Ethnic cleansing, continued: the fate of Serbs in Kosovo

National Review, Sept 12, 2005 by Jason Lee Steorts

More generally, to excise Kosovo from Serbia despite the violence of the past six years would make a mockery of the West's claim that talks on Kosovo's final status would follow only upon improvements in the rule of law, freedom of movement, and the protection of minorities. The message will be that ethnic cleansing pays, so long as you don't do it first.

But Tadic's proposal is probably not workable. Albanians constitute 90 percent of Kosovo's population, and almost to a man they demand independence. If their national aspiration is blocked now, on the cusp of fulfillment, it will be felt as a kind of coitus interruptus. A violent backlash will almost surely follow. That will put NATO in the awkward position of shooting at the very people it bombed Belgrade to defend.

Even if an initial burst of violence could be suppressed, it is difficult to see how Tadic's proposal could be sustainable. Having come within a hair's breadth of independence through the Kosovo Liberation Army's violent tactics, the Albanians are not likely to be good pacifists now. With time, NATO's patience and purse strings will be strained, and upon the alliance's exit from Kosovo, Serbia will be left with a violent insurgency and no institutional or military presence with which to defeat it. Radical solutions will begin to look reasonable, and that is about when a new Milosevic can be expected to appear.

Few people on either side of the Atlantic will want to run that risk. Instead, we will unfetter Kosovo and turn our eyes as its story comes to a dramatically perfect conclusion. At the heart of that story is Milosevic, who rose to power on a wave of nationalism that surged first in Kosovo, who capped his career by driving Kosovo's Albanians toward Tirana--and who will now see that his final, ironic legacy is the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's Serbs.

"If the truth is not told, there will be no Serbs here," one man tells us. Half right--but far, far too late.