Whispers about a face-saving Serbian loss to the world’s most powerful military alliance began here long before NATO bombs started to fall on Yugoslavia.
Reinforced earlier this week in various interviews with well-placed officials in the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, opposition leaders and Serbs downing beers in Belgrade bars, the whispers all follow a similar line of Balkan logic. It goes like this:
Surrendering control of Kosovo, a province that has significant historical and religious importance to 10 million Serbians, through peaceful negotiation would be humiliating. It would break Milosevic’s hold on the hearts and minds of nationalists, leaving him open to challenge and possible assassination at the hands of well-armed warlords who are part of the ruling elite in Belgrade.
But a military loss of Kosovo, after a brave and hopeless struggle against an overwhelming foe, could be just the ticket Milosevic needs to survive with his Serbian honor and his rule intact. It could rid him of a region where more than 9 out of 10 people are ethnic Albanians, an impoverished place that political analysts in Yugoslavia agree is all but ungovernable.
At the same time, such a military defeat would sanctify Milosevic in the lost-cause tradition of Serbia’s famously martyred Prince Lazar. Just before dying in Kosovo in 1389 during a legendary failed charge against the Ottoman Turk invaders, the prince said, “It is better to die in battle than to live in shame.”
In this scenario, even as he savored the sweet fruit of a glorious Serbian defeat, Milosevic would not have to share Prince Lazar’s unpleasant end. For unlike the prince, Milosevic wages hopeless war from the safety of his bunkered residence in Belgrade.
None of this, of course, has surfaced in any official discourse in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. With NATO bombs falling nightly, such arguments, if breathed in public, would be treasonous. Officials and state-controlled news organizations hold to the line voiced this week by Vuk Draskovic, a deputy prime minister, who thundered during a news conference: “Losing Kosovo would be the death penalty for the Serbian nation. Kosovo is the root of our national history.”
Amid all this noise, however, there was no shortage of Serbs willing to speak softly of Realpolitik.
“Any Serbian leader who simply wrote off Kosovo would have a terrible political problem,” said Dejan Anastasijevic, who writes about military affairs for Vreme, an independent Belgrade weekly. “But it is sort of honorable to lose after a battle with the most powerful military alliance in the world. I think Milosevic probably is aware that in the long run, he cannot keep his control over Kosovo, and he has opted for losing it by force.”
Similar sentiments, although not for attribution, were voiced by an official a few hours before the first bombs fell on Kosovo on Wednesday night.
“If it is lost, we keep the right to reconquer it, even 100 years from now,” the official said. “If we give it away, it is lost forever.”
This view has been percolating for weeks in Belgrade. At Wunderbar, a downtown watering hole, well-educated young people cynically refer to a nation without Kosovo as the “Fourth Yugoslavia,” conjured up by Milosevic as part of his decadelong reign of fomenting ethnic war and losing real estate.
The first three incarnations fell apart beginning in 1991 as his nationalist policies brought about the breakup of the six republics of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation, the loss of Serb-majority territory during the Croatia war and, in the Bosnia war, the loss of what many Serbs regarded as their land.
In the political culture of Serbia, where defeat in pursuit of nationalism ensures popular support, none of these losses crippled Milosevic. He seems uniquely accomplished in the curious Balkan art of losing wars and winning elections. Similarly, with the Serbian leader now taking on the United States and much of the Western world, a defeat in Kosovo has an almost delicious political upside.
“It sometimes looks like America and Europe are doing all things to support the survival of Milosevic,” said a 31-year-old rock musician drinking beer at Wunderbar. “After the bombing and the loss of Kosovo, he will be stronger.” The musician said he did not want his name published because he is trying to avoid mandatory military service.
Demographic and economic realities also play fundamental roles in this argument.
Kosovo, a farming region of about 2 million people at the southern tip of Serbia, is by far the poorest and least developed part of Yugoslavia. Before the breakup of the six republics, it had the federation’s highest infant mortality rate, highest illiteracy rate and, ominously for Serbs, highest birth rate.
Ethnic Albanians were the third-largest group in what used to be Yugoslavia, after the Serbs and the Croats. If their birth rate continued at current levels, demographers say, they could surpass the Serbs in population in the coming century.
Decades ago, ethnic Albanians became the overwhelming majority in Kosovo itselfand they have resisted a number of Milosevic’s schemes to repopulate the region with Serbs. Many Belgrade Serbs say they never travel to Kosovo and their only interest in the place is in preserving its medieval Orthodox monasteries.
While all this may be news to Americans trying to figure out what the bombing is all about, it has long figured into the calculations of Serbian leaders in Belgrade and Kosovo politicians. Seven years ago Veton Suroi, a political leader in Kosovo, said confidently that ethnic Albanian autonomy “was only a matter of time.”
But the bloody separatist struggle that has been under way in Kosovo for the last year, analysts say, was not inevitable. As was the case in Croatia and Bosnia, violence was ignited by Milosevic’s maneuvering.
“Milosevic burned his bridges with the Albanians in 1989 when he ended the autonomy they were given by Tito in 1974,” said Anastasijevic, the Vreme writer.
In 1989, when Milosevic was president of the republic of Serbia, he played his first nationalist card in Kosovo, stripping ethnic Albanians of political rights and tapping into long-simmering rage among those Serbs who resented the Albanians’ political power in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
There have been repeated opportunities in the last decade for a peaceful endgame in Kosovo.
“He had several chances to correct his policies during the past 10 years,” said Anastasijevic. “The main Kosovo leaders for most of that time were pacifists. He probably could have made a deal with them that would have kept an autonomous Kosovo in Serbia.”
Those pacifists, however, lost popular power last year to leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose members were fed up with go-slow policies that brought little but Serbian repression.
Since then, violence has fired up Serbian nationalist sentiment, especially among Serbs who would not normally care about Kosovo.
Anastasijevic said the noble loss of Kosovo in an unwinnable war would keep those sentiments alive, at least in the short term. In the process, he added, Milosevic will be able to distract Serbs from the many other costs of being a pariah state in Europe.
