Kosovo has nothing
to do with the encirclement of Russia, and
everything to do with America's failing effort to
hold together a coalition of friendly Sunni Arab
states against Iran's challenge in the Persian
Gulf.
Washington does not care about
Kosovo. It simply wants to put the issue to rest
by the most expeditious means possible, the
better to deal with its
urgent business at hand. No matter that
Washington's objective is chimerical, as M K
Bhadrakumar explained April 11 on this site (The chimera of Arab
solidarity.)
Former ambassador
Richard Holbrooke, the stage-manager of the 1999
war against Serbia, warned in the March 13
Washington Post that war would erupt if Russia
attempted to "water down" the Kosovo independence
plan. "The Bush administration and the public have
paid too little attention to a series of Russian
challenges to the stability of Europe ... If
[there is] a Russian veto in the Security Council,
or an effort to water down or delay Ahtisaari's
plan, the fragile peace in Kosovo will evaporate
within days, and a new wave of violence - possibly
even another war - will erupt."
Holbrooke
added, "Moscow 's point about protecting fraternal
Slav-Serb feelings is nonsense; everyone who has
dealt with the Russians on the Balkans, as I did
for several years, knows that their leadership has
no feelings whatsoever for the Serbs."
In
this instance, Holbrooke is as wrong as one can
be. Never mind that Russia entered World War I to
defend Serbia against Austria and fought alongside
Serbia against Germany in the Second World War.
Sentiment is not the only issue. Russia, as I
reported in Russia's hudna with the
Muslim world (Asia Times Online
February 21, 2007) must face the prospect of
Islamification far sooner than Western Europe.
There can be no doubt that Europe is
resigned to gradual absorption into the
umma. Father Richard John Neuhaus, the
conservative Catholic writer, quotes an
"influential French archbishop" saying, "We hope
for [assimilation of Muslim immigrants], while we
work at reducing immigration and prepare ourselves
for soft Islamicization." Western Europe is a
beaten, deracinated rabble with no will to fight.
Russia is a different sort of beast. The Kosovo
question for Russia is not a sentimental, but an
existential matter.
No modern people have
proven a greater inconvenience than the Serbs.
They threw off two foreign yokes unaided - the
Ottomans during the 19th century, and the Germans
during the World War II. Out of pride and
pig-headedness, Serbia refused to give up the
Muslim-majority province of Bosnia to Austria, and
the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince Ferdinand
by extremists supported by Serbian intelligence
sparked World War I.
After initial
reverses, Serbia marched its army and a large part
of its population over the mountains in mid-winter
and regrouped, eventually throwing out the
Austrian and German armies, at the cost of 28% of
its total population and 58% of its men.
I
do not wish to glorify Serbia's history. John
Keegan in his History of the First World
War argues that if Austria had crushed Serbia
immediately after the murder of the heir to its
throne, world war might not have been the outcome.
The broader interests of humanity might have been
served by smacking down the Serbs on other
occasions. This is not one of them.
Serbia
has had a brutal history which has made its
leaders brutal, as the world observed during the
breakup of the former Yugoslavia. But Serbian
demands in the case of Kosovo today are limited
and reasonable, namely a partition that serves the
interests of the small Christian minority. I do
not think Russia will let Washington make a
horrible example of them in order to create an
example of "US-Muslim partnership".
If
Washington does not modify its support for
independence, the most likely outcome is a Russian
veto of the Ahtisaari plan in the UN Security
Council, followed, perhaps, by a unilateral
declaration of independence by the Albanian Muslim
majority in Kosovo. The aftermath could be quite
messy, namely a small shooting war between
Christians and Muslims on European soil. "Soft
Islamification," in the words of Father Neuhaus'
French archbishop, may turn out to be no option at
all.
It would be foolish to try to guess
the outcome. After all, no one expected the
inconvenient Serbs to become the casus belli of
1914. No one wanted the war; the generation of
leaders that guided Europe in 1914 had spent a
whole generation avoiding a general European war.
No-one, least of all Russia, wants an open
conflict with Muslims. But there are limits to
what the Orthodox Christian world will tolerate,
and they may have been reached in Kosovo.
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