Global Policy Forum

By Steven Erlanger

NATO is floundering in the Balkans, reaping the consequences of a refusal to deal seriously with the problems and aspirations of the Albanians it went to war to protect.

The alliance's failure to confront the armed, organized Albanians - who are fighting to drive out non-Albanians, enlarge Kosovo and make it independent - has allowed them to grow into a serious regional threat, with new fighting in Albanian-dominated areas of southern Serbia and now, Macedonia.

The West usually blamed Slobodan Milosevic for instability in the Balkans. But he is gone now, replaced by democrats friendly to the West. Yet his ouster has created new difficulties and uncertainties, and the borders of Kosovo are ringed with tension and gunfire, putting serious new pressure on the West's allies in Belgrade and Macedonia. U.S. troops have rushed to help defend fragile Macedonia, which would disintegrate in violence if the militants got significant support from the large minority of ethnic Albanians there.

But the desire of the Bush administration to reduce the U.S. military presence in the Balkans is well known, and combined with the reluctance of American commanders to take casualties, it has emboldened the militants, other Western officials say. Some already compare Macedonia to Kosovo in early 1998, when the Kosovo Liberation Army was organizing in the hills.

Other nationalisms are again resurgent.

With Montenegro also pressing to secede from Yugoslavia against Western wishes, and the Bosnian Croats insisting that the federal Bosnia-Herzegovina imposed by the 1995 Dayton accord is no longer valid, the West is scrambling to restore the stability in the Balkans it fought to establish.

"With Milosevic gone and the Serbs out of Kosovo, NATO has become the single guarantor of stability and security in the Balkans," a senior Western diplomat said. "But it is not clear that NATO wants to do the job. Confronting Albanian extremists could cost lives, which is the Pentagon's nightmare, and it could make NATO forces a target in Kosovo itself." The refusal to confront the extremists, he continued, "sends a clear signal to them to keep pushing for what they want."

Ognjen Pribicevic, director of the Center for Southeast European Studies in Belgrade, said: "The biggest problem is the unwillingness of NATO - and more particularly the United States - to use troops against the extremists. The feeling here is that these troops are thinking more about their own security and safety than about the safety and security of the people living there. And the big problem is that the Albanians know this."

Slobodan Samardzic, a senior adviser to President Vojislav Kostunica of Yugoslavia, has worked with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the idea of allowing the Yugoslav Army back, gradually, into the five-kilometer (three-mile) zone of separation in Serbian territory around Kosovo, intended originally to keep Yugoslav and NATO forces apart. The militants have found safe harbor in the zone.

"We want to cooperate with NATO, and anyway, we don't have another choice," Mr. Samardzic said. "But NATO is now facing the very nature of the problem, which is the Albanian dream of Kosovo as an independent state, and the project for a greater Albania - first to fight for autonomy and then for independence. And the method of the militant groups led by the Kosovo Liberation Army, no matter what they call themselves in southern Serbia or in Macedonia, is not to solve minority problems in a democratic way, but to make this zone of insecurity even more insecure, to step-by-step consolidate more land and make new frontiers."

The United Nations resolution that ended the Kosovo war promises Kosovo substantial autonomy but leaves its final status unresolved, subject to some future negotiation, while confirming that the territory is a sovereign part of Yugoslavia.

But nearly all the Albanians in Kosovo - mindful of repression by the Serbs, and the atrocities committed by Mr. Milosevic's forces in 1998 and 1999 - reject the idea of any future rule from Belgrade, no matter how democratic, and most support an independent state.

While many moderate Albanians do not approve of the forced expulsion or murders of Serbs or the fighting in southern Serbia or Macedonia, they are afraid to confront the organized men with guns.

"The West has never made it clear enough to the Albanians," another senior Western diplomat said, "that we are not there to ensure Albanian independence and promote Albanian interests, but we're there to promote our interests, which are a stable Balkans."

"We're all guilty of this," he added. "The serious problems now are a result of 18 months of indecisiveness, and a lot of soft decisions dancing around the real issues, without dealing with them."

He and other officials in Kosovo defined those issues as the connection between former Albanian military leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, now politicians, and the "new" militants; the connection between those same leaders and organized crime; the organized effort to intimidate the few Serbs remaining in southern Kosovo into selling their property and leaving for Serbia; the unchallenged partition of Kosovo in Mitrovica and, most important, the refusal or inability to punish crime when it happens.

Last year, when British troops discovered a huge and recently used arms cache in Drenica, in territory controlled by Agim Ceku, the commander of the supposedly disbanded and disarmed Kosovo Liberation Army, there was a debate about cracking down, the diplomats said. "There was much talk about force protection and fear of a backlash against KFOR," a senior diplomat said, using the acronym for the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo. "What happened? Nothing."

Similarly last month, when a busload of Serbs, escorted by peacekeepers, was blown up by a carefully designed bomb triggered by wire, "there was a perfect opportunity for a crackdown," a senior international official in Kosovo said. "But no one did anything, and the message of impunity is loud and clear."

The Bush administration has refused to let NATO troops, despite British arguments, go into the five-kilometer buffer zone to deal with the armed Albanians in the Presevo Valley. Instead, Washington wants the Yugoslav Army to do it, but under careful monitoring and with limited weaponry. As a start, NATO has suggested the most dangerous part of the zone, a wedge on the border between Serbia and Macedonia.

Mr. Kostunica has agreed, but he is cautious, aides say, understanding that the army could be fired upon from three sides. He would prefer to see other parts of the zone dismantled at the same time, especially along northern Kosovo, which is dominated by Serbs.

"KFOR is abandoning the border and is inviting our army into the crossfire," Mr. Kostunica said last week. "The army will of course do this, but it now undoubtedly has to make up for the mistakes of others."

Mr. Samardzic, Mr. Kostunica's adviser, said that the Europeans and Americans should have more confidence in the ability of the new Yugoslav leaders to resolve the conflict in southern Serbia.

Belgrade would allow foreign observers and journalists to report freely on the activities of the army in the zone, and is trying to bring local Albanians back into government and the police, he said.

"The point is to isolate the militants," Mr. Samardzic said.

"If they are not willing to have a cease-fire and negotiate, they should be diplomatically isolated. And if NATO is unwilling to intervene directly, the risks of settling the problem should be given over to us."