The latest country to find its place on the map is sending shockwaves around the world.
Kosovo’s declaration of independence 17 February brings the number of statelets born out of the former Yugoslavia, population 23 million, to seven — Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and now Kosovo, which boasts an impressive two million.
Statistics are trotted out to justify independence from Serbia. Ninety per cent of residents are Albanian, it is said, though this excludes 250,000 Serbs who fled when the NATO invaded. Some 120,000 plucky Serbs remained and a brave 18,000 have trickled back in recent years — under armed escort — to hostile neighbourhoods, to reclaim homes seized by Albanian squatters when NATO troops occupied the province. But demographic shifts are no reason to dismember a country.
The province was the heartland of the Serbian Kingdom in the 13th century until conquered by the Ottomans in the 15th century, and only by the end of the 19th century did it have a slight majority of ethnic Albanians for the first time. It suffered mass population transfers of both Serbs and Albanians over the years and finally achieved quasi-state status within the Yugoslav Federation by the 1960s. In the 1970s, the demographic balance was 75-25 Albanian-Serbian. Milosevic owed his rise to the presidency to his defence of Serbs in Kosovo after the death of President Josip Broz Tito in 1980, whose motto was “a weak Serbia means a strong Yugoslavia.” Kosovo’s nationalists were demanding full republican status within the federation by then, and in 1990 its parliament even declared independence (only recognised by, surprise, Albania). This dissolving of the delicately balanced federation would have been suicide and the movement was suppressed, as similar movements have been in Spain, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and many, many other countries, with nary a whisper of protest by the “international community”.
Milosevic’s attempt in the 1990s to resettle Serbian refugees from civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia prompted the formation of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1995, a rag-tag rebel group financed by drug, arms and human trafficking, which made it to the US State Department’s prestigious list of international terrorist organisations in 1998 — Osama bin Laden made three visits to Kosovo 1994-96, but which the West nonetheless supported in the “liberation” of Kosovo in 1998-99. The denouement — Milosevic being served up to the International Criminal Court by Serbia’s current prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica — did nothing to reverse what was by now a clear policy by the West to carve a new, compliant state out of the remains of Yugoslavia.
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