Lucky Serbia. Its infrastructure all but eradicated – it will enjoy the best and latest replacements courtesy a multitude of international financial institutions and NGOs. Materially revamped, nationally revived, militarily vindicated, an invigorated power that withstood the mightiest alliance in history – Serbia is in an excellent position to emerge as an important, nay, indispensable, regional, pivotal player. It can have its choice. In Rugova it will find a genteel, compliant, respectable and submissive partner. In Thaci – a fellow bully. Serbia can conduct business with both. As it tramples over internal dissent, suppresses Montenegro and tightens its grip on its minorities – Serbia will strive to split Kosovo. It will be content with the mineral-rich, historical north. Thaci will be content with any kind of foothold, a stepping-stone on the way to a Greater Albania. There are grounds for doing business and business will be done, indeed.
Poor Kosova. Lucky Serbia. With such opponents, one need not have friends. And, in the background, NATO stumbles on into its worst nightmare, into an apocalyptic tapestry of exploding mines, KLA sniper fire and mortar attacks, Serb revanchism, material devastation, mass starvation and geopolitical destabilization. It is this war: gradual, nerve wrecking, multi-annual, expensive, replete with body bags and horror scenes – that will do NATO in. It is the end of NATO, only it does not know it. It has contracted the humanitarian cancer and its days are numbered.
Milosevic is smiling. He won the war. Completely. And the world has yet to learn it.
Post Scriptum
It is ever so easy and rational to disregard the above scenario. It is abrupt, illogical, paradoxical. The Serbs and Milosevic are surely the KLA's worst enemies. No peace – even one mediated by a confluence of interests – can blossom among the ruins of coexistence and trust shredded. A KLA supported by the Serbs against NATO is as outlandish as an Iraq supported by the USA against Israel.
But the Balkan is a region characterized by its fluid alliances and structures. Rebecca West, in her masterpiece, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" tells of an alliance no less unholy and no more improbable than a KLA-Milosevic one (pages 840-1 in the 1994 Penguin edition):
"It happened that the Slavs who had become Janissaries, especially the Bosnian Serbs, who had been taken from their Christian mothers and trained to forswear Christ and live in the obedience and enforcement of the oppressive yet sluttish Ottoman law, had learned their lesson too well. When the Turks themselves became alarmed by the working of that law and attempted to reform it, the Janissaries rose against the reformation. But because they remembered they were Slavs in spite of all the efforts that had been made to force them to forget it, they felt that in resisting the Turks, even in defence of Turkish law, they were resisting those who had imposed that Turkish law on them in place of their Christian system. So when the rebellious Janissaries defeated the loyal Army of the Sultan in the fourth battle of Kosovo in 1831, and left countless Turkish dead on the field, they held that they had avenged the shame laid on the Christian Slavs in the first battle of Kosovo, although they themselves were Moslems. But their Christian fellow-Slavs gave them no support, for they regarded them simply as co-religionists of the Turkish oppressors and therefore as enemies. So the revolt of the Janissaries failed; and to add the last touch of confusion, they were finally defeated by a Turkish marshal who was neither Turk nor Moslem-born Slav, but a renegade Roman Catholic from Dalmatia. Here was illustrated what is often obscured by historians, that a people can be compelled by misfortune into an existence so confused that it is not life but sheer nonsense, the malignant nonsense of cancerous growth."
This is reminiscent of the Gorani Moslems in 1999 Kosovo who collaborated with the Serbs against their co-religionists, the Albanians. They persecuted the Albanian population – looted, burned houses and worse – more tenaciously and more ferociously than any Serb.
In hindsight, Milosevic would have done well to co-opt the KLA. By pitting it against Rugova and provoking Rugova's camp against a strengthened KLA – Milosevic could have incited a veritable, full fledged civil war among the Albanians. The West would have then begged him to intervene in his by now traditional role of peacemaker. But history took a different turn. The returning Albanians will not forgive or forget. Retaliation has many faces, some less bloodied than others. But retaliation will come. And while Milosevic may have won this battle – he may, indeed, have lost the war. Only history will tell.
(Article published June 14, 1999 in "The New Presence")