History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  In one respect, and one only, Kosovo should be easier than Bosnia. In Bosnia, the international community is trying to maintain the semblance of a multiethnic state, but the reality on the ground remains one of ethnic partition. In Kosovo, the West must certainly strive to see that there is a place for innocent Serb civilians in a territory that holds so much Serb history. We must not ourselves become party to a revenge ethnic cleansing, as we were in the Croatian Krajina. But I fear that, in practice, all the Serbs will flee. As innocent Germans paid the price for Hitler’s crimes after 1945, so innocent Serbs will pay the price for Milošević’s crimes. Even if some of them stay and are given all possible minority rights, the combination of demography and democracy would mean that this would still be essentially an Albanian political entity. As a result, a viable homegrown polity could eventually develop under international tutelage—in a way that is, alas, most unlikely ever to happen in Bosnia.

  Eventually, it probably would become an independent state. The legal basis for its independence would be the very plausible claim that Kosovo was a constituent part of former Yugoslavia: the same basis on which Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and the other republics of former Yugoslavia were recognized. So it would not set a dangerous precedent, let alone enunciate some universal right of ethnic self-determination: Catalonia for the Catalans, Ruthenia for the Ruthenians, Cornwall for the Cornish! But at the moment, the question of its formal status in international law is far less important than the reality on the ground. (Milošević knows this, too. After all, he rejected the Rambouillet agreement, although it gave him full, formal sovereignty.) Wise Kosovars acknowledge that a new Kosova (the Albanian spelling) will need international foster parents for a long time before it can walk on its own feet.

  The Russians will have to be part of this international framework. They are an essential part of the solution. They are also part of the problem. The Kosovars don’t trust them at all. “They are worse than the Serbs,” one Albanian patriarch told me. “They are all Slavs,” his son explained. If Russian soldiers stand at the frontier, refugees will be reluctant to go back. But there is a worse variant, which Milošević will almost certainly try for. This is a Russian zone of occupation in the north and east of Kosovo, where the mineral wealth and some of the main Serb monasteries are. What this would mean in reality is partition. Serbs would go to the Russian part; Albanians to the rest.

  One has to be very clear about this: Such a “face-saving compromise” would be a defeat for NATO. As noted in earlier essays, even Serb nationalists have for several years been talking about partition as the only solution for Kosovo. It would also encourage Albanians to say: All right, if you, the West, are ready to accept the partition of Bosnia and Kosovo on ethnic lines, we will divide Macedonia on ethnic lines. It would be a disaster—and Milošević could plausibly claim victory, strengthening his hold on power.

  The trouble with this war is that it is being fought in the wrong place. A war in Kosovo for Kosovo seems to me wholly defensible. A war fought—because of NATO’s lack of contingency planning and the American paranoia about taking casualties—from the air over Serbia proper, against increasingly civilian targets, is much more difficult to defend.

  What we should aim for is exactly the opposite: a situation in which, in Serbia proper, Milošević loses rather than gains popular support, while we at last do something effectual in Kosovo itself. The distinction between fighting for Kosovo and fighting against Serbia may seem a fine one—too fine for wartime—but it remains vitally important. Rather than bombing Serbian towns, we should be liberating Kosovan ones.

  The key to doing this has all along been the presence of ground troops. With hindsight, we can see that we should have had substantial ground troops ready nearby before we started bombing. I referred earlier to NATO leaders being “misled by the Bosnian precedent.” Many people still believe we bombed Milošević to the Dayton peace agreement. But that was possible only because we already had French and British troops on the ground—who could direct the bombs accurately to their targets, in a way that besieged KLA commanders with satellite phones obviously cannot—and because the Croatian army, trained by Americans, had changed the military balance against the Serb forces on the ground.

  Some have suggested that we should have used the KLA in an analogous way. If you’re not prepared to change the balance on the ground yourself, use the local barbarians to do it for you. But the Croatian army was at least the more or less regular army of a recognized, sovereign state. Even then, the horrible side effect was that we became party to the largest single act of ethnic cleansing until Kosovo: the expulsion of at least 150,000 Serbs from the Krajina in 1995. The KLA has, of course, never been the regular army of a sovereign state. Last year, it was still a ragtag, irregular, guerrilla army with some very wild local commanders. They made few distinctions between guilty and innocent Serbs. In the capitals of the West, people loosely say, “They are a bunch of drug dealers.” Although some of the funding may have come from Kosovar drug dealing, a knowledgeable senior Western official comments wryly that “drug dealers is about the only thing they aren’t.” I think it would have been neither right nor militarily effective to arm and train them last year. And now? Well, we don’t have the time. And then, thinking ahead to the protectorate, it would seem a very curious strategy to arm people today in order to disarm them tomorrow.

  No, there is no alternative to doing it ourselves. We should have had the ground troops there at the beginning. We have wasted two months not building up a credible force. The deadline drew near for bringing in the necessary troops and equipment so we could go in opposed, if the worst came to the worst, and start getting the refugees back before the winter snows descend. Now, at last, President Clinton has been persuaded by the Pentagon and Tony Blair to go up to fifty thousand.

  But Milošević has to believe that we are actually prepared to use them. No one ever won a fight by saying at the outset, “All right, I’ll fight, as long as I never get hurt.” Having seen British troops training to take casualties—with a realism that almost matched that in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan—I do not write these words lightly. To look after your own people is the first duty of a leader. Yet it is a perverted moral code that will allow a million innocent civilians of another race to be made destitute because you are not prepared to risk the life of a single professional soldier of your own. What are soldiers trained for? What kind of superpower is this? What kind of morality?

  The irony is that if we had had the ground troops there in sufficiently impressive array at the beginning, we might never have needed to use them. Milošević has this, too, in common with Hitler and Stalin: His programmatic evil and strategic madness is mixed with supreme tactical realism. As the Romans knew, if you want peace, you must prepare for war.

  4

  In two months, we have learned or been reminded of some deeply sobering lessons. About the human capacity for evil. About the Balkans. About the Clinton administration. About the United States, a superpower that believes in no-loss war. About NATO, the emperor who turns out to be naked in his high-tech birthday suit. Yet this is also a story of a European failure to deal with a European problem.

  Talking to the European soldiers in Macedonia, I asked them whether European forces could, if it came to the worst, liberate Kosovo on their own? Well, they said, there was a problem with the transport of heavy armored divisions and with air support. But otherwise: Yes, in military terms we could do it. We have the men. We have the equipment. We have the money.

  Isn’t this just the kind of operation that has been discussed ever since the end of the cold war: European troops with NATO support? I doubt it will happen this time. German opinion has moved a very long way, but Chancellor Gerhard Schröder says it is “unthinkable” that German ground troops would participate in an invasion of a country that was last occupied by Hitler’s Wehrmacht. His red-green coalition would fall apart if they did. The Italians are also unwilling. Britain
and France alone would not be enough. But this should surely be a catalyst for the closer European defense cooperation that has been talked about for so long.

  The countries of the European Union are bound to take a leading role in the economic and political effort to reconstruct not just Kosovo but the whole region after the war. Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, and Bulgaria all need urgent help, especially if a fudged diplomatic solution means that a significant number of refugees decide not to return to Kosovo. Already, there is talk of speeding up EU enlargement (I’ll believe that when I see it), and a conference has been summoned in Germany to discuss a “stability pact” for the Balkans—politely called “Southeastern Europe.” At last, European policy makers are beginning to use some imagination about what the world’s economic superpower—the EU—can do to prevent still more of its neighbors from descending into war and to rebuild those that have already gone through war. Writing, somewhat incongruously, in a British tabloid, The Mirror, Mikhail Gorbachev jeers that the war has shown Europeans their true place: “Yes, you are strong economically, but politically you are pygmies.”

  Will it help us to grow up? Heraclitus famously said that war is the father of all things. The experience of the Second World War was the father of the European Union as we know it today. Perhaps this war will lead us to start doing at the end of the decade what we should have done at the beginning: build a liberal order for the whole of Europe. Knowing Europe, I wouldn’t count on it.

  When Milošević caved in, just ten days after this essay was completed, some former critics of the bombing campaign threw up their hands and declared that they had been wrong. This heralded, they suggested, a new era of high-tech wars won from the air. Indeed, the victory was sudden, unexpected, and complete. It remains a challenge for historians to work out exactly why Milošević gave in when he did. But, while I patently did not expect this outcome so soon, I will not join that chorus of “we were wrong.” For it remains true that a million Kosovars paid the price for NATO’s failure to anticipate Milošević’s reaction to the bombing and for the United States’s insistence on waging the war without a single American casualty.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1999

  27 MAY. International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague announces that it has indicted Slobodan Milošević and other Serbian leaders.

  3 JUNE. Slobodan Milošević accepts the peace plan presented jointly by EU envoy Martti Ahtisaari and Russian envoy Victor Chernomyrdin.

  3-4 JUNE. Cologne summit of EU. Javier Solana is appointed as the E U’s first high representative for foreign and security policy. Agreement is reached on the outlines of a common defense and security policy and a “stability pact” for southeastern Europe.

  9 JUNE. Yugoslav and NATO representatives sign a military-technical agreement on the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo. Romano Prodi presents his proposed new European Commission.

  10 JUNE. UN Security Council Resolution 1244 approves international administration for Kosovo while reaffirming full Yugoslav sovereignty over it.

  10-13 JUNE. Elections to the European Parliament. Low turnouts across Europe.

  11-12 JUNE. Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) enters Kosovo. Two hundred Russian troops arrive unexpectedly at Priština airport, having come from Bosnia via Serbia.

  18 JUNE. Meeting of G8 in Cologne.

  20 JUNE. Serbian forces complete their withdrawal from Kosovo.

  21 JUNE. KFOR signs agreement with the KLA for its progressive demilitarization over a ninety-day period: “K-Day.”

  2 JULY. Bernard Kouchner, a French human-rights activist and founder of Médecins sans Frontières, is appointed head of the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK).

  RETURN TO KOSOVO

  AT HALF PAST SIX ON A FRESH SUMMER MORNING, THE VOICES OF invisible nuns ring out from the Serbian monastery of Gračanica. This was the first place I ever visited in Kosovo, more than twenty years ago, and here, behind the high monastery walls, you can, for a moment, imagine that nothing has changed. Still the black-bearded priests in their white, red, and gold robes celebrate a never-changing God in the ancient, undulating chants. I recognize one of the nuns, who has a round, nut-brown face, and she gives me a serene smile.

  But the visitors’ book tells a different story. From 11 June, the day before NATO troops marched into the devastated province, a defiant inscription in Serbian declares, “Kosovo is the heart of Serbia and the monasteries are its soul.” But now Kosovo is part of Serbia only in name. Day by day it becomes ever more Albanian and more international. “May peace return to Kosovo,” reads an entry in English dated 20 June, “and the people live together in harmony and prosperity.” Signed: Richard Cieglinski, KFOR—the acronym for the international military force whose tanks, armored cars, and soldiers you now see churning up every dusty, potholed road across the devastated land.

  I CAME TO KOSOVO for the second time in the early 1980s. Albanian student protests had just been brutally suppressed, and the atmosphere was heavy with menace. I wrote an article entitled “Belfast in Yugoslavia.” Today, the troops who were then on the streets of Belfast have actually come to Kosovo. Everywhere, I hear the accents of London, Leeds, and Glasgow. Twenty years on, the once remote, exotic world of the other Europe and the familiar world of Britain have suddenly and surreally met.

  There’s a British KFOR post in the former Serbian police station close to the Gračanica monastery. “It’s OK, they’re English,” shouts the guard to his mate as I approach with a colleague from The Independent. Stuart Watson, a young second lieutenant from 52 Battery, Royal Artillery, tells us how last night the senior churchmen from the monastery came to say that the people in this mainly Serb village were frightened by the sound of gunfire from the nearby capital, Priština. Lieutenant Watson tried to reassure them, and they went back to calm their flock. Since there are no ordinary police, the locals come to the KFOR soldiers to complain: “He stole my pig,” “No, he nicked my radio!” There’s still no civil administration in sight here, so British soldiers and Serbian priests try to run the place between them.

  Everyone says the experience of Northern Ireland equips the British best of all the foreign troops for the job in Kosovo. A corporal of the Parachute Regiment who stands guard at the door to the Grand Hotel in Priština tells me it’s like serving in Belfast—only better. There, in their own country, the Paras were spat at in the streets. Here, the Serbs look anxiously to them for protection, and the Kosovar Albanians greet them like heroes. Large graffiti on the facade of a nearby theater offer thanks to one “Tony Bier” and proclaim “God Save the Quin.”

  MY NEXT TRIP was in the spring of 1997. For eight long years, the Kosovars had organized entirely peaceful resistance against the Milošević regime, which in 1989 had stripped the province of its autonomy. But patience was running out. There were reports of a shadowy organization called the Kosovo Liberation Army, killing Serb police in the hills of the central region of Drenica. Yet friends in Priština warned me, “There are some seven hundred purely Albanian villages, so the people there could all be killed.” When I was last here, in November, the KLA rising had met with brutal, utterly disproportionate repression; already there were miles of ruins, hundreds of thousands of the refugees, much blood in the snow.

  Now I return to visit the places and the people I knew. In the meantime, they have been to hell and back. Or at least to Macedonia or Albania and back. You see the returnees on every road, trailers piled high with mattresses and children, the red-and-black Albanian flag flying from the tractor in front. Everyone I meet has some extraordinary tale of suffering and endurance. There are ten thousand novels here. Misery is a writer’s gold mine.

  Yet beyond the tragedy, I find a phlegmatic determination to rebuild, as well as a real sense of liberation: liberation not just from a few months of horror but from ten years of oppression by the Milošević regime. And, for those who see the longer perspective, from more than eighty years of living under Ser
bian rule. The Kosovar Albanians have suffered terribly, but most of them also feel that they have finally won.

  Priština itself I find relatively undamaged. Every day, there are more people on the streets, and another café reopens. A surprising number of people stayed here throughout the bombing, though under extreme duress. Veton Surroi, the leading independent newspaper publisher, was in hiding the whole time—obsessively listening to radio news and watching satellite television: “BBC World was the best.” I meet him on his way back from Holland, where he’s just bought a new printing press for his paper. Professor Abdyl Ramaj, a small, charming, cultured man, survived in his own home, harassed constantly by Serb police and officials, who tried to persuade him to collaborate. He is exhausted, even traumatized, the words coming only slowly in half-forgotten French. But as I leave he stands on the verge, eyes sparkling again, and gives the V-for-victory sign.

  To see the real destruction, you have to go into the countryside. Sol steer my Russian-built jeep past the endless columns of KFOR military vehicles, along dirt tracks, and across makeshift bridges that replace the ones we bombed. The small town of Mališevo, in the heart of Drenica, was described by Richard Holbrooke as “the most dangerous place in Europe.” When I went there last autumn, it was a ghost town, utterly destroyed, with heavily armed Serb police controlling the road into town. Graffiti on the walls boasted “Serbia to Tokyo” and “burning houses, beautiful houses.” Now I find Albanians cheerfully cleaning out the police station. There’s a market in the main street with vendors selling bottled water, some vegetables, fruit, and great piles of the real essential of Balkan life: cigarettes.

  I visit a family that I had then found cowering in one cellar room of their ruined farmstead, terrified of the police. One brother was originally a schoolteacher, the other a bus conductor. The men survived the war in the woods, creeping down for food at night; their wives and children fled to Albania. When it was over, the schoolteacher walked for seven days and nights, crossing illegally into Macedonia, then into Albania, to fetch his family. How did it feel when they met? His hands go up: “It was the happiest moment of my life.” They have just a few blankets between them. No food, no flour, no oil, no work. Only aid and a little money from relatives abroad. But they say they feel free—“so long as NATO is here.”