Column: Our Life and Times
October 1999

Kosova and Serbia after war's end

by Kevin A. Barry and Mary Holmes

This fall, as chill winds began to be felt in the mountains of Kosova, half of the 800,000 Kosovar Albanians "ethnically cleansed" by Serbian forces still lacked adequate housing for winter. Thousands more languished in Serbian prisons, people whose fate was not even mentioned in the agreement between NATO and Serbia that ended the bombing campaign and created a NATO/UN protectorate over Kosova.

NATO and the UN have concentrated most of their efforts not on these issues but on establishing "order" by disarming the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), something they may have achieved with its transformation into a lightly armed Kosovo Protection Corps in September.

The new occupiers have also allowed a Serb enclave led by paramilitaries to form in Mitrovica, as Albanians continue to be terrorized from re-entering the main part of the town. Not coincidentally, Mitrovica is close to the richest economic prize in Kosova, the Trepca metal mines, where in 1988-90 thousands of Albanian miners were fired and then imprisoned for striking to defend the autonomy granted to Kosova in the 1974 Yugoslavian Constitution. During the 1998-99 war, the area was an important stronghold for KLA guerrillas whom the Serbs could never dislodge from the surrounding hills. Today, the Trepca miners are still waiting to get their jobs back.

Some contradictions have also developed within the Albanian community in the wake of violent attacks by some of its members on Roma and Serb civilians. While the numerous war criminals need to be identified, tried, and punished, some have embarked upon collective punishments directed at civilian populations. Adem Demaci, a longtime supporter of resistance to Serb rule and a leader of the KLA, put the issue most forcefully: "I was not happy when I saw ordinary Serbs going. I don't accept freedom only for Albanians. We must understand that all these miseries were done by the Serbian regime, not every Serb" (THE NEW YORK TIMES, Aug. 10, 1999).

Although increasingly challenged from below, Serbian dictator and indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic remains in power. Much of his staying power is due to deep contradictions among the Serbian masses, with many blaming him not so much for launching eight years of genocidal war for a "Greater Serbia" as for having failed to hold onto enough territory in those wars.

During the NATO bombing and the Serb genocide in Kosova that immediately preceded it, many were startled by the nearly unanimous belief among Serbs, even oppositionists, that it was they, not the hundreds of thousands of Bosnians, Croats, and Albanians killed by Milosevic's men, who were the real victims. In explaining this phenomenon, many have stressed the emotional appeals of demagogues such as Milosevic, but few have noted the role of leading philosophers and intellectuals in the creation of today's Serbian nationalism.

A September 1999 article by Laura Secor in LINGUA FRANCA details as never before the role of Serbian intellectuals, some of them formerly oppositional Marxist humanists, in creating the ideological ground that even today props up the Milosevic regime. Most prominent among them has been Mihailo Markovic of the Praxis group, who already in 1990 was able to write that "Slobodan Milosevic endorsed the initiative of Kosovo Serbs and invited people everywhere to an 'anti-bureaucratic' revolution-against the injustices of the system, against incompetent and corrupt functionaries, against the Constitution of 1974 and, especially, against discrimination against Serbian people" (PRAXIS INTERNATIONAL, January 1990).

Writings like these, especially the infamous 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences which Markovic co-authored, formed, according to Secor, nothing less than "the conceptual framework for a greater Serbia." Markovic became a Vice-President of Milosevic's party, later breaking with him for allegedly giving away too much Serbian land in the 1995 Dayton accords. In 1996, Secor notes, Markovic and another former Praxis philosopher signed a petition urging the Balkan War Crimes Tribunal to drop charges against the butcher of Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic, calling him "the true leader of all Serbs." Such ideological pollution forms a major barrier to the dismantling of the Milosevic system.

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