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                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 74

The Serbian Death Wish


By Strobe Talbott

    Last week there was more bad news with the historically
ominous dateline Sarajevo. The United Nations had pulled out
most of its peacekeepers -- there was no peace to keep -- and
thousands of civilians were suffering, with dwindling supplies
of food and medicine. The catastrophe, in short, continues.

    The people of the Balkans, it is sometimes said, have too
much history for their own good. In a perverse twist on George
Santayana's famous warning, they seem condemned to repeat it.

    Take the Serbs, whose leader, Slobodan Milosevic, is most
to blame for the horrors. Serbs remember vividly what happened
on a late spring day 603 years ago, June 15, 1389, when Prince
Lazar tried to stop the advancing army of the Ottoman sultan
Murad I, 150 miles south of Belgrade. Lazar's army was crushed,
and Serbia fell under Ottoman rule. That epic defeat has roughly
the same significance for Serbs that the destruction of King
Solomon's Temple has for Jews.

    Serbia remained under the Ottoman yoke until the end of the
19th century. Then, during the First Balkan War in 1912, Serbia
and Greece banded together with several other small states in the
area to drive the Turks back to the gates of Constantinople. The
victor's rush to divide the spoils led to the Second Balkan War.
The great powers of Europe stepped in and redrew the map.

    As often happens, the political boundaries they set did not
coincide with tribal ones. The former Ottoman province of
Albania became an independent country, but more than one-third
of the Albanian people ended up outside its borders, living for
the most part as second-class citizens in neighboring countries.

    In Yugoslavia, whose name means Land of the South Slavs, the
non-Slavic Albanians were at a special disadvantage. The Solvenes
had Slovenia, the Croats Croatia, and the Macedonians Macedonia,
but the Yugoslav Albanians never had a republic of their own.
Instead, they were concentrated in the province of Kosovo in
southern Serbia. Worse luck still, that piece of real estate
included the site of the famous battlefield where Lazar lost to
Murad.

    The Yugoslav Albanians consider Kosovo their homeland, which
is not unreasonable since they live there and outnumber the
local Serbs 9 to 1. Most Serbs, however, regard Kosovo as holy
ground, the cradle of their nationhood, because of 1389 and all
that. It has never helped relations between the two communities
that Albanians are predominantly Muslims, while Serbs in the
region have tended to see themselves as descendants of Lazar,
defending the eastern frontier of Christendom against the
encroachments of Islam. During the 1980s the classically Balkan
imbroglio played a key part in the rise of Milosevic, who in turn
has contributed so crucially to the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

   In 1981, the Kosovo Albanians started agitating for the status
of a republic. The Serbs feared that the next step would be
secession, then union with Albania, and many fled. In the late
'80s Milosevic fanned the patriotic paranoia of the remaining
Serbs there and put the province under direct and extremely
repressive rule from Belgrade.

    Until then, the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and
Bosnia had by and large been willing to remain with Serbia in a
loose federation. But when they saw how brutally Milosevic was
dealing with Kosovo, they concluded that he was the embodiment
of Serb nationalism at its worst. Wanting no part of his
Yugoslavia, they headed for the exits.

    Dennison Rusinow, an expert on the Balkans at the University
of Pittsburgh, believes that had it not been for Milosevic's
heavy-handedness in Kosovo five years ago, Yugoslavia might still
be intact today. "Kosovo provided the fuse," says Rusinow, "and
Milosevic provided the detonator that has now led to explosions
across the whole country."

    In the current troubles, the almost 2 million Kosovo Albanians
have so far remained relatively quiet. That is no doubt because
the Milosevic regime has installed in their midst an enormous
military and police apparatus and imposed a state of emergency.
But below the surface, resistance has been building. In
defiance
of the Serbian government, the underground Albanian leadership
plans to hold clandestine parliamentary elections for the
phantom republic this week.

    One new and highly incendiary factor is Albania itself. A
decade ago, at the time of the last serious uprising in Kosovo,
Albania was a Stalinist dictatorship. Whatever their grievances
against Belgrade, few Yugoslav Albanians believed they would
fare better under Tirana. But now that Albania is beginning to
emerge from communism to join the modern world, it will
inevitably serve as a stronger magnet for the loyalties of
Albanians in Serbia and a stimulus to their militancy.

    Having already ravaged Croatia and Bosnia, the third Balkan
War is about to spread into Serbia, setting the scene for a new
battle of Kosovo. Like Prince Lazar, Milosevic will have led his
people to disaster.

    And even that won't be the end of it. If Kosovo blows, so may
Macedonia, where there is a large Albanian population. That could
trigger an intervention from Greece, which takes a mischievously
proprietary interest in the birthplace of Alexander the Great.
Greece's involvement could, in turn, provoke its old antagonist
Turkey to enter the fray, and history really will have come full
circle.