The International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES), Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyzes events occurring in the Middle East and the Balkans. The former President of the Democratic Party of Albanians (PDSH) in Macedonia and member of the Macedonian Parliament, Arbën Xhaferi, presents his view on the Kosova Crisis. His article, entitled "Kosova Crisis", which was written in 1999, is for its actuality published in its entirety.

Arbën Xhaferi

The former President the Democratic Party of Albanians (PDSH) in

Macedonia and a member of parliament of the Republic of Macedonia

KOSOVA CRISIS

Introduction

Social formations are dynamic organisms, which objectively undergo transformations dependent on factors - economic, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious or cultural - that, in general, affect the society's system of values.

Communism is an ideology, a world outlook that arrogantly proclaimed the end of history even as it tried to dominate history and the factors that promote historical development. Its ideologists concealed unresolved problems in the naïve belief that they had definitively succeeded in suppressing social antagonisms that were supposed to hinder the historical process, and allowing them to bring about the improvement of social formations.

For its part, post-communism is the revenge of history on that ideology, the tragic manifestation of those unresolved problems and antagonisms. The implosion of communist systems has manifested itself in the re-emergence of ethnic, economic, and social conflicts, the deification of the ethnos, and the deconstruction of other human and moral values. Tribal mentalities have been legalized in the creation of ethno-centric States and supplements of ideological States. These phenomena give this historical period its character as one of slowing-down, a historical retardation, or outright anachronism.

The historical retardation, the revenge of history on ideology in the post-communist states expresses itself in two dimensions: The creation of ethnic states, and the creation of colonial relations among different ethnic groups - that is, a sort of neocolonialism. The creation of nation-states was a phenomenon of the 19th century, when this project could be carried out because of different levels of national consciousness and national formation. The process was completed to the advantage of nations with better-formed national consciousness. The successful establishment of some ethnic states was also related to the low level of development internationally of mass media, with weak and fragmentary interaction of the information system.

On the eve of the 21st century, national consciousness has risen to a level that makes assimilation impossible. When the whole planet has turned into a "global village," when global information systems penetrate everywhere and give every crisis a global character, it is almost impossible for ethnic states to be set up in multi-ethnic spaces. Human rights cannot be violated without arousing indignation and reaction on the part of international opinion, ethnic cleansing cannot be carried out on a given territory, colonial or apartheid relations cannot be established among different ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural communities without triggering international concern. In the post-communist states and, in the future, in the Eastern countries in general there are and there will be problems between the tendency to the affirmation and cultivation of diversity, on the one hand, and the tendency on the other to ethnic hegemony and ethnic, religious, ideological of or cultural domination. The latter tendency embraces the justification of colonialism and a right of brutal hegemony, and the misuse of Western values such as democracy, transforming them into an instrument of marginalization of non-dominant ethnic groups, thereby legalizing the right of domination of the majority over the minority, and indeed into a procedure of elimination.

These are global problems and may be explained by the tendency to dominate and the struggle for liberation and emancipation. In this line, in the sphere of international law two categories of ideas confront each other: The right to self-determination, liberation, emancipation, decolonization, and the right of States to sovereignty and to inviolability of their borders. The former right is original, inalienable, and natural. The latter does not absolutism the right to sovereignty, but defines the means and the ways in which borders can or cannot be changed.

Elimination of this confusion is difficult because, in both the political and scientific arena and in the information media, ethnic lobbies and unrestrained ethnic propaganda are at work so that there is a general disorientation over the implementation of those two principles of international law.

Historical Tendencies

Proceeding from the fact that the number of new States is increasing with each passing day, analyzing the phenomenon of decolonization in its various aspects, finding a degree of affinity among the calls for secession in Asia, Africa and Europe, and exploring the factors which brought about the destruction of totalitarian systems - we may conclude that a characteristic of the historical tendency today is the affirmation of diversity. We see as a result the disintegration of ideological totalitarianisms of States - ethnic, religious, linguistic or cultural amalgams set up on the basis of geo-strategic interests.

Resistance to this tendency is expressed through the re-creation of low-level totalitarianisms in partial systems. In this vein, an analysis of the phenomenon of the recycling of totalitarianism reveals parallels between the exclusiveness of the new ethno-centric States and the authoritarianism of patriarchal families or the comparable extreme loyalty of Japanese workers towards their bosses. In all these cases the right to diversity and to ideological, cultural, or merely personal individuality is suppressed through repression or through a will typical of the enslaved mind and suspended consciousness.

A dominant characteristic of this mentality and of its accompanying structures and sub-structures (State, factory, family) in which totalitarianism survives is, along with authoritarianism, exclusiveness too. These systems exclude the other, the different. In the former ideological systems, the opponent of the dominant idea, the communist one of the central planning of the economy, was excluded from society and deported to various gulags, concentration camps, or re-education camps. At present, when ideological totalitarianism is being replaced with ethnic totalitarianism, the same phenomenon of exclusiveness presents itself: now ethnic opponents and competitors are excluded, marginalized or condemned. So we have ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, apartheid in Kosova, and marginalization or ghettoization of the Albanians in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). This totalitarian, authoritarian and exclusive mentality is also closely linked with issues of ethics and moral maturity. A characteristic of moral principles is their universal validity. In totalitarian exclusive systems, moral principles have only partial validity: they are valid only for the conformists, the member of the family, gang, tribe, or ethnos. Hence, the principle that "thou shall not kill" is valid only for the elements of the system; it is not valid for those who stand outside the system. In Bosnia and Kosova this moral immaturity brought about real tragedies for the people who were outside the ethnic and military systems.

This political immaturity also pervades Russian diplomacy: it does not defend principles, but its traditional ally—Serbia. More exactly, it carries out a Slavophil policy.

Those manifestations are against the historical tendency to inclusive systems that affirm diversity, in which the other, the different, is not necessarily an enemy who should be eliminated. In the cultures, which fit into the historical tendency and in which moral maturity stands at a high level, not only do the individual and the system feel responsible for the human "other," but, with the emergence of ecological movements, they affirm this responsibility toward the environment as well.

If a characteristic of the historical tendency is the affirmation of the right to individuality, of the right to the cultivation of ethnic, religious, linguistic, or individual peculiarities, then all those projects that obstruct this process are anachronistic.

Usually the obstruction of this process is justified with arguments:

• Of legality;
• Of the unchangeability of borders;
• Of conspiracy, which does not present the problem in its real light, but sets it in the realm of speculation and imagination which produces the category of the foreign enemy;
• Of racist fundamentalist, Nazi, or ethno-centrist theories;
• Of history, when a glorious historical stage is uncritically chosen or invented and then attempts are made to change the present-day reality so as to fit that imagined past;
• Of globalism, rebutting the problem by generalizing it through creation of absurd analogies - for instance, between the demands and status of the Albanians in the former Yugoslavia and those of, variously, the Hispanics in the United States, the aborigines in Australia, the Basques in Spain, and the Occitans and Arabs in France (Marseilles); and
• Of cataclysm, which presents respect for the right to diversity as an agent of planetary cataclysms.

In this line, the policy of the staff around Serb President Slobodan Milošević is utterly transparent, as, to defend its anachronistic project, it resorts to all arguments, apparently very weighty, when it mentions the factors, which led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Initially it mentions four foreign agents, Western in general, and more concretely Hans-Dieter Genscher, former German minister of foreign affairs, or the well-known US senator, Robert Dole, as responsible for the disintegration of their country. It then presents itself, that is Serbia, in the context of vulgar Nazi theories, as the bastion of Orthodoxy, which stands up against the penetration of Catholicism into the East, of Islam into the West, or the restoration of the Fourth Reich to the north.

Just as transparent are other all-encompassing theories that often resort to bizarre and even grotesque analogies, such as that drawn between the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and the United States. When the Albanians from FYROM called for more extensive use of the Albanian language or the official recognition of the Albanian University of Tetova in the framework of the FYROM educational system, the ideologists of ethnocentrism resorted to the argument of global conditioning: If these rights are given to Albanians, then they should also be given to the Hispanics in Texas and the Arabs in Marseilles.

Historical arguments are just as shallow. In order to justify their hegemony, the Serbian ideologists sometimes resort to the ethnic argument (as they did in Bosnia and Herzegovina, saying the Serb ethnic group had the right to separate) - while at other times they resort to the wholly contrary historical argument (regardless of who lives there, Kosova was anciently Serb). They want to annex Kosova by proclaiming it the "Jerusalem" of Serbia, although this assertion is a complete invention — and anyway, nobody in the Christian world uses an argument of this kind to claim a right to occupy Bethlehem, the holy place of Jesus' birth. This mentality belongs to the era of the Crusades. Is Serbia going through that period today? Such confusion appears to be intentionally created in order to hamper the unstoppable historical tendency. To avoid this confusion it is necessary to analyze the individual historical contexts in which these problems emerge.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

To understand the phenomenon properly, avoiding sterile analogies and pretentious globalizations, the crises that emerge in the world's various social formations should be analyzed in the context of their time and space. The present crisis takes place in the systems of the former so-called "socialist camp" because of the failure of the communist concept of social formation and the State.

Communism emerged on the historical arena with major pretensions. It offered the utopian project of extinguishing social, economic, ethnic, and cultural antagonisms in general. It came out with the method of manipulating the social factors that would accelerate the historical process, that is, the development of history itself. It stated that property should belong to nobody but should be everybody's, should not be private but belong to the people. Consequently territories should not belong to an individual ethnos, or ethnic group, but to the whole people, to the proletarians emancipated from bourgeois leftovers, form the mentality of private ownership, religion or cultural identity.

This new definition emerged at the time when the large multi-ethnic empires - Austro-Hungarian, Turkish-Ottoman and Russian-Czarist - were crumbling. National amalgams disintegrated, magmatic compositions pulled apart, and constituent elements separated. At this time the historical process of the destruction of empires and the creation of national (i.e., ethnically based) States that had started in the 19th century ought to have come to an end. But this did not happen.

The historical process was interrupted with the creation of some unnatural federations - the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav Federation, which had initially presented itself as the Serb-Croatian-Slovenian Kingdom. Cynics claimed that communism was a smokescreen for Pan-Slavism, as initially the territories of a particular nation became property of all nations, of the proletarians divested of all identity. However, at the end of the process, when communist ideology was replaced by nationalist ideology, the common territory, factory, or army of "everybody" becomes inevitably the property of somebody - the ruling class in society, be it an ethnic group or a political nomenclature. For instance Kosova, which had always been a separate entity as Dardania, the Vilayet of Kosova, and the like, becomes part of Serbia (under the constitutional change of 1989), and the People's Army comes under Serb control. Meanwhile, the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, a common republic of the Macedonians, Albanians and others, becomes the independent State of the Macedonians (see Amendments 24-56 of 1989 and the Constitution of 1991).

The phenomena have nothing to do with the virtual world of international conventions regulating relations between States. These are valid in normal conditions, but do not apply to our case. Instead, we are at the beginning phase of the creation of States and confronted with unique historical reality: the dissolution of federations, the secession of their elements, and the emergence in the historical arena of the right to self-determination.

In this context the rights to self-determination, liberation, and de-colonization should have priority over the principle of the inviolability of borders. Likewise, changes of borders in this crisis-ridden zone do not mean changes of borders everywhere in the world, in zones unaffected by crises. Many people may be sick, but the doctor only cures those who come to him. Hence, the Albanian question has nothing in common with the condition of the aborigines in Australia, the Hispanics in the United States, the Arabs in France, or, structurally the Basques in Spain, the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Bretons, and others. Time and space determine the context, whereas the global argument only complicates things and serves as a smokescreen for local colonialism and hegemony.

In this historical context the axiological phenomenon, the system of values in the new social formations, should be taken into account. The question should be asked whether the new political entities guarantee the incontestable human values - freedom, equality, peace and democracy - or merely invoke the former exclusivist principles, recycling the crisis which led the former systems to their destruction. If the new entitles do not guarantee these values right from the beginning, the international institutions should not contest them. New States must be set up only if they respect the new system of values.

YUGOSLAVIA

Yugoslavia in both its first and second incarnations was the product of agreements and contracts concluded among the nations that constituted it as well as of the international context. These contracts were ruptured mainly because of Serb hegemonic tendencies, which periodically manifested themselves in changes to the constitution or in dramatic alterations to ethnic demographics through ethnic cleansing or colonization. Non-Slavs - Albanians, Hungarians, Volksdeutsch Germans - were expelled from their territories, while Lika, Herzegovina or Montenegro were colonized by Serbs. These phenomena represented only the tip of the iceberg of brutal Serb hegemony. Usually Serb methods had an influence in weakening the loyalty of citizens toward the Yugoslav state, which they now considered a Serb Lebensraum. The results of this lack of loyalty were evident when situations of crisis arose. Nobody wished to defend this Serb Yugoslavia when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Indeed, in 1941 the Germans were welcomed in many regions of Yugoslavia as liberators, initially much as NATO troops in Bosnia are welcomed now (although this analogy is not completely correct).

The second Yugoslavia, that of Tito was built on principles, which were supposed to prevent Serb hegemony forever. Eight federal units - six republics and two autonomous regions - were formed, respecting the ethnic structure and historical legacy of all. With this structure, Tito built a system that made hegemony and domination of a greater people over a smaller one impossible. The secret of this system was the mechanism of consensus. This mechanism worked perfectly when the system was monist and led by communists; in that time, all rights were merely formal. Problems cropped up when the communists turned nationalist. The first person to manifest this phenomenon in all its brutality was the former bureaucrat of the communist nomenclature, the present President Slobodan Milošević. In political semantics he represents an abnormality - the transformation of the communist, not into a democrat, but into a nationalist. The mentality he created in general destroyed the chance for the democratization of these regions.

His project started with an attempt to remove the consensus mechanism in decision-making, replacing it - always on the line of the affirmation of Serb hegemony - with principle "one man-one vote." The principle of majority rule would give the Serbs, who were the majority in Yugoslavia, the legal right to decide for themselves and others. Of course, the other peoples of Yugoslavia did not accept this principle and thus ethnic conflict and the definitive disintegration of Yugoslavia began. Pursuing their internal national aims, the Serb nationalists brought about the degeneration of democracy and its cultural values, debasing it into a process for the subjugation or elimination of the lesser peoples by the greater people. (In this dimension there is no difference between the policy of Milošević and that, which seems to be a milder one - the policy of Gligorov in Macedonia. Both those policies rest on the principle "one man-one vote.") So Yugoslavia disintegrated because Milošević wanted to extend Serb hegemony and, what is most important, he did not limit himself to the conventional means of vulgar propaganda to carry out this policy. Worse, he resorted to all means that run counter to the most minimum standards of human rights.

Serb nationalism was the factor in the destruction of Yugoslavia. It squandered and misused all investments, the chances the international community offered the first and second Yugoslavia, and even the third one for a reasonable solution of its inter-ethnic problems. Hence the right entrusted to the Serb people to include others in a shared state - given in the belief that they would resolve ethnic conflicts in a civilized manner - should definitely be taken away from them, as they have showed themselves incapable of creating conditions for equal coexistence. They have showed no readiness to build inclusive systems; on the contrary, they have manifested all their rigidity and their entire propensity to national exclusivity with their concrete projects of ethnic cleansing and of unrestrained domination by Serbs over others.

In this context the works of the Serb "scientists" - Garašanin, Čubrilović and the Nobel-prize winner Andrić - are interesting, also from the scientific viewpoint. They may rightly be called genocidal in regard to the Albanians, along with the Memorandum of the Serb Academy of Arts and Sciences that accelerated the disintegration of the second Yugoslavia. This demonstrates that Serb responsibility for the Yugoslav tragedy cannot fall on only one person, Milošević, nor on his team, but on the whole Serb society, political class, scientists, mass media, and even writers and artists. Their guilt made itself manifest throughout the whole period of co-existence. No legal, or moral, or geostrategic arguments can convince the Albanians to accept, nor are they allowed to accept, any suggestion of remaining under Serb domination. After all this bitter experience, the international community should give the Albanians the historical chance, which the Serbs were unable to use, to create their own State and to govern in a tolerant, inclusive and democratic society that will respect civilized values.

KOSOVA

Kosova has always been and remains an entity of its own, both as regards its geographical and ethnic as well as administrative content. In ancient times it was called Dardania, which had its own geographical and administrative definition, then it was called the Vilayet of Kosova and lately the Autonomous Region of Kosova.

Autonomy was granted to Kosova because the Albanians, not the Serbs, wanted it. Kosova was a constituent element of the former Yugoslavia, had the right of veto and, with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, it automatically won the right to secession, just as the other constituent parts of the federation did.

The following facts argue in favor of the independence of Kosova:

• The former system of a federated Yugoslavia disintegrated because the formula of coexistence did not work; all its other constituent elements achieved the right to self-determination;
• Kosova was a constituent element of the Yugoslav Federation;
• Kosova has its own administrative borders;
• Kosova is a compact entity ethnically, geographically, economically, and infrastructurally - it is an organism on its own;
• More than 90 percent of the Kosovars expressed themselves for independence in a referendum;
• Kosova has been occupied by a foreign power that established a system of apartheid there and exploited it as a colony, so it must be decolonized;
• Kosova has the right to secession also on the basis of precedents.

The independence of Kosova will create stability and peace in the region. Its occupation, or its remaining within the framework of Yugoslavia, destabilizes the region and will pose an ongoing threat to peace and civilized values. The independence of Kosova is supported by a whole range of arguments - legal, historical, economic, geostrategic, and cultural. No argument can justify Kosova's remaining within the framework of Serbia, or Yugoslavia, apart from those customarily used to justify domination, hegemony, expansionism, colonialism and apartheid.

Ljubljana, 20 January 2008

International Institute for Middle East

and Balkan Studies (IFIMES) - Ljubljana

Directors: Bakhtyar Aljaf

Zijad Bećirović, M.Sc.