February 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

review

Civil Resistance in Kosovo, Howard Clark Pluto Press (Sterling VA), 2000

A haunting book from the Bosnian war, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, was researched in the 1980s but published in 1995 with the anthropologist-author Tone Bringa regretting that the story of her village of friends was in the past tense. Granada TV had captured its disintegration during January-October 1993 in the film "We are all neighbours," shown on Frontline.

Clark's Civil Resistance in Kosovo, is similarly haunted by the burgeoning civil resistance by the Albanians of Kosovo (Kosovars) in the early 1990s. But their vision failed to achieve more than the violent NATO intervention on their behalf. Perhaps they could not have achieved more--even that was more than the Bosnians achieved until the Serbs killed 8000 men and boys from Srebrenica in a weekend. But ironically, even after the bombing of Serbia, and in the months after publication of this book, the strategic nonviolent campaign of the Otpor student-led movement, steeped in the work of Gene Sharp, major scholar and advocate of nonviolent resistance, energized the civil resistance in Serbia and ousted Milosevic.

The tragedy of the Kosovars is that they could see nothing but a tunnel leading to independence. Clark describes the pre-1990s history, politics, and ethnography of Kosovo in three fine introductory chapters to bring us up to this decade. Unfortunately, the Kosovars lost their best national allies early in the '90s, in particular the Slovenes who turned away to the Alps, while remaining in Yugoslavia became all the more intolerable.

Clark observes that nonviolence emerged rather suddenly during 1990, with no clear initiation, but in tune with events throughout eastern Europe and at the start of the special Campaign to Reconcile Blood Feuds. To be clear, this has not been a pacifist struggle, but rather the choice of nonviolence as a political tool. The Kosovar goal was to be apart, not to convert the society but to find a Botha as a partner for Mandela.

What did the Kosovars need to do to gain that independence? In chapter 4, Clark lays out a strategy, beginning with four largely defensive objectives: contest the Serbian institutions with their own, refuse to be provoked by violence and label it, mobilize international support, and maintain the life of the Albanian community. But the situation and the workings of Albanian society led to a strangely withdrawn movement after a few shining years that Clark covers in his middle chapters. The sacking of most Kosovar public employees--depriving them of the economic and political positions they had held since 1974--left no leverage for cooperation (while the Serbs in Kosovo behaved as part of central Serbia with exclusion of everyone else, rather than considering themselves part of a region of Kosovo inhabited by others). The Kosovars established a strong base of parallel institutions--government, education, health--but failed to build on it. A lively small business environment had no economic strategy for a healthy parallel economy to support self-determination and internal development. The Kosovo Parliament was elected in 1992 but hardly met, and contributed nothing to an active struggle. In the critical period between Dayton and Drenica, a student movement did develop to press for implementation of the 1996 agreement between Milosevic and Kosova President Rugova to reopen the schools to Kosovar students. But it was overwhelmed by a flood of weapons out of the chaos in Albania, by the lesson from Dayton that only armed control of territory would be recognized, and by the newly bloody Serbian repression in Drenica.

Clark's sixth chapter, "Pointers for an Alternative Strategy," covers many things that could have formed an actively nonviolent movement--in education, art, media, and all aspects of the civil society on which an independent Kosovo would depend to survive. Most fundamentally, the Kosovars could not bring themselves to reach out to Serbs against a common enemy in the Milosevic regime, and outreach from Serbian groups was not reciprocated. By failing to acknowledge any place for Serbs in a future independent Kosova, they made the same errors as did Croatia in 1990-91. Even during the student protests, they rejected contact with the demonstrations all that winter in Serbia (an audience highly primed to be educated into a positive position on Kosovo). Instead, this rejection played into the strategy of Milosevic. However much he and other Serbs might have preferred the Albanians to just be Yugoslav citizens with all the others, Milosevic 's play for power required an ultimate scapegoat and his propaganda ensured that Serbs would dislike and fear Kosovars as much as the reverse. Nevertheless, in the end Milosevic lost at home because Otpor understood a fundamental goal of strategic nonviolence that the Kosovars did not--"A change will come when [the regime] cannot rely on its security forces or when its power base withdraws their support."

Sadly, one of the golden aspects of Kosovo society--the Albanian stewardship of the Orthodox heritage in Kosovo--was an early loser to the Milosevic propaganda which portrayed the Albanians as stealing the trees belonging to the church. Lacking a common language and with much less media freedom in Serbia in the late 1990s than during the earlier wars, it is unlikely that trust could be refashioned in place of starkly incompatible "national truths" about the Serb-Albanian relationship in Kosovo. Another book, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War by Julie Mertus valuably shows how the mutually separatist propaganda war was lost early in the 1980s and often thereafter, showing the need for early intervention.

Now the new Serb leadership blames the bombing of Serbia on the Kosovars and the US and will keep the Kosovars and the Montenegrins, however autonomously, as part of the new, lesser, Yugoslavia. Kostunica is under no international pressure for concessions, particularly as he won without any Montenegrin or Kosovar votes (both boycotted the elections as illegitimate).

What more might nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have done in the period after 1981 when conditions in Kosovo began to receive greater political attention within Yugoslavia and outside? There are some 350 NGOs in Pristina now after the war, but hardly a handful were active in the 1980s or even during the Bosnian war. Quietism gained the Kosovars praise, but it was so easily shoved aside from the Dayton agreement--who stood with them at the base gates? Clark's final chapter reflects on the strategy of civil resistance. Mertus also ends with a chapter, which Clark cites as well, commenting on how NGOs interact in such situations and thereby giving pointers on how to go about it. And Clark concludes with a challenge to all of us:

"The anguish over Bosnia in the 1990s has reshaped NATO thinking and capacity; it also converted voices for peace and disarmament into hawks for military intervention. The anguish there should be over Kosovo which should cause people to reflect on the failure of prevention, the failure to esteem and reward those who rejected the war option."

--Gordon Burck is an analyst on chemical and biological weapons disarmament based in Washington, DC. In 1969-71, as a draft refuser, he did alternative service with the Slovene Red Cross, and he has traveled frequently in the area.

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