Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Speak The Truth and Shame The Devil--

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Thursday, February 18, 1999/Page A17

COMMENTARY

by Ben Works

The Clinton administration, one eye on the polls, the other on its core left-liberal constituencies, is now discussing sending U.S. ground forces -- likely 4,000 -- into the ancient Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija (Kosovo) to enforce a political settlement between the Serbian majority of Yugoslavia and the local Albanian Geg majority within the province, an area four-fifths as large as Connecticut. Since 1981, the majority of Albanians within Kosovo have been trying to trick their way to a stolen independence on stolen land through a generous interpretation of human rights charters; but a violent minority financed by drug profits decided to blast their way to independence with Kalashnikovs and grenades.

We are told in one sound-bite that the United States and its NATO allies are prepared to bomb Yugoslavia if it does not agree to come to political terms with the Albanian factions and to stop its police and border security operations against the internationally recognized terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA or UCK). In the next sound bite we are told our ground forces will not invade or conduct warlike operations -- "a non- permissive environment" is this year's euphemism. In the third breath, we are told it is the KLA's guerrilla operations that are the provocative and destabilizing ones. then in the next news cycle we are told all police operations aimed at arresting suspected murders and busting up KLA strongholds are

"massacres" and "human rights violations." But the administration has also made a subtle word change; the call for "autonomy," a vague term at best, has become a call for "self-rule" in the province.

What gives?

Execution of U.S. foreign policy is captive to inflammatory rhetoric, based on propaganda, and used to demonize the Serbs over the past eight years in order to rally domestic political support. In January, the alleged "massacre" at Racak and another police operation at Rogovo are but two events in a long-running dispute between an immigrant majority and a native minority fueled by the ethnic-based group politics of affirmative action in a socialist polity, where so much of the capital base and pork barrel lard is in the hands of the local political rulers. Archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians and diplomatists agree Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia.

Since 1941, a fascist-Muslim movement, now combined, paradoxically, with a Maoist-Muslim movement (the KLA's original core), and funded by a heroin smuggling mafia (which operates throughout Europe and here in New York), has aspired, then schemes to steal Kosovo from its native populations -- Serbs, Roman Catholic Albanians, Gorani, Circassians, Turks and others -- by fraud or by force. Any agreement at Rambouillet must prevent this prospective disaster: make the Albanians engage again in Yugoslav politics, but do not empower sovereignty to Islamic drug lords -- they will take control at gunpoint in an independent state.

In World War II, to achieve a "Greater Albania," Kosovo Albanians joined the SS Skanderbeg Division and ethnnically cleansed Serbs out of their villages in Drenica and other districts. After the war, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the communist dictator, did not allow those Serbs to return; rather, he encouraged more Albanians in from their neighboring homeland. Now Mr. Rugova's political movement seeks to achieve this longstanding goal by sheer fraud, while the KLA is willing to mix terror, force, fraud, and pan-Islamic jihad. This is an interesting difference between urbanized Gegs and their country cousins. Mr. Rugova must imagine a NATO army can keep the countryside gangs in line, but the prospects are that those with the guns will take over a Kosovo cleansed of non-Albanians and poised for independence.

Add to that the ancient Albanian-Geg practice of the blood feud vendetta codified in the 1400s in the "Kanun" of Lek Dukagjini, which makes even Sicilian Mafiosi think twice. Then add the Gegs' general propensity to criminality and banditry -- look at Tirana, then ask Italy and Greece. This is why Europe only wants the violence stopped and does not support an independent Kosovo. And we should not want U.S. troops protecting KLA lawlessness or a process leading to independence for a people who unabashedly perpetuate a barbarous culture of brigandage, violence and ritual murder.

Kosovo's Albanian majority began demonstrating for independence, while harassing non-Albanian communities in 1981, long before the rise of Slobodan Milsoevic and long before any crackdown or curtailment of individual rights by Belgrade. In fact, Robert Dole and Joseph DioGuardi sponsored resolutions in Congress in support of this misbehavior in June 1986, three years before the suspension of Geg misrule by Mr. Milosevic. The fact is that much as we Americans despise Mr. Milosevic based on fact and propaganda, he is the product of the Kosovo Albanians' misrule and conspiracy, not the author of their independence drive or their purported "oppression."

A people who boycott elections, refuse to attend bilingual schools, who quit speaking the majority language as their second tongue, who practice discrimination against their neighbor ethnic minorities, and who generally refuse to cooperate with government by even paying their electrical bills are hardly suffering human rights abuses when the electricity keeps flowing, the phones still ring and the water flows. It has been observed that the Albanians have an utterly free press in Kosovo, cafes are open. But when that majority systematically discriminated against Serbs, Gypsies and others during its time in power -- practicing the tyranny of the majority, which is "democracy's: glaring flaw -- they were rightly shut down.

As individuals, though, the Gegs have not been discriminated against in any way.

In post-communist Bulgaria, the Turkish minority used their political power as "kingmakers" between the left and right. The Albanians could use their political power in Yugoslavia in a similar way once it is clear secession is not an option. This is something Mr. Milosevic will not relish as it weakens his hold on a parliamentary majority.

Mr. Cohen wants to, if we go, have the U.S. Army enter a "permissive environment" but not shooting; it's the same package as Bosnia, where 6,900 U.S. troops remain after more than three years protecting another corrupt and ethnocentric socialist regime. The perceived mission will be to prevent further oppression and fighting, and the Yugoslav police and army will go back to garrisons. But the U.S. and NATO armed forces will be actually protecting non-Albanians from the KLA's violence, while seeking to obstruct its scheme to erect an Islamic "Greater Albania" from Kosovo, the Sanzak, part of Montenegro, part of Macedonia and Albania proper. So the NATO force will have involved itself in a long-term occupation -- to be politically incorrect, we will have embraced yet another tar baby. Still, it if leads to reintegration of Albanians within Yugoslav politics and helps contain this mafia, there is a possible benefit.

Serbia's revenge will be to save money and lives, but if Rambouillet were to lead to a plebiscite on independence, Serbs and other non-Geg-Muslim minorities will be pushed rapidly out in the completion of what is really an Albanian ethnic cleansing of other peoples' lands. Then the West will have created a sovereign state controlled by a heroin-smuggling mafia. Imagine that "empowerment."

So why would America get herself involved? Why should we? To prevent independence, to assure minority rights and to contain heroin smuggling are the only reasons. Otherwise, a NATO occupation will only cover the immediate exodus of more non-Albanians from the core of "Old Serbia" to the point where Kosovo will have been ethnically cleansed for the KLA under the protective shield of Western soldiers. NATO would then be protecting the hub of the Albanian drug trade.

With an independent Kovoso, would NATO and Interpol succeed in either shutting down the Albanian drug mafia or eliminating the flood of "refugees" into Western Europe and the United States?

Hardly likely.

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Benjamin C. Works, executive director of the Strategic Issues Research Institute (of the United States) -- SIRIUS -- analyzes defense and diplomatic affairs for CBS News and Fox News.

© 1999 by The Washington Times_

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