CKNW Editorial
for June 15, 1999

I received a letter, just before I went away, from a faithful listener who took me severely to task for my editorial that day on Kosovo. He thought it was outrageous, saying that it condemned equally the Serbs and Kosovars and said I was insensitive to what amounts to genocide on the part of the Serbs. He berates me for not remembering Poland in 1939.

The position I took then and the position I take now is that the Nato actions were wrongheaded and will lead to a greater disaster than they were designed to cure.

It is right that we learn from history but we should take care that we learn the right lessons. Poland in 1939 was under attack from a foreign power, Nazi Germany, which had already swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia. In fact, Britain and France offered no help to Poland being utterly unable to and the first real shots in anger between the three major combatants didn’t occur until May 10, 1940, over 8 months after war was declared to save the Poles.

It is the history of the Balkans from which I draw my lessons, a history which goes back hundreds of years and a history which is largely unchanging. Ethnic cleansing in the area was scarcely invented by the Serbs which, while scarcely excusing Serbian outrages, does tend to make one look a little beyond the outrage of the moment.

I agree with my listener that if one is to take a simplistic approach, then Nato, for which read Bill Clinton, was right. There were unacceptable outrages being committed by Serbs against Kosovars and something had to be done. The question was what?

If one is looking to a short-term answer, bombing hell out of Serbia is the answer though I didn’t frankly think it would work even in the short term and it seems I was wrong. But my main point in that and previous editorials is that such an undertaking required not only the short term guaranty that it would work but the assurance that the solutions sought would be achieved in the long term.

What then have we got? Precisely what I said we would get. The United Nations is like Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar baby – stuck with no way to get loose.

Leaving aside the fact that the 77 days of bombing left hundreds of thousands of Kosovars homeless and undoubtedly contributed mightily to further atrocities by Serbia, we now have created a political vacuum in the area which can only be filled in one of two ways – long term, by that I mean decades of troops from the UN in place or victory by the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The first alternative may have the same attraction that long term UN involvement in Cyprus and South Korea has had. To a great extent peace has been maintained but at the expense of creating perpetual UN protectorates. And each of those cases is distinguishable in this important way – in South Korea the people want the UN to stay and in Cyprus both sides are content to have the UN act as buffer. Therefore there has been little if any loss of life.

Quite the contrary is the case in Kosovo. The Serbs, seeing themselves losing part of what hitherto was their country, are mad as hell and there will be fighting. But that leads into the second alternative, the Kosovo Liberation Army. Set aside any romantic notions you might have about these people being simple peasants bound on bringing democracy to Kosovo – these are dedicated and armed revolutionaries who wish to create a Greater Albania attaching to Albania itself, all of Kosovo and most of Macedonia. These people are not going to simply lay back and await their day of deliverance – they will shed blood – UN soldiers blood. The United Nations armed forces will be as popular in Kosovo as the British Army in Ulster is to the IRA.

The point I hope is obvious – thanks to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, Kosovo has become and must remain a UN protectorate which will be maintained by force.

Why is this so?

Because before the last UN soldier has left Kosovo the KLA will fill the vacuum and then we’ll really see some ethnic cleansing.

What my friendly critic overlooks is that Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia and is such by international edict going back to the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. It is true that most of the people in Kosovo are Albanians but most of the people in Quebec are French and most of the people in Catalonia Catalans … just as most of the people in much of Romania are Hungarians. Quebec remains by international law party of Canada, Catalonia part of Spain, western Rumania part of Rumania. We might also talk about Basques, Chechnyans, Kurds and Tibetans. It may well be that these things ought not to be. but the international community, for obvious reasons of self interest, do not lightly interfere with the right of states to control what is within their own borders.

My main argument then remains this – far from having improved the long term situation on Kosovo we have dramatically aggravated it. We have elevated the Kosovo Liberation Army into being the only available political option, we have activated the Russian bear in ways yet to be determined and we have paved the way, through Macedonia, for the Greeks and Turks to be at each others’ throats again.

It may not look all that bad now, my friendly critic – but you just wait … and not all that long either.