Kosovo challenges the West to learn from the mistakes made in the Bosnian conflict

By NOEL MALCOLM

s the conflict in Kosovo about to turn into a second Bosnian war? The short answer is no: there are too many differences between the Bosnian example and what is happening, or can happen, in the Albanian-inhabited province of Kosovo. Yet, at the same time, it seems that Western governments have still not learned the most basic lessons of that earlier diplomatic disaster. While the problem itself is different in important ways, the international response is similar enough to prompt an alarming sense of deja vu.

To understand why there can be no replay of the Bosnian war in Kosovo, one must study a contour map. That will help to explain why the war lasted three and a half years, even though the Bosnian Government forces had almost no weapons to begin with and the Serbs had tanks and artillery. Much of Bosnia is like Switzerland: tanks do not climb mountains, and in such terrain lightly-equipped infantry can defend hugely extended front lines.

Kosovo, on the other hand, is tank country with key towns and territory situated on rolling plateaus. If Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic ever launches a full-scale war against the Kosovo Albanians, who have no weapons apart from some smuggled Kalashnikovs, it will be not so much a war as a massacre.

This means that prolonged, Bosnian-style war is not an option, leaving only two possible scenarios for physical conflict. Either the present situation continues as a simmering intifadeh in which most Albanians are active but non-violent, while a minority resorts to force. Or the collective patience of the Albanians snaps with a general rising amounting to an act of virtual mass suicide. The Kosovo Albanians are not crazy or suicidal, but the risk of such a bloodbath is something that Western governments must take seriously. NATO will not be able to stand idly by if hundreds of thousands are killed, and refugees flood into neighboring Macedonia and Albania.

The West cannot afford to get this one wrong, so no long-term political solution should be ruled out until the whole range of options has been explored. And yet the position taken by the leading Western powers is that almost all options are closed off except for the restoration of Kosovo's "autonomy"--in other words, a return to the status it had in Tito's Yugoslavia.

This is where the sense of deja vu comes in. In 1991, as Yugoslavia slid slowly toward war, Western governments were fixated on the idea that the Yugoslav state must be kept together. After the votes for independence in Slovenia and Croatia, even after Milosevic's artillery had begun shelling Croatian cities, Western diplomats still thought that keeping Yugoslavia together would be the best way to ensure "stability."

Today, when they refuse even to admit the long-term possibility of independence for Kosovo on the grounds that such a move would be "destabilising," they are making the same mistake. So long as 2 million deeply alienated Albanians are cooped up in a Serbian or Yugoslav state, with anti-Albanianism as the trump card of every Serb nationalist politician, the causes of instability will be built-in.

Curiously, the more far-sighted among the Serb nationalists have already accepted this point. In the last three years they have started discussing the separation of Kosovo from Serbia because they fear the much higher birth-rate of the Kosovo Albanians. In 1991, ethnic Serbs made up 66% of the population of Serbia. By 2040 they may have fallen below 50%; two or three generations later, they might even be outnumbered by Albanians. An Albanian-majority government in Belgrade is the stuff of Serb nationalist nightmares.

Western diplomats, meanwhile, are obsessed by an artificial nightmare of their own devising. They say that even to discuss the possibility of independence for Kosovo would set a terrible precedent, opening the floodgates for secessionist movements all over the world. In fact, Kosovo's claim to independence is almost identical with that of Slovenia or Croatia. As an international committee of jurists found, what happened in 1991 was not "secession" but the complete dissolution of the old Yugoslavia into its constituent units. Kosovo was one of these units of Yugoslavia under the 1974 constitution, and, in practice, functioned just like the other republics, with its own borders, parliament and government.

It is a virtual certainty that Kosovo will become independent from Serbia within the next 50 years. The only question is: how do we get from here to there? A negotiated solution based on a prolonged interim phase, like the one agreed for Chechnya by General Alexander Lebed, may be possible but only if the Albanians are assured that independence remains an eventual option. With Western governments blithely telling them that even long-term independence is out of the question, the chances for "stability" in the Balkans are slender indeed.

Noel Malcolm is the author of Bosnia: A Short History. Kosovo: A Short History will be published by Macmillan in April