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The West in the Balkans - Part I

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 7/27/2006

Excerpts from an interview granted to www.serbianna.com, May 2004.
Kosovo cannot be compared to Croatia or Bosnia. Kosovo was (and, technically, is) an integral part of Serbia, an autonomous province, not a republic-constituent of the former Federal Yugoslavia. During the initial phases of KLA activity (1993-6), Kosovars did not overtly wish to secede from (the truncated) Yugoslavia. As I said in my interview to "Balkanalysis" earlier this year: "(Milosevic) had (no) 'plan' as far as Kosovo is concerned. He simply wanted to eradicate what he regarded as criminals in cahoots with terrorists - and many Kosovars considered as freedom fighters. A typical Balkan policing operation was labeled 'Ethnic Cleansing' by the West (mainly by the Americans) and treated as genocide by the emerging system of supranational courts. Milosevic could not have foreseen these surrealistic turns of events. He reacted as any besieged self-respecting politician would have. He fought back."

The war in Iraq has exposed the deep fissures in the monolithic facade so painstakingly cultivated by Western leaders during the Clinton decade. The truth is that, in the Balkans, the West spoke in (at least) two voices during the 1990s. Germany, out to reestablish its hinterland, encouraged (at first surreptitiously and then openly) the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The United States, France, and other European countries were against. In 1989, the West was utterly uninterested in the Balkans. It is an impoverished, backward, crime-ridden, crumbling, institutionally dysfunctional corner of Europe. With the exception of Greece and Bulgaria it has little geopolitical or military merit. The West - namely, NATO and the USA - was reluctantly dragged against its will and judgment into the Balkan quagmire, coerced by the emerging doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" and by the EU's military impotence.

The USA would love to get its tortured forces out of here and hand this benighted and insignificant region over to the inapt, understaffed and under-equipped European Union. America's interests elsewhere - in the oil rich Middle East and Caucasus, for instance - are far more vital. But the EU - aware of its shortcomings and limitations - seeks to prolong America's involvement in the region.

As to separatist movements - this is a classic pattern of American global (mis)behavior.

The United States is a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, spawning mutated monsters in its wake. Its "drain and dump" policies consistently boomerang to haunt it.

Both Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega - two acknowledged monsters - were aided and abetted by the CIA and the US military. America had to invade Panama to depose the latter and plans to invade Iraq for the second time to force the removal of the former.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), an American anti-Milosevic pet, provoked a civil war in Macedonia three years ago. Osama bin-Laden, another CIA golem, restored to the USA, on September 11, 2001 some of the materiel it so generously bestowed on him in his anti-Russian days.

Normally the outcomes of expedience, the Ugly American's alliances and allegiances shift kaleidoscopically. Pakistan and Libya were transmuted from foes to allies in the fortnight prior to the Afghan campaign. Milosevic has metamorphosed from staunch ally to rabid foe in days.

This capricious inconsistency casts in grave doubt America's sincerity - and in sharp relief its unreliability and disloyalty, its short term thinking, truncated attention span, soundbite mentality, and dangerous, "black and white", simplism.

In its heartland, America is isolationist. Its denizens erroneously believe that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is an economically self-sufficient and self-contained continent. Yet, it is not what Americans trust or wish that matters to others. It is what they do. And what they do is meddle, often unilaterally, always ignorantly, sometimes forcefully.

Elsewhere, inevitable unilateralism is mitigated by inclusive cosmopolitanism. It is exacerbated by provincialism - and American decision-makers are mostly provincials, popularly elected by provincials. As opposed to Rome, or Great Britain, America is ill-suited and ill-equipped to micromanage the world. It is puerile and ignorant, haughty and overly narcissistic.

Cosmetic and face-saving alterations to its borders aside, Kosovo, in one piece, will end up being an independent state. The Serbs and even the West have no say in this. It is entirely the Albanians' call. The Serbs don't need to be bribed - or bombed. They no longer exist as a meaningful (let alone powerful) political piece on the Balkans chessboard. The Serbs - after much grumbling and gnashing of teeth - will do as they are told by the USA. Recent history teaches us as much.

Serbia is in an excellent position to emerge as an important, nay, indispensable regional player. It is geographically pivotal, has an unparalleled fund of human resources, rich natural endowments, and culture and history to match. Its people are entrepreneurial, generous, and forward looking.

Serbia's problem is its political class. The West's collusion with the local mafias (as represented, for instance, by the late Zoran Djindjic and by the long-serving Montenegrin President, Milo Djukanovic) only exacerbates it.

In Serbia, precious time (and an inestimable amount of goodwill) were wasted on pursuing and purging minions of the ancien regime (Milosevic apart), on imposing the notorious Washington Consensus (a surefire recipe for economic decline), and on aiding and abetting an assortment of indigenous crime lords and murky power brokers.

"After the crisis". This is the key proviso. Serbia has not yet emerged from its crisis. Witness the murder of Djindjic, the stalemate in the presidential elections, the economic under-performance, the unresolved problem of Kosovo, the resurgence of the rabid sort of nationalism, the poverty, the despair.

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