America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Last week there was more bad news with the historically ominous dateline Sarajevo. The United Nations had pulled out most of its peacekeepers -- there was no peace to keep -- and thousands of civilians were suffering, with dwindling supplies of food and medicine. The catastrophe, in short, continues.

The people of the Balkans, it is sometimes said, have too much history for their own good. In a perverse twist on George Santayana's famous warning, they remember the past too well and therefore seem condemned to repeat it.

Take the Serbs, whose leader, Slobodan Milosevic, is most to blame for the horrors. Serbs remember vividly what happened on a late spring day 603 years ago, June 15, 1389, when Prince Lazar tried to stop the advancing army of the Ottoman sultan Murad I, 150 miles south of Belgrade. Lazar's army was crushed, and Serbia fell under Ottoman rule. That epic defeat has roughly the same significance for Serbs that the destruction of King Solomon's Temple has for Jews.

Serbia remained under the Ottoman yoke until the end of the 19th century. Then, during the First Balkan War in 1912, Serbia and Greece banded together with several other small states in the area to drive the Turks back to the gates of Constantinople. The victors' rush to divide the spoils led to the Second Balkan War. The great powers of Europe stepped in and redrew the map.

As often happens, the political boundaries they set did not coincide with tribal ones. The former Ottoman province of Albania became an independent country, but more than one-third of the Albanian people ended up outside its borders, living for the most part as second-class citizens in neighboring countries.

In Yugoslavia, whose name means Land of the South Slavs, the non-Slavic Albanians were at a special disadvantage. The Slovenes had Slovenia, the Croats Croatia, and the Macedonians Macedonia, but the Yugoslav Albanians never had a republic of their own. Instead, they were concentrated in the province of Kosovo in southern Serbia. Worse luck still, that piece of real estate included the site of the famous battlefield where Lazar lost to Murad.

The Yugoslav Albanians consider Kosovo their homeland, which is not unreasonable since they live there and outnumber the local Serbs 9 to 1. Most Serbs, however, regard Kosovo as holy ground, the cradle of their nationhood, because of 1389 and all that. It has never helped relations between the two communities that Albanians are predominantly Muslims, while Serbs in the region have tended to see themselves as descendants of Lazar, defending the eastern frontier of Christendom against the encroachments of Islam. During the 1980s, this classically Balkan imbroglio played a key part in the rise of Milosevic, who in turn has contributed so crucially to the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

In 1981, the Kosovo Albanians started agitating for the status of a republic. The Serbs feared that the next step would be secession, then union with Albania, and many fled. In the late '80s Milosevic fanned the patriotic paranoia of the remaining Serbs there and put the province under direct and extremely repressive rule from Belgrade.

Until then, the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia had by and large been willing to remain with Serbia in a loose federation. But when they saw how brutally Milosevic was dealing with Kosovo, they concluded that he was the embodiment of Serb nationalism at its worst. Wanting no part of his Yugoslavia, they headed for the exits.

Dennison Rusinow, an expert on the Balkans at the University of Pittsburgh, believes that had it not been for Milosevic's heavyhandedness in Kosovo five years ago, Yugoslavia might still be intact today. "Kosovo provided the fuse," says Rusinow, "and Milosevic provided the detonator that has now led to explosions across the whole country."

In the current troubles, the almost 2 million Kosovo Albanians have so far remained relatively quiet. That is no doubt because the Milosevic regime has installed in their midst an enormous military and police apparatus and imposed a state of emergency. But below the surface, resistance has been building. In defiance of the Serbian government, the underground Albanian leadership plans to hold clandestine parliamentary elections for the phantom republic this week.

One new and highly incendiary factor is Albania itself. A decade ago, at the time of the last serious uprising in Kosovo, Albania was a Stalinist dictatorship. Whatever their grievances against Belgrade, few Yugoslav Albanians believed they would fare better under Tirana. But now that Albania is beginning to emerge from communism to join the modern world, it will inevitably serve as a stronger magnet for the loyalties of Albanians in Serbia and a stimulus to their militancy.

) Having already ravaged Croatia and Bosnia, the third Balkan War is about to spread into Serbia, setting the scene for a new battle of Kosovo. Like Prince Lazar, Milosevic will have led his people to disaster.

And even that won't be the end of it. If Kosovo blows, so may Macedonia, where there is a large Albanian population. That could trigger an intervention from Greece, which takes a mischievously proprietary interest in the birthplace of Alexander the Great. Greece's involvement could, in turn, provoke its old antagonist Turkey to enter the fray, and history really will have come full circle.