount Castlereagh, and Tsar Alexander I, obsessed with issues of “legitimacy” and fearful of encouraging “anarchy”—doggedly supported the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the Concert initially condemned the Greek uprising of 1821, and dismissed out of hand all appeals for the establishment of an independent Greek state providentially rid of what a subsequent British prime minister, W. E. Gladstone, would later in the century famously deride as the “bloody tyranny of the Turks.” This, despite the highly publicized efforts of many eminent Western Philhellenes—most notably, of course, Lord Byron. Back in the United States, where the Greek cause elicited a good deal of public support on humanitarian grounds, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams counseled his own countrymen against wishy-washy sentimentalities and a misplaced crusader spirit in his celebrated July Fourth Address of 1821, which included the line, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy....”
Still, against all odds, the Greek uprising continued; and in due course, the European Great Powers, shocked by the awful bloodletting, agreed that the Sultan should be encouraged to desist from wiping out his disloyal Christian subjects—through near-genocidal military measures—and instead put an end to hostilities by offering some Greeks (those living in what today forms only the southernmost part of the Greece tourists know) a modicum of autonomy, though still under Ottoman suzerainty. But such halfway measures proved unacceptable both to the by now radicalized Greek rebels, who (whatever their violent disagreements among themselves or with their foreign supporters) aimed to throw off the Turkish yoke in toto, and to the Sublime Porte, whose prestige was very much on the line. Thus, the fighting went on, with appalling atrocities committed by both sides: most egregiously by the Sultan’s Egyptian troops, under the notoriously ruthless Ibrahim Pasha, who slowly devastated the Morea, the modern-day Peloponnesus.
Belatedly, the Concert (for which now read: Britain, France, and Russia—the Great Powers most involved in Ottoman affairs, while at the same time remaining suspicious of each other’s ambitions in the Levant) decided to send a substantial naval force to Greek waters in the hope of intimidating both Greeks and Turks into accepting a “reasonable” compromise. And then, suddenly, on October 20, 1827—in the Duke of Wellington’s memorable phrase—the “untoward event” occurred: the Battle of Navarino, near ancient Pylos, in the course of which the combined allied fleet, under Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, stupidly provoked by the Turko–Egyptians, proceeded to obliterate the latter in what incidentally proved to be the last great naval battle of the age of sail.
Not surprisingly, Navarino gave courage to the Greeks and to their supporters abroad. More important, it forced the Concert’s hand: the unthinkable, i.e., the partial dismemberment of the Sultan’s European possessions, became a marginally acceptable proposition. So long, that is, as it was “supervised” by the Big Three, who now emerged as the guarantors of certain European norms of international behavior—to be enforced even in the “barbarous” Balkans; and so long as neither London nor Paris nor St. Petersburg gained an unfair advantage over each other in the Near East. Three years after Navarino, following further Ottoman military reverses, this time at the hands of a Russian army threatening Constantinople itself, the (to be sure, initially tiny) modern Greek state was officially born, and duly recognized, by the international community, including the Sultan’s government. 2
The Past Is Prologue
At present, we find NATO, in partnership with the European Union and the United States, threatening Milosevic and the KLA, but especially Belgrade, with punitive strikes should the warring parties refuse to “come to their senses,” cease hostilities, and negotiate a return to the status quo ante 1989. Yet neither Milosevic, whose very credibility (and indeed political survival at home) is at stake, nor the KLA, now receiving ever-larger amounts of military and financial aid from abroad, is apt to yield to Western entreaties. The more likely scenario, instead, is an increase in Serbian scorched-earth policies, duly publicized in the West, forcing NATO’s hand (despite Russian objections). An ideal setup, that is, for a modern-day Navarino: isolated NATO air strikes, followed by Belgrade’s panicky overreaction, followed by a humiliating Serb retreat in the face of overwhelming NATO firepower, leading, in due course, to the international community’s acceptance of Kosovar independence.
True enough, the many Cassandras who, for years now, have been predicting a Third Balkan War—involving (we are told) Bosnia, Serbia–Montenegro, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, and even Turkey, in various lethal combinations—should the Serbs and Kosovars “push matters too far,” continue to insist that, whatever the merits of Kosovar discontent, an independent Kosovo is to be avoided at all costs: the “dismemberment” of Serbia would, it is argued, unleash forces that would “destabilize” the entire Balkan peninsula. Translation: we would witness the emergence of a “Greater Albania”—presumably composed of Albania proper, Kosovo, and such parts of Macedonia as are currently populated by equally truculent ethnic Albanians, angry with the Skopje regime—ipso facto threatening in some unspecified way all of its non-Muslim neighbors and ready to set off one of those “civilizational wars” predicted by Prof. Samuel Huntington.
Yet there are few, if any, realistic grounds for such nightmares. (Even the chances of uncontrollable Albanian refugee flows occurring—currently a matter of concern in both Montenegro and Greece—would no doubt diminish with Kosovar independence.) Leaving aside the improbability of a Greater Albania actually coming to life any time soon, there are, for starters, perfectly good ways for the international community to guarantee Macedonia’s present borders (not least by substantially strengthening the U.N./U.S. peacekeeping contingent already there): the quid pro quo being to oblige the Skopje government to deal more intelligently and responsibly with the demands of its own substantial Albanian minority.
So the question then becomes: who exactly are these putative hordes of concerned citizens—leaving aside the small pockets of perennially hysterical Serb, Bulgarian, and Greek religious zealots, or out-and-out racists—who, we are meant to believe, shake in their boots at the mere thought of a Tirana–Pristina marriage of convenience perhaps occurring down the road?
Let us be realistic: Kosovo’s road to independence should be encouraged and assisted, rather than obstructed, by Western policymakers. 3 This road, moreover, would be made smoother if Washington and Brussels, harking back to the steps taken by Greece’s three Protecting Powers in 1830, were to prescribe, and guarantee the observance of, certain minimal norms of acceptable international behavior—based on what is nowadays referred to in Europe as the common rule of law—by all of the parties directly affected by the inevitable emergence of an independent Kosovo.
Endnotes
Note 1: Warren Zimmermann, “The Demons of Kosovo,” The National Interest, no. 52, (spring 1998), p. 11. Back.
Note 2: The new Greek State “embracing the Peloponnesus, southern Roumeli and a number of islands near to the mainland...contain[ed] fewer than a third of the Greek inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire at the time of the outbreak of the war [of independence].” Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 45. Back.
Note 3: Morton Abramowitz (until recently the president of the Carnegie Endowment, with whose views on the Bosnian war I often agreed), as recently as June 15, 1998, argued (in Newsweek) that Kosovo should “remain a part of Serbia.” Back.