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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 remember the past too well and
therefore 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 victors' 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
Slovenes 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, this 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 heavyhandedness 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.