Misha Glenny, wants to appease the Kosovo separatists with part of Serbia so they would not start a war in Macedonia. He fails to tell us why would they start a war there. Perhaps, they intend to create 'Greater Albanian'. In a recent article in NY Times (will be posted here), Glenny urges Kosovo Albaninas not to seek full independence NOW -- Glenny thinks it's not the right time for it. That, in a nutshell, is what the Serbs are put against, the separatist dream will be granted at some later time. Why should the Serbs help them get there by granting them authonomy now? --ddc

The Observer, March 8, 1998

Serb blitz helps gunmen eclipse peacemakers;

Misha Glenny warns of catastrophic consequences if conflict
with ethnic Albanians spills over into Macedonia

BY: MISHA GLENNY

THE Serb security forces in Kosovo claim that by killing Adem Jashari they have decapitated the Albanian insurgent organisation, the Kosovo Liberation Army. On Friday, Jashari fell victim in his home village of Prekaz to a Serb police operation of unprecedented ferocity.

The Serbs say they killed 20 Albanians; Albanians say it was 70,  in a 'massacre characterised by Bosnian- style atrocities'.

There is no doubt that Jashari was a member of the KLA. But one of Jashari's acquaintances, who demanded anonymity, said he was 'not the brains behind the KLA or anything approaching that'. Albanians in Kosovo say the Serbs have cut off the hydra's head and the KLA will return with a vengeance.

It is now over two years since the KLA first resorted to violence. Its first victim was Blagoje Okulic, a Serb refugee from Croatia.

When he arrived in Kosovo in 1995, Okulic must have been relieved. He had fled his house, trekked through Bosnia, and spent months in transit camps in Serbia before getting a place in a refugee centre in Kosovo.

On the evening of 22 April 1996 he was sitting with a friend in a cafe when a masked man opened fire on the customers with an automatic weapon. Okulic died in hospital.

Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority resents the heavy-handed rule of the Serb government, but until recently killings like that of Okulic were rare.

The Serbs claim that by killing Jashari and destroying his home they have rooted the KLA out of the Drenica area where he lived, west of the capital Pristina. But this type of operation will not destroy the KLA. The Podujevo region, north of Pristina, is rife with Albanians ready to join the fight. Support for the KLA grows by the day, while the strategy of peaceful resistance to Serbian rule - championed by the Albanian leader, lbrahim Rugova - is all but dead.

'If you kill 20 people from Drenica,' said Ismet Hajdari, a  journalist from Pristina, 'then the whole region goes over to the KLA. This is the most powerful anti-Rugova instrument imaginable.' Many Serb and Albanian intellectuals see last week's campaign of state terror as a Machiavellian strategy by Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav President. In pushing the Albanians to the limit, he may have gone mad, they argue, but he is not stupid.

'Milosevic is doing this on purpose in order to radicalise the Albanians,' said Veton Surroi, editor of the Pristina newspaper Koha. 'Perhaps he has to be a warmaker before he can play the role of peacemaker in Kosovo. '

But many fear the situation will go out of control. As long as the Albanians of Kosovo followed the Gandhi-like course advocated by Rugova, Kosovo was an accident that could not happen. But at the end of 1995 a small group of militants lost patience with the persistent violation of Albanian rights by the Serb authorities in Kosovo.

Since then the KLA has carried out dozens of shootings and several bombings. Its favoured target has been Serb traffic police, although it has also claimed responsibility for killing Albanians who profess loyalty to the Serbian state and a few refugees, such as Okulic.

'At most there are about 100 active members of the KLA, not more,' explained Hajdari, 'But because of the exceptional sense of solidarity among Albanians in Kosovo, the organisation is extremely effective for its size.'

It draws support from the close family and clan links of Albanians living in the countryside.

After chaos broke out in Albania last year, the country was in the grip of gangsters for months. They looted Albanian army arsenals and imported shiploads of light weapons from Italy. Much of this material was shunted into Kosovo to the north and Macedonia in the east, where there is another large concentration of restless Albanians.

'This was when the KLA started arming itself properly,' a Geneva-based diplomat from the former Yugoslavia said. 'And the Kosovo emigres here in Switzerland have provided substantial funds for them.'

Until recently the Serb security forces in Kosovo did little to curb the KLA's activities. They were content to continue their policy of random arrests, beatings and generally making life miserable for ordinary Albanians. But in January the Serb police responded to the Albanian attacks by moving into KLA strongholds, spraying buildings with bullets and harassing suspected KLA activists.

With an increasingly radical Albanian population in Kosovo, there are growing calls for the UN Security Council to be convened. Tomorrow the Contact Group of Russia, the US, France, Germany and Britain will hold an emergency meeting in London to forge a united policy.

'Our policies are unco-ordinated and none of us really knows what to do,' admitted a Foreign Office official, 'but we must come up with some sort of play pretty quickly before it is too late.'

As far as the Europeans and Americans are concerned, 'too late' means when the fighting spills over into Macedonia. Ethnic Albanians make up a quarter of the population there and their relationship with the majority Macedonian population, Slavs like the Serbs, is delicately balanced. If refugees from Kosovo flee to Macedonia, that balance could be thrown out of kilter.

The Balkan Wars, a terrible preface to the First World War, were fought over Macedonia. If there is not a halt to the fighting in Kosovo soon, we shall have to brace ourselves for a reprise.