Postwar agenda

The NATO countries have been clear about the postwar agenda in Kosovo and Serbia. The first goal has been to create conditions under which peace and order might return to Kosovo. That means providing a credible police force that not only allows the Albanian refugees to return but also—a much more difficult task—protects Serbs from retaliatory violence. The second goal has been to bring relief and development aid to the region, thereby laying the basis for future economic and political stability and eventual integration into Europe. NATO has insisted that the second goal be conditionally linked to a third: the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power in Serbia. 

The first goal remains unrealized. On July 23, 14 Serb farmers were shot dead while they were harvesting crops near the village of Gracko. In Pristina on August 2 an 80-year-old Serb woman, feet and hands bound, was drowned in her bathtub. According to a NATO official, a young Albanian couple moved into her apartment hours after the murder. And these are but two examples of the scores of revenge killings, many of them execution-style, that have taken place since NATO-led peacekeepers entered Kosovo on June 12. Almost certainly the Kosovo Liberation Army is complicit in many of the slayings as it pursues a policy of intimidation designed to drive the remaining Serbs out of Kosovo. The policy is working.

No one should have expected a peaceful multiethnic society to be established overnight in Kosovo. And no one can be surprised that some Albanian Kosovars—who were forcibly removed from their homes and then returned to find their loved ones murdered, their possessions looted, and their homes destroyed and sometimes obscenely violated—have taken revenge against suspected perpetrators or accomplices. As for the Kosovar Serbs, they can hardly be expected to be so devoted to creating a multiethnic Kosovo that they would risk their lives by staying.