March 18,1998

KOSOVO ISSUES

Increasing international pressures on the Serbs to grant "greater autonomy" to the Kosovo Albanians need to come to grips with a basic reality if that is ever going to be a lasting resolution of the "Kosovo Problem." Negation of this reality through the slogan of "human rights" and a subsequent punishment of Serbs in Serbia and at Kosovo will only insure a most unstable future across the board. This reality is that over half of the ethnic Kosovo Albanians are not documented Yugoslav citizens. In contrast to the American legal tradition, children born in Kosovo of ethnic Albanian parents are not automatically citizens of Yugoslavia. It is not the rule of jus solis but jus sanguinus that applies to the tradition in force. The Yugoslav state (old or truncated recently) has required, as do other countries, that foreign nationals apply for citizenship. The ethnic Albanian parents who had hundreds of thousands of children at Kosovo never applied for the Yugoslav citizenship. Several hundred thousand ethnic Albanians simply crossed over the border and settled at Kosovo without ever bothering to formally ask for the Yugoslav citizenship.

Every state in the world has the right to regulate immigration and all do it in a variety of ways. The problem of illegal immigrants in the US itself has led to a variety of stern measures and deportations. After the recent collapse of order in Albania, thousands of Albanians tried to settle in Italy. They were ruthlessly shipped back, with lives lost, because the Italians did not want another Kosovo in their country, especially given that the Albanians have the highest birth rate in all of Europe. There were no outcries of violations of "human rights" or of "punishing Italy." If there is to exist an international order then one standard cannot be applied to Italy and another to Yugoslavia. Application for citizenship by foreign nationals is a minimal legal requirement everywhere. With the citizenship granted come certain obligations and not only benefits. Among them are respect for the state law, acceptance of the of official language and educational system as well as the promise of loyalty to the adopted country.

The ethnic Albanians who reside in Kosovo without the Yugoslav citizenship have not met any of the qualifications while acquiring demographic majority through the interventions of the Italian Fascists and the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia and Albania before Albania went over to Mao. Moreover, they have persuaded the ethnic Kosovo Albanians who hold the Yugoslav citizenship to participate in the disregard of the basic requirements. They have setup in effect a state within a state refusing even to pay the Yugoslav taxes. Thus, to grant "greater autonomy" to the Kosovo Albanians is a call from abroad to accept automatically as permanent residents almost a million ethnic Albanians who never bothered to apply for and honor the terms of the Yugoslav citizenship. It should be obvious that this is a prelude to Greater Albania sanctioned by the same international forces that have denied the Serbs their self determination in Krajina and in Bosnia under the accusation that the Serbs were creating a Greater Serbia. Moreover, in the case of Krajina, the US generals trained the new Croatian army with the specific mission to bring the "Krajina Rebels" under the authority of the Croatian State. Four US jets, under the NAT0 command bombarded Serb installations around Knin as the Croatian army launched its blitz-krieg and ethnically cleansed some 200,000 Serbs whose families had been in Krajina even before the Mayflower touched the Plymouth Rock. There, too, were no outcries of the violation of human rights from the Enlightened West.

It is thus high time for the International Community (a construct particularly favored by US officials with which to envelop their own version of what is Right and Wrong) to really apply itself to the resolution of the Kosovo problem. Planes and guns will not produce anything lasting. Nor will the "punishment" of the "Serbs" really satisfy anything except the venality of Serbophobes formed after almost a decade of media campaigns against the "Serbs." What will turn the tide into a lasting and peaceful solution to a most dangerous problem in Southern Europe is the economic and logistical assistance of the wealthy nations to repatriate the ethnic Albanians at Kosovo who do not hold the Yugoslav citizenship and will not apply for it as well as honor its requirements. At the same time, Albania should be given huge economic assistance to reabsorb its citizens who had simply been living in another and economically better-off country. The alternative to the repatriation would be application for the Yugoslav citizenship and the Albanian "besa" that it will be honored. 0nce the citizenship issue is settled in a positive way with all-around cooperation there will have arrived a time when the future of Kosovo can be discussed. To insist the hardships of repatriation it is possible for the Serbs to allow on their terms and not anyone else's a possible detachment of a part of Kosovo and its attachment to Albania by international agreement. If the International Community is unwilling to provide the economic, logistical and impartial good offices for the proposed solution of the Kosovo Problem, it should disqualify itself from taking moral stands at Kosovo altogether.