Helmets and Tuxedos

It seems that one stage of the Kosovo conflict ended on Sunday, August 16, when Serbian police and army troops marched into Junik, the last stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). After fierce clashes in the area between the villages of Prilep, Drenovac and the Albanian border, KLA troops have been defeated and prevented from crossing into neighboring Albania.

Serbian authorities have issued official statements to the effect that the KLA intended to provoke serious incidents at the border during NATO drills in Albania, and thus prevent peace talks. The authorities have said nothing about the NATO drills, hoping that the alliance's threat to intervene in Kosovo is no longer an immediate one.
According to ground reports, Junik has been spared from mass destruction  while Prilep and other nearby villages have suffered substantial damage.  Some reporters said the house in which Richard Holbrooke met with KLA representatives had been hit.

Serbian President Milan Milutinovic received US ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill last Monday after the dramatic events in Kosovo. The meeting ended with the all too familiar official Serbian platform that "both sides in the talks agreed that the Kosovo conflict can be resolved by political means only, through dialogue and full respect for the rights of all ethnic groups living in Kosovo, in accordance with present international standards". The meeting was preceded by a written debate between a member of the newly formed ethnic Albanian delegation, Fehmi Agani, and Serbian Vice Premier Ratko Markovic.

Markovic came forward with the proposition that the peace talks should begin immediately, but Agani replied that the talks would get underway when the "violence stops" and the Serb troops withdraw units "used against the civilian population.

Agani expressed the hope that the time, venue and terms of the peace talks would be brokered by Christopher Hill, who is in permanent contact with  authorities in Belgrade and Pristina. Hill went to Belgrade and made a statement suggesting that partial peace talks on restoring confidence between the two sides rather are, at this stage, more realistic than extensive  negotiations on a general solution to the conflict.

Representatives of the Humanitarian Rights Fund believe that peace talks  should not start before the effects of a humanitarian disaster in Kosovo are mitigated. International relief workers say there are some 240,000 displaced persons in Kosovo, while a number of newspapers write that some 40,000 refugees have been left without any protection whatsoever. The Serbian government claims that it has drawn up a plan for rebuilding destroyed houses and submitted it to international organizations. It says that it has sent supplies to Djakovica and Orahovac and adds that some 30,000 people have returned to Srbica and Glogovac, and another 3,000 to Klina in the past few days. Large groups of refugees are located in Djakovica, Pec, Prizren, Mitrovica, Gnjilane and Podujevo. There aren't many newspaper reports about them, perhaps because the fact that they have found shelter in peaceful enclaves controlled by the hated Serbian authorities is not exactly a ideal invitation for a NATO intervention that should supposedly stop a humanitarian tragedy.

That has aggravated the position of refugees who found shelter with their  relatives in towns that aren't so interesting for the media these days.  Their position would probably be made easier if the Serbian authorities pardoned all ethnic Albanian civilians who took up weapons in the past few months and the ethnic Albanian leaders encouraged them to drop their guns.

It is very unlikely that the Belgrade authorities will grant Agani's wish  and withdraw the troops from Kosovo in the near future. The Radicals and  some police chiefs said they would continue to pursue armed rebel groups  until their final defeat. Vuk Draskovic, the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) leader, said the terrorists must lay down their weapons before any talks on the withdrawal of troops from Kosovo. Ljubodrag Stojadinovic, a military commentator and a Yugoslav army spokesman, said on Monday that there was no room for exaltation after the end of the first stage of the Kosovo conflict, because various KLA factions could now get radical and retaliate with real terrorism.
There is news indicating the direction this radicalization might take. During a sweeping operation in the village of Lodj near Pec, Serbian police found the massacred bodies of their two comrades, Milorad Rajkovic and Srdjan Perovic. The two were kidnapped back on July 6th during a fierce clash between the police and the KLA. Another Serbian policeman, Nebojsa Boljevic, was killed in the village of Stari Trg near Kosovska Mitrovica last Monday by an ethnic Albanian sniper. It remains to be seen whether the guns will go silent for a while or keep talking.

The police say that the inhabitants of some villages are surrendering weapons given to them by the KLA. The Yugoslav army revealed some details concerning the KLA in Tropoja and Kuks. It reported 600 incidents along the Yugoslav border with Albania, and demonstrated Chinese weapons it had seized in clashes with ethnic Albanians. It confirmed that the weapons came from down south, but the Yugoslav authorities still haven't compelled Albania to seal its borders and stop the inflow of weapons into Kosovo.
The Serbian regime hasn't bothered to reveal the KLA's nature, organization, command structure and political connections abroad. "All of them are involved, those who admit it as well as those who don't", a police chief said last week.

The Serbian propaganda, which is usually a disaster in such circumstances, worked a little better this time for several reasons. The Pristina-based Serb Media Center published brief and accurate reports on clashes and backed them up by organizing trips for reporters to villages where fighting had taken place. The rival Kosovo Information Center started lying and lost all credibility. Some reporters came to Kosovo looking for another Bosnia at all cost, which is why even the Serbian Radical Party managed to deny reports, such as the one on mass graves in Orahovac.

Although the Serbian media have not invited the population to support war like they did in Bosnia and Croatia, patriotic rhetoric has prevailed once again. Apart from repeating time and again that Kosovo belongs to Serbia,  the media haven't told the public what Serbia can and wants to do about Kosovo, or explained what the strategy of the ethnic Albanian leaders is.

Adem Demaqi, the new KLA representative, refused peace talks with the Serbs after a meeting with Christopher Hill last Monday. He praised the KLA’s  "long march" tactics and said that the organization was quite capable of guerrilla warfare if not a full scale war with the Serbian troops. This Marxist-Leninist oriented politician still believes in Chinese weapons, and is believed to be one of the spiritual leaders of the KLA. He also surprised quite a few dissidents in Belgrade by refusing peace talks and by blessing those who are prepared to carry guns and die.

Predrag Simic, a professor of the Belgrade Political Sciences Faculty, believes that peace talks will start in the near future. He adds, however,  that it would be far too optimistic to expect quick results.

he Contact Group has put forward a number of solutions envisaging guarantees to the ethnic Albanians that they will have their autonomy and that it won't be taken away by Belgrade, as well as guarantees to the Serbs that Kosovo's ethnic Albanians won't be allowed to secede and declare and  independent state.
The proposed solutions are based on models existing in Europe, such as the Alto Addigie, the Aaland islands, South Tyrollia, Tatarstan - an autonomous region of the Russian federation, as well as amendments to the 1974 Yugoslav federal constitution on Kosovo.

Nikola Sainovic, the federal Vice Premier, said the Contact Group's proposition had good points, while Radical leader Vojislav Seselj expressed the opinion that it included just as many shortcomings. Vuk Draskovic dismissed the Aaland and South Tyrollia models although he had previously welcomed the South Tyrollia proposition as an acceptable one.

Some media qualified Predrag Simic as the author of one of the propositions forwarded by the Contact Group. Simic, however, said that the proposition had not been reviewed by any official Yugoslav institution, adding that he didn't know whether Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, had read the proposition as some German sources informed. An international team of experts sponsored by the German Bertesman foundation has been working on a solution to the Kosovo conflict since September 1996. Simic says that the several models mentioned had come up in some kind of a simulation of peace talks, and that a number of Serbian representatives had taken part in the project. The team was divided into three groups. One worked on the measures for restoring confidence among the sides to the conflict, the second considered the autonomy issue while the third predicted the consequences of Kosovo's would-be secession from Serbia. The first group attained the most desirable results and proposed that the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians should reach agreement on issues such as health care, education, trade and a few others. The autonomy group said that a single document should be drawn up, but both the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians rejected the idea and came up with two documents instead. Simic looked for a solution based on internal self-determination and vertical autonomy. In other words, he proposed that Kosovo should remain a part of Serbia and that the province's autonomy should generally be defined by the South Tyrollia model. According to the model, Kosovo should get multi-level autonomy. Some issues would be under the jurisdiction of the province only, some would be regulated by both the provincial and the Serbian authorities, while certain issues should be the competence of the Serbian authorities only. The plan also envisages protection for the non-Albanian population, as some sort of positive discrimination including the right to veto all important decisions In case of a dispute, the plan envisages local arbitration. If that doesn't work, the decision is in the hands of the national constitutional court, in this case the Constitutional Court of Serbia which should include a certain number of ethnic Albanian representatives.

Simic says that the Aaland islands model is inapplicable in Serbia's case because it is being applied in a region where the entire population belongs to a single ethnic group (the 24,000 inhabitants of this Finnish archipelago are Swedish). The Finns can't buy land in this area or populate it unless they are given regional citizenship. This model is most definitely more appealing to the ethnic Albanians than the Serbs.

The price of peace is undoubtedly high, but not as high as the costs of war. Bosko Mijatovic of the Belgrade Economic Faculty said that the daily cost of the Kosovo conflict is somewhere between official US estimations of two million dollars and Seselj's figure of one million German marks. The most probable figure is around two million German marks. Taking into account all the material damage - destroyed houses, cattle killed in the fighting, private vehicles and other consumer goods, it is fair to say that the most immediate cost of the six-month war in Kosovo is 500 million German marks. Mijatovic believes that the incomes per capita in Kosovo have been depleted severely, simply because all the fighting has taken places in the impoverished regions of Drenica and the Junik mountains. The cities, where all the industry is located and the incomes are considerably higher, have so far remained intact. Mijatovic added his estimations were very general because there is still no official information on the extent of the destruction that resulted from the fighting. "It is a relatively cheap war being fought with outdated equipment in an impoverished region and a poor country, where a human life has become virtually worthless", Mijatovic said with a great deal of sarcasm in his voice.