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10 May 1999

Why partition is no good for Kosovo

Melanie McDonagh, after visiting the Balkan camps, implores British pundits to listen to the refugee

By Melanie McDonagh

It’s a weird business coming back from Albania and Montenegro to London. At least in terms of the news. It’s not just that you find yourself engulfed by the Jill Dando murder and the Soho nail bomb instead of round-the-clock coverage of the exodus from Kosovo and the Nato bombing. The papers here cover the war remarkably comprehensively. What you miss when you get back is the corrective to the newstalk: the flesh-and-blood people to whom this is happening, for whom the outcome is everything. It’s easy to talk in generalities and abstractions in England, to discuss whether Kosovar refugees should be let in or not, whether Harold Pinter is quite sane, whether the Russian peace plan is a starter. It’s less easy when you’re there.

The first thing that changes after being there is your perspective on what Jesse Jackson calls the violence in this conflict. You find it harder to get as worked up as Alice Mahon does about Serbian civilians killed on their bus as a result of the Nato bombing when you’ve been in a dirt-poor Albanian town like Shkoder, which has been swamped by 30,000 refugees, violently dispossessed, all of whom can tell you about the killings they’ve seen – not unintended casualties, but deliberate knife-to-throat and gun-to-head murders.

Ethnic cleansing? I can give it to you plain or fancy. I read John Pilger’s moving denunciation of what he witheringly describes as Nato’s “just and noble” war and felt sick inside that in this tirade against specious moralising there should be no space, none, for the line of poor bastards I’d seen stagger across the border with their blankets, the only things left of their homes; or for the women who’d been cleansed not once but twice since last August by Yugoslav army bombardment. It would take a Max Frisch to do justice to that perverted sense of moral outrage.

You compare Julie Burchill’s pig- ignorant diatribe against the KLA as drug-dealing criminals with the reality that, for the mass of volunteers I’d met, the KLA was simply young Albanian males who want to go back home.

There is a case to be made against the Nato campaign, which is that in the absence of ground troops, contingency planning for ground troops, timely deployment of the Apache helicopters or co- ordination with the KLA, it will simply fail in its objectives, with fatal consequences for the Albanians still inside Kosovo.

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Then there are the broadsheet peace plans, in which people will lightly draw partition lines on a map to trade off, say, the monasteries and mines and capital of Kosovo against an enclave which the Albanians may be allowed to return to; or in which David Owen blithely hands over half of Bosnia in return for the reversal of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. You don’t do that when you’re there. The Albanians may be dispossessed and mendicant but when you use the word “partition” to them, they just say “no”, categorically, every single one of them. The refugees also have their own views about the question on everyone’s lips here: should we let them in?

In the tobacco factory in Shkoder, where 9,000 souls live in squashed squalor, Hamez Jemej, 46, told me: “I don’t want to go to Texas or California, thank you. The place that is loveliest for me is my own home.” His friend, Prakim Tahirim, 47, said: “I worked for ten years in Paris, but I came home because I wanted to return to where I was born.”

Those two men, like every other refugee, had similarly strong views about the conditions under which they might return home: under Nato protection, is the short answer. But perhaps I should mention their story, just to spare them the imputation of being unduly fussy. Four weeks ago, their village, Skanderai, in the Drenica region, was surrounded by the army and shelled with rockets. Tanks entered the village; prudently the men had already left. There had been 4,000 people there, refugees from the villages of Broje, Iznica and Nice Tourij, packed into 300 houses. Those who could fled to the hills, leaving 150 people who couldn’t leave. From where they were hiding, the men saw what happened when the paramilitaries came. Those 150 people were shot, killed. The men know, because when the army left they came down from their hiding place to bury the bodies.

These men just laugh at you when you mention unarmed monitors or a peacekeeping contingent that would put them under Russian protection. Russian volunteers have taken part with Serbian paramilitaries in the cleansing of towns like Gjakova: to Albanians they are simply the equivalent of Serb forces. So if there are to be, as there probably will be, Russians in any protectorate peacekeeping force, they should, perhaps, be kept for such Serbian areas as remain in Kosovo after the displaced Albanians return to their homes.

Which raises the more fundamental question: will any Serbs remain after – if – the Albanians return? Albanians, dispiritingly, say that there can be no more living together with Serbs again. Yet any just solution has to acknowledge the right of innocent civilians from all the communities to live together in whatever kind of protectorate will be established after the war, and in the – probably independent – Kosovo that ultimately succeeds it.

If I can take my own turn at punditry, the solution, I think, has to be based on two fundamental principles: the punishment of war criminals and the right of return. (The other important principle, the right of self-determination, is for the longer term.)

These two admirable concepts were meant to be the foundation for peace in Bosnia; they weren’t. So far as living together goes, the punishment of war criminals is the best way to prevent the exaction of revenge on individuals. And it must start at the top, with the authors of the cleansing, not least Slobodan Milosevic himself. What is more, these principles cannot be applied just in Kosovo. One of the problems of the serial wars that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia is that each conflict was dealt with in isolation. Remember how at Dayton the moderate Kosovar LDK party was marginalised to the small print, with the happy results we now see.

But if the principle of the right of return were to be applied across the board in former Yugoslavia, the Serbs would be one of the main beneficiaries. When the Croatian army retook the Krajina in Operation Storm in 1995, over 200,000 Serbs fled from their ancestral homes. They want to go back, too. The problem of former Yugoslavia has to be dealt with as a whole, not just in terms of its most tragic part, Kosovo.

One thing we should remember as we talk about peace plans. We can’t deal with Kosovo as we did with Bosnia – partition it in such a way that refugees can’t go back. I’m not saying this just because it is unjust, or because it is destabilising to the region, which is already apparent. I’m saying that the Kosovar Albanians won’t wear it. Ask them. Just this once.

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