The Big Powers (really, the West) would have done well to leave the
Balkan to its own devices. Clearly its inhabitants were intent on
re-drawing borders and securing ethnic homogeneity. Serbs, Croats,
Bosniaks, Kosovars - were all busy altering maps and ethnically
cleansing minorities. The clumsy and uninformed intervention of the
West (led by the USA) served only to prolong these inevitable
conflicts. By choosing sides, labelling, providing military and
diplomatic succour, arming, intervening, cajoling, and imposing
ill-concocted "solutions", the West internationalized local crises and
prevented attrition and equilibrium - the prerequisites to peace. The
West's artificial arrangements, served on the bayonets of SFOR and KFOR
are unlikely to outlast SFOR and KFOR. Moreover, humanitarian military
interventions have proven to be the most pernicious kind of
humanitarian disasters. More people - Kosovars included - died in
Operation Allied Force than in all the years of Serb repression
combined. The Balkan is simply frozen in geopolitical time. It will
re-erupt and revert to old form when Western presence is reduced and
perhaps even before that.
The West should have ignored the Yugoslav wars of succession. But it
would have done well to offer the combatants - Serbs, Croats, Albanians
- a disinterested diplomatic venue (a benign, voluntary Berlin Congress
or Dayton) to iron out their differences, even as they are fighting.
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