September 23-29, 2000
Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's strongman, is hoping that democracy will fail to take root in Kosovo. So far, that grim hope is being fulfilled.
Which place will become a decent democracy first—Kosovo or Serbia proper? The answer will greatly affect the outcome of the unresolved battle between the Serbs, who hope the breakaway province will remain within their orbit, at least notionally, and Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian leaders, who demand independence.
If Kosovo looks incapable of becoming a decent, law-governed state, even under western tutelage, its leaders' case for a final break with the Yugoslav federation will weaken—especially if Serbia itself becomes more democratic after this weekend's presidential and parliamentary poll in Serbia and, more contentiously, in Montenegro.
That may be one reason why Yugoslavia's masters have in recent weeks been trying harder than usual to destabilise Kosovo, and make life difficult for its international administrators, who are preparing to hold local elections—arguably the first above-board test of Kosovar opinion ever conducted—in late October.
So far, things have been going quite well for Yugoslavia's sitting president, Slobodan Milosevic, and other would-be wreckers. The foreigners running the province of Kosovo—the United Nations, NATO and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe—have been struggling against mounting odds to maintain a minimum of stability and open political debate.
Early this month, Mr Milosevic cunningly sent a delegation from his Socialist party to the southern province, to urge the 100,000 or so ethnic Serbs still living there to vote in the Yugoslav elections. That put Bernard Kouchner, the Frenchman who runs Kosovo for the UN, on the spot. Should he allow the Serbs to cast votes in what is still, under the terms of UN resolutions, their own country? Or should he risk seeming weak or unfair by insisting that, because of security problems, no residents of Kosovo could take part in Yugoslav ballot?
In the end, he came up with a fudge. While denouncing the Belgrade-run contest as hopelessly flawed, he agreed that local Serbs could take part—and promised that NATO would do its best to let them do so in secure conditions. But neither NATO nor the pro-Milosevic camp is saying anything in advance about how exactly they expect voting to be conducted in Kosovo's highly abnormal conditions. If Serbs are attacked by Albanians on the way to vote, that will be a blow to the credibility of NATO—as the supposed guarantor of safety for all Kosovo's residents—and a boost, paradoxically, for Serb nationalist propaganda.
With tension rising steadily, NATO troops this week raided a Serb enclave and arrested some former and serving members of the Yugoslav army who had infiltrated from Serbia on a mission to blow up targets in Kosovo. Meanwhile an ethnic-Albanian group trying to seize power in part of southern Serbia said it had lost three men in a gun-battle.
As well as coping with the Serbs, Kosovo's international protectors have picked up some worrying and contradictory signals from the province's Albanian politicians. Privately, at least, many of them confide that they would prefer Mr Milosevic to remain in power; that way Serbia will remain a pariah.
More specifically, some Kosovars fear that a post-Milosevic Serbia would compete with their province for a finite pool of international assistance. So, in a bid to allay these fears, the EU has assured them that the province will receive at least euro360m ($306m) next year, whatever happens in Belgrade.
But these Machiavellian arguments are not the ones that Kosovar politicians use in public. Instead, Hashim Thaci, the ex-commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas who now heads a political party, has been stressing that the Yugoslav election is illegitimate and that no voting for Belgrade institutions should be taking place on Kosovar soil. To some ears, this may sound like a thinly-veiled call to his supporters to stop Serbs, by force, from voting.
Nor is it only the Serbs who feel intimidated by the two parties which have sprung out of the ethnic-Albanian guerrilla movement. (In addition to Mr Thaci's PDK, there is a rival group, headed by his erstwhile comrade-in-arms, Ramush Haradinaj.)
Opinion polls suggest that the most popular politician among the Kosovars is still Ibrahim Rugova, the pacifist leader who led the province's shadow administration when it was still under direct Serb control. But the UN fears that supporters of Mr Rugova who do well in the forthcoming local elections could then be attacked by the ex-KLA parties.
If Kosovo's internal politics are shown to be dominated by the bullet rather than the ballet box, the western governments who keep troops and administrators in the province will find it harder to justify the outlay. Dr Kouchner has said that any party in Kosovo that uses force will be banned from taking part in the election. But it is hard to prove the links between acts of violence and their ultimate sponsors; nor is it likely that the UN and NATO could cope with the uproar which would ensue if an ex-KLA party was banned.
So what is the most the Frenchman can hope to do? His best chance lies in persuading the Kosovars to switch their attention away from Machiavellian games, and even from the long-term aim of independence, and concentrate instead on convincing the world that they are proper democrats. Otherwise Serbia may even beat them to it.
