From the Editor

Kosovo--Looking Beyond Last Week

The unwillingness to look past the previous week that has bedeviled media coverage of Israel for so long now distorts the coverage of Kosovo. Newspapers do not even consult their own files. If the New York Times did so, it would find an article written by its staffer David Binder entitled "In Yugoslavia, Rising Ethnic Strife Brings Fears of Worse Civil Conflict." The date is twelve years ago -- November 1, 1987. And while the strife Binder describes is in Kosovo, it is initiated by Albanian separatists.

Here are some quotes from the Binder article: "As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981--an 'ethnically pure' Albanian region, a 'Republic of Kosovo' in all but name. The violence, a journalist in Kosovo said, is escalating to 'the worst in the last seven years'....Last summer, the authorities in Kosovo said they documented 40 ethnic Albanian attacks on Slavs in two months. In the last two years, 320 ethnic Albanians have been sentenced for political crimes, nearly half of them characterized as severe....Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment called federal Yugoslavia, which consists of six republics and two provinces....Ethnic Albanians already control almost every phase of life in the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the police, judiciary, civil service, schools and factories....While 200,000 Serbs and Montenegrins still live in the province, they are scattered and lack cohesion. In the last seven years, 20,000 of them have fled the province, often leaving behind farmsteads and houses, for the safety of the Slavic north."

This was the background against which Milosevic two years later removed Kosovo's autonomy, which had been converted into an instrument for driving Serbs from the province. There is not a word of this in the media, whose pundits uniformly speak as if Milosevic acted out of an Iago-like motiveless malignity.

In the 1990s, things have gone from bad to worse in former Yugoslavia, as one by one the republics broke away and ethnic cleansing (of Serbs no less than of Muslims or Croatians) became the norm. But ironically it had begun in Kosovo -- by the very Albanians who are now its victims. Back in August 1992 (the New York Times of August 25 is again the source), during the fighting in Bosnia, Yugoslavia's then-Foreign Minister noted that the policy of ethnic cleansing had actually begun in Kosovo with ethnic Serbs as its victims.

Yet look at the simple-minded way President Clinton, in his astonishing New York Times op-ed of May 23, describes the complex struggle in the region. "The intolerable conditions the region finds itself in today are the result of a decade-long campaign by Slobodan Milosevic to build a greater Serbia by singling out whole peoples for destruction because of their ethnicity and faith." Have devil, will bomb. Adding insult to injury, Clinton announces he is not targeting the people of Yugoslavia as he destroys their bridges, fuel, electricity and water supply, all from the safety of 15,000 feet high.

Jews who speak out are overwhelmingly backing the bombing -- indeed the war on Yugoslavia has created such unlikely bedfellows as Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol on the one hand and David Saperstein and Michael Lerner on the other, all four signatories on an ad for a "Balkan Action Council" demanding ground troops to achieve NATO victory. They see only the admittedly terrible images of refugees streaming out of Kosovo (even though it seems extremely unlikely they would have been driven out en masse, absent the NATO strikes).

But Jews should consider the background for the NATO attack--and its implications for themselves. Clinton decided "justice" required detaching Kosovo from Serbia, despite the Serbian people's deep historic and religious ties to the province, in effect coming down on the side of the KLA, the guerrilla force engaging in a civil war against the Serbian authorities. He presented Milosevic with an ultimatum: sign the Rambouillet agreement forfeiting Kosovo (there is no dispute that is what it amounted to) or else. Given that Kosovo was universally recognized as part of Serbia, that threat, as Joshua Muravchik admits in Commentary (June 1999), itself violated international law. (Muravchik is another NATO-must-win man.) Milosevic refused and is now being bombed into submission. Is it difficult to imagine an American President, in the name of ethnic self-determination, coming down in favor of future Arab demands to detach territory from Israel? One major difference is immediately obvious in the two situations: while Serbia has backing from Russia and China, Israel would find itself with zero support.

Outpost               - 2 -               June 1999