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B. A Clash of Civilizations in Kosovo
Roots of Conflict: After reading Balkan Ghosts "[s]o haunted was the president by the picture of insoluble ancestral hatreds that he dismissed the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession as a 'problem from hell' that warranted no American intervention."5 Three empires, three world religions, and three language groups clashed in the Balkans. The Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires brought competing Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Muslim faiths to Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia. Catholic Croats and Eastern Orthodox Serbs had their own imperial ambitions.
Albanians made up ninety percent of Kosovo’s two million people. Most were Muslim, and their Illyrian language was separate from the Slav language family. Serbs and Albanians had both resisted the Nazis and Croatian fascists in World War II. Yugoslavia's President Tito had allowed Kosovo considerable autonomy. As Yugoslavia began to unravel in 1989, Milosevic revoked local control of the courts and police and restricted use of the Albanian language. Holbrooke concluded:
The animosity in Kosovo, the ethnic hatred is real, not like Bosnia where it was manufactured by demagogues and racists and Mafioso crooks. There was a lot of intermarriage in Bosnia, it's a common language, a common history. Albanians and Serbs are really different people and there's very little interaction and intermarriage and the hatred is much deeper.6
In response to renewed Serbian nationalism in the 1990s, Albanian separatists in the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) terrorized their oppressors. After Kosovo was ignored in Dayton, their numbers and brutal tactics increased. By early 1998 Clinton faced new atrocities against Albanians in Kosovo and a liberation army the U.S. had condemned for terrorism.
After Human Rights Watch documented hundreds killed by Serbs in 1998 a U.S. special envoy visited Yugoslavia. When a moderate Muslim leader visited the White House in May, President Clinton assured him: "We will not allow another Bosnia to happen in Kosovo."7
