The greatest violence since the end of the war in 1999 erupted in Kosovo on Wednesday 17 March, in the divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica. The town is the political centre of Serbs in the north of Kosovo, while there are numerous Serbian enclaves in the central, eastern and southern Kosovo. According to the most recent information released by international forces, at least 26 people have been killed in Kosovo. International forces did not state the ethnicity of the deceased, however, according to some reports there are more Albanians than Serbs, in which the majority of Albanians were killed in scuffles with international forces that were protecting the Serbs. The exact number of victims is not yet known, as the situation in various hotbeds of violence is still not clear. Some 830 people have been injured, including 98 UN police officers and 55 KFOR members. 3600 Serbs have been forced from their homes, and at least 350 Serbian homes and 30 Orthodox churches and monasteries have been torched. These events were incited by two incidents.

Early last week a 17 year old Serbian boy was seriously injured from a firearm near the Serbian village of Čaglavica south of Priština. This angered the Kosovo Serbs, who were convinced that this crime was the doing of Albanian extremists. In a sign of protest, the residents of Čaglavica blocked off the road Priština-Skopje that runs near their village. On Tuesday, 16 March, three Albanian boys drowned in the Ibra River in the north of Kosovo, some 20 kilometres west of Kosovska Mitrovica. The fourth boy, who managed to escape, claimed that the boys ran into the river while running from Serbs who had been chasing them with a dog. This incident aroused anger among the Albanian citizens.

Though there was some doubt regarding the boys’ story, which changed several time, masses of Albanian citizens gathered together in the southern, Albanian side of Kosovska Mitrovica and headed across the bridge towards the Serbian side of town. KFOR attempted to stop them without success, however, some of the protestors crossed the river and began throwing stones at the Serbs. Shots were heard fired on both sides, and there were victims in the scuffle.

Virtually simultaneous, unrest and violence erupted in other parts of Kosovo, and there is the impression that this unrest was not quite spontaneous but was instead planned and organized by extremist Albanian leaders. The most violent incidents were around the village of Čaglavica, where many Albanians gathered together to face the Serbs. The strong KFOR forces failed to stop them, and some of the Albanians succeeded in entering into the village and began torching homes. Only when the American forces from the nearby base at Uroševac was the situation put under control. Buildings with Serbian residents were attacked in Priština, while Albanians entered into Kosovo Polje and torched the post office, medical clinic, school and dozens of homes. Serbian homes were attacked in Gnjilan, there was violence in Prižren where Serbian churches were torched and grenades were launched on the Serbian monastery of Veliki Dećani, and there were many incidents in other towns. Numerous Serbs began leaving their villages and seeking shelter in the KFOR bases and in larger Serbian centres in Kosovo.

On the evening of Wednesday 17 March, anti-Albanian demonstrations were held throughout Serbia, in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Čačak, Vranj. In Niš, a mosque was burned to the ground, the Bajrakli Mosque was torched in Belgrade and its interior completely burned. The demonstrators tried to invade the buildings of the Serbian government and the American Embassy in the early hours of Thursday, however, strong police forces prevented them and they turned instead to smash the McDonald’s display. The demonstrators sought Serbia to immediately intervene and to protect the Serbs in Kosovo with police and military forces.

This was the first crisis situation for the government of the new Serbian Premier Vojislav Kostunica. He promised that the appropriate diplomatic measures would be taken. The President of Serbia and Montenegro Svetozar Marović addressed the people and informed them that he had spoken with UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, who promised an emergency session of the Security Council. Foreign Minister of Serbia and Montenegro Goran Svilanović requested that NATO, which is responsible for the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, take appropriate measures. On that Wednesday evening, the Supreme Defense Council of Serbia and Montenegro, the highest state forum for military issues, also met. The following morning, the report from that session was that the combat readiness of the Serbia and Montenegro Army had been raised to the highest level, but that the country would work exclusively towards a diplomatic solution to the problem. Only the following sentence was mentioned regarding the possible involvement of the army: “The Supreme Defense Council has expressed its readiness to involve the Army of Serbia and Montenegro in aiding the international forces in stabilizing the situation in Kosovo and Metohija within the framework of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, and within the mission of international forces KFOR and UNMIK.”

In other words, if someone in Serbia and among the Serbs in Kosovo was hoping for an independent mobilization of troops, they have been disappointed. This statement clearly shows that the Serbia and Montenegro leadership knows that they cannot help the Serbs in Kosovo. They are prevented from doing so by this UN Resolution and by the Kumanov Agreement of 1999 which ended the NATO attack on Serbia over Kosovo, and Serbia lost Kosovo which became an international protectorate. This document foresees the possibility of a small military force from Serbia to be present on the territory of Kosovo for auxiliary tasks such as mine clearance, however, only where the international administration in Kosovo holds that necessary. Their presence is also permitted exclusively as a part of the international forces with no more than one thousand soldiers. That was also publicly confirmed by the military Chief of Staff Branko Krga.

The ethnic cleansing started by the Kosovo Albanians caused quite a stir among the international community, not only due to the tragic fate of the Kosovo Serbs, but also due to the danger that this could act to destabilize Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia. After the government in Belgrade succeeded in calming the rampage of Serbian right-wingers the following day, and took political initiative to condemn the events in Kosovo, it was put in a somewhat more favourable position.

However, already by Thursday 18 March, NATO rejected the proposal by the Supreme Defense Council to permit a professional military unit of Serbia and Montenegro to enter into Kosovo as part of the KFOR operation. Instead, NATO send additional troops in order to prevent the chaos from spreading. That was a special request by the Belgrade government, and Defense Minister Boris Tadić went to the NATO session in Bratislava and spoke with NATO General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. Upon returning to Belgrade, he announced that if NATO could not fulfill its task, that Serbia and Montenegro was prepared to review its policies on Kosovo.

The international community began to fear that the events in Kosovo would spill over into the two neighbouring countries. Macedonia is currently preparing for new presidential elections following the death of Boris Trajkovski, with whom the Macedonian Albanians were very satisfied. The question is who will be able to succeed this man, who knew well how to harmonize the interethnic interests.

The events in Kosovo were carefully followed in Bosnia Herzegovina. Presiding BiH President Sulejman Tihić made a concerned stated that he was certain that the crisis in Kosovo would not negatively impact the situation in Bosnia. The leaders of Republika Srpska called for peace, and president of the RS Assembly Nikola Kalenić made a special warning to citizens that it was not in the interests of RS for its citizens to repeat what had happened in Belgrade and Niš. BiH is currently being restructures, and RS is trying to fend off any further uniting of state bodies, and as such, violence would seriously weaken its position. This is the reason why there was no particular reaction in RS to the news that an Orthodox Church was torched in Bugojno in recent days.

For the international community, it was a priority to calm the situation, for both Macedonia and Bosnia Herzegovina, but also to prevent a radicalization of the situation in Serbia. There is suspicion that the torching of mosques in Belgrade and Niš was not spontaneous rage of drunken football fans, but the planned radicalization of the situation at a time when Kostunica’s new government has not even begun to operate, and prior to the Serbian presidential elections.

Certain Serbian political analysts have already assessed that the torching of mosques was part of a slow attack on the state, in which the government would be forced to radicalize its moves. Due to international obligations, it was not able to do so, and this was the cause for demonstrations against the government, the kind that some have already tried to organize. In such an atmosphere, the chances of victory for Tomislav Nikolić, leader of the Serbian radical forces, at the upcoming presidential elections were increased.

The international community is trying to halt the radicalization among the Kosovo Albanians as well. The Albanian radicals do not agree with the conciliatory policies of Ibrahim Rugova. He is increasingly showing that he is inclined to dialogue, and direct contact with him have recently been re-started in order to come to an agreement, under the auspices of the international community, on the status of Serbs in Kosovo. Allegedly, Albanian radicals are angry with Rugova, which likely explains the recent grenade thrown into the yard of Rugova’s home in Priština. Allegedly, the Albanian extremists have long been planning such demonstrations, which would force the moderate Kosovo leadership to back away from an agreement with the Serbs, but they lack a real reason to set things in motion.
However, the tragic incident in the northern Kosovo district Zubin Potok where three children were drowned in the Ibra River became a good reason for the mobilization of the Albanian population. However, this time, not against the moderate Kosovo leadership, but against the local Serbs there, and the Albanian extremists tried to take over the initiative on the Kosovo political scene. The violence nullified all the already set agreements and forced the moderate Albanian leaders to radicalize their positions in order to not lose public support. They blamed Belgrade for all that had happened, as Belgrade has insisted on forming cantons in Kosovo which was an unacceptable concept for the Albanians, and announced that under the new circumstances, there was only one possible solution for the Kosovo issue – the complete independence of Kosovo.

For these reasons, it was most important for NATO to calm the situation in Kosovo as quickly as possible. Failure to do so meant the threat of spreading radicalism through the entire former Yugoslavia. Therefore, NATO took the newest crisis in Kosovo very seriously, and halted the plans of the Albanian extremists from the start. Commander of the NATO South Wing, US Admiral Gregory Johnson, flew in from Rome to take over command of the entire operation. Additional American and British forces was transferred to Kosovo from Bosnia, in addition to some 40 airplanes with soldiers from various NATO member states. A specially trained British unit for combating violence is also to arrive soon.

Combating the violence also included serious warnings from the international communities to the Albanian leadership. Admiral Johnson clearly called the events ethnic cleansing, which was also the assessment made by certain European politicians who agree that while the initial events may have been spontaneous, what followed was certainly planned. The Albanian leadership was obviously told that it was most responsible in putting an end to the violence, and as such it made an appeal to the public. The leadership in Kosovo proclaimed a day of mourning for the victims of the unrest, and announced that it would establish a fund to compensate the owners for damages incurred to their property. Even those who wanted to take advantage of the violence for their own political goal – the independence of Kosovo – were quickly quieted. Though the leading moderate Albanian leaders, who had proclaimed that independence was the “only way to permanently resolve the Kosovo issue” are no longer saying this, as they have realized that the newest events have seriously jeopardized that goal.

Western political sources and newspapers have assessed that this violence have shown that there is no reason to rush into granting Kosovo independence, though this was serious considered as a permanent solution, as the Kosovo Albanians, who were to lead the independent country, are obviously not up to the task. Furthermore, there is talk that the American government, which was much more inclined to that solution, has changed its policies due to these events. Washington was inclined to support independence as that would lead to a decreased American military and political involvement in the region, and those resources could be redirected to Iraq. The Kosovo violence proved that the American presence is necessary there, as well as in Bosnia, where trouble could again flare up without it.

The extreme Kosovars perhaps achieved certain tactical goals, forcing Serbs out of a handful of villages and burning their churches, but in the long-term they did not get what they were after. On the contrary, this brutal violence in fact only moved them farther away from their goal, complete independence for the entire territory. Now the talk from the West is that the Serbian proposal of the creation of cantons and, in fact, the division of Kosovo, which Kostunica supports, is not so unreasonable, and that they could use the BiH formula. However, the Kosovo Albanians have not agreed to such a proposal.

NATO also took action to calm the Serbian side, which virtually unanimously began to accuse KFOR in the first days of the violence that they had not done enough to protect the Serbian population there and that they had proven themselves incapable of governing KFOR. This lead to proposals that Serbian military forces should be sent to Kosovo. Though Admiral Johnson rejected this proposal, this is continually repeated by the leading Serbian politicians, in particular by Boris Tadić. NATO has assessed this proposal to be completely unacceptable, as the arrival of Serbian military forces would only complicate the situation and nullify the results of the war in 1999. For NATO it is key to prove that the NATO policies in effect in Kosovo since 1999 are just, in the military, security and political sense. NATO claims that, despite the deaths of dozens of people in the first wave of violence, that the security situation is now fully under control, and the number of Serbs that NATO soldiers succeeded in saving or evacuating is large. This then refutes Minister Tadić’s claims that they are expecting the conflict to escalate. The only Serbian proposal currently under serious consideration is the one of decentralization and cantonization of Kosovo, as the Albanians have also proven that they cannot coexist with the Serbian minority in Kosovo.

For the time being, NATO will have to forget its plans to leave Kosovo and the region of the former Yugoslavia, to reduce its forces there or to hand over the peacekeeping mission to someone else. Furthermore, NATO could even expand its operation in Kosovo by taking over authority of other international bodies which NATO believes to have not fulfilled their tasks. These events have tarnished NATO’s reputation and authority, not only with regards to Kosovo, but also in terms of similar future operations. This reputation can only be returned if these events are not repeated while NATO is in Kosovo.