Serb Threat Raises NATO Dilemma

The post-Milosevic world wasn't meant to be like this, but then the idea that the strife in the Balkans was the work of one man was always a dangerous illusion. Slobodan Milosevic may be nothing but a blowhard Serb opposition leader now, but Albanian refugees are once again leaving their homes and a new round of ethnic Serb-Albanian conflict threatens to break out any moment along Kosovo's northern border. At the weekend, the new reformist government in Belgrade set Monday as a deadline for Albanian separatist guerrillas who infiltrated from Kosovo to withdraw from a string of villages inside Serbia, or face eviction by the Yugoslav army. And though new president Vojislav Kostunica later postponed the deadline indefinitely — saying he wanted to give diplomacy a chance — the situation poses a huge dilemma for NATO, since the villages in question are inside a three-mile buffer zone from which Belgrade is barred from sending troops, under the agreement that ended last year's Kosovo conflict.

KLA Blamed

While the Western alliance blames the latest troubles on an offshoot of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and has stepped up its operations against the group on the Kosovo side of the border, it has also warned Belgrade against sending troops into the buffer zone. But for President Kostunica, the continued presence of hundreds of heavily armed guerrillas from Kosovo on Serbian soil killing Serbian policemen is intolerable — particularly when the Milosevic-led opposition is charging that Serbia's government is now in the hands of its enemies. Kostunica's message to NATO has been, essentially, either the West deals with the problem or Belgrade will. But that's precisely what the former KLA men who've returned to arms want: Their goal is to annex the Presevo Valley villages, which house some 70,000 Albanians, for an independent Kosovo, and they've calculated that by forcing a confrontation with the Yugoslavian army, NATO would once again be forced to intervene on their behalf.

NATO's Dilemma

The Western alliance holds no brief for the Albanian separatists, but their provocation of Belgrade could paint NATO into a nasty corner. The spectacle of refugees fleeing as Serb armor descends on their villages to flush out the guerrillas would be an uncomfortable flashback to last year's ethnic cleansing. And yet the only way to prevent that may be to move more forcefully against the Albanian separatists who'd fought alongside the West last time around, which could provoke a dangerous showdown between NATO and the former KLA throughout Kosovo. Even if NATO and Belgrade find a way of resolving the latest flare-up, the intractable conflict of which it is a symptom persists. The more things change in the Balkans, perhaps, the more they stay the same.