next - main - previous
The Eurasian Politician - Issue 3 (February 2001)
By Anssi Kullberg, 30th March 2001
(Click here for the Finnish version)
In 1997 it was restless in the Western Balkans. Albania was plagued by a short civil war, which had started from the collapse of pyramide companies and which ended with the quittance of the authoritarian president Sali Berisha and democratisation of Albania. The Albanian civil war was stopped by a NATO intervention, which was successful and effectively stopped the conflict in the country that is divided into south and north (northern part including also Kosovar and Macedonian Albanians). Albania is still poor and unstable, but it is remarkably moderate – almost a model country in the Balkan context. For some reason media have not been as interested in the intervention to Albania that ended happily – thank to adequate timing – as it has been in the interventions, always too late and with same mistakes, that have been done to stop the bloody events in former Yugoslavia. It has also not been much noticed how peaceful development has taken place in Albania, Europe’s poorest country, after the intervention, while Yugoslavia, once the freest and wealthiest of the socialist bloc, has fallen into seemingly endless conflicts.
In the same year I was travelling in the Balkans for second summer. Besides Albania, also Macedonia was restless. Greek Macedonia was paying attention on the situation of the Greek minority of southern Albania (for the Greeks Northern Epirus) in the turmoil of Albanian civil war. Albanian nationalists were told to expel ethnic Greeks from their homes in Gjirokastër (in Greek Argyrokastron) in order to hand their houses over to Albanian refugees, who were then already, in 1997, fleeing tyranny from dictator Slobodan Miloševic’s Yugoslavia to poor Albania. In Kosova, systematic state terror against Albanians was already going on and most people knew to expect a full-scale war. Western politicians and media, however, purposefully chose to silence about Kosova, because in the cabinets of the superpowers it had been decided that Kosova, which declared independence in 1992, should not become an independent state, whereas Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republic of Macedonia, which declared independence in 1993, should be made independent. They should become independent state artefacts even though, unlike Kosova, they were wholly disunited conglomerates, products of Josip Broz Tito’s nationality policy.
I visited Tetova (Tetovo, Tetovë) in summer 1997 with my brother, and we were trekking on the slopes of the mountain where the Macedonian army is now blowing up private houses in their hunt for mysterious "Albanian terrorists". In 1997 there was fuss about "terrorism" and "separatism" of Albanians, already, and Macedonian troops were crushing demonstrations in Tetova and Gostivar, in which several Albanian students were killed and wounded. At that time the "Albanian terrorism" was not yet guerrilla fighting on mountains, but it was enough for being blamed of terrorism that they had founded a private university in Tetova, which was teaching in Albanian language. Another sign of horrible terroristic separatism was the use of Albanian flags, which were forcefully removed by Macedonian army. Ironically enough, Macedonia herself tried just some years earlier explain to the world why they should have right to use the Greek Macedonian flag.
Macedonia did not recognise and still does not recognise any kind of autonomy for the Albanians, and no official status for the Albanian language, despite the fact that about 30 % of Macedonian citizens are ethnic Albanians. Teaching in Albanian was prohibited – nowadays Albanian teaching has been unofficially possible, though still not officially recognised. In 1997 the army was sent to wipe out the whole Albanian University of Tetova. Several Albanian students died. The world press did not react, but instead, praised Macedonia, led by ultra-nationalists, as a "successful multi-ethnic country", although also Finnish UN troops were patrolling there up until China decided to stop peacekeeping in Macedonia as a revenge for Macedonia’s having official relations with Taiwan.
One year later I told about my Macedonian experiences in a Balkans seminar in Sweden. The leftist politologist chairing the seminar, yet having not visited the area, suspected how could I know more about the ethnic tensions in "successfully multicultural" Macedonia than the articles of Swedish dailies, to which he referred. Besides, he characterised my opinions being "disturbingly pessimistic, even anti-Serbian", when I dared to presume that sooner or later the West would be forced to intervene in Kosova if they wished to prevent genocide or full-scale war from taking place, and that was Kosova’s status not solved internationally, violence would face also the "model country of multi-ethnicity", Macedonia.
There was namely never (in recent times) any more tolerant opinion atmosphere in Macedonia than was in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova, which all went to full-scale war. Quite the contrary, the absurdity of Macedonian nationalist pathos was quite in its own scale. Far up to 1990s leadeing politicians of Skopje were vowing to create a "united Macedonia", that is, Greater Macedonia, where Skopje would have annexed the "Aigeian and Pirin Macedonias" into the newly independent state. "Aigeian Macedonia" means Greek Macedonia which is bigger than the presently independent Macedonia, and includes the second largest city of Greece, Thessaloniki. (Latin names for Skopje and Thessaloniki are Scupi and Salonica. Turkish names are Üsküp and Selenik.) Pirin is a region in Bulgaria.
Still in 1991, Kiro Gligorov, who became president of Macedonia, vowed: "Leading Macedonian nationalist parties that want to see Greater Macedonia have not hidden their willingness to return those territories [Northern Greece, Bulgaria’s Pirin and present Republic of Macedonia] into one single independent state, and they do not conceal their goal, because it is only a question of days when the military might of Macedonia will redraw the borders of Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia." The chairman of one of those nationalist parties, and present prime minister, Ljubco Georgievski, announced in the journal Borba in 1990 that he was a "defender of the spiritual, intellectual and territorial unification of [Greater] Macedonia". He declared: "Macedonia consisting of Pirin, Aigeia and Vardar Macedonias is not yet any Greater Macedonia – it is just Macedonia. We will speak about Greater Macedonia when we start to claim Belgrade, Sofia, Thessaly and Valona".
The reason why Macedonia so far avoided wars is not that its population – divided into Slavs and Albanians – would have been more tolerant and more integrated than elsewhere in Yugoslavia. It was by no means that. Macedonia was and is a very divided and segregate society. The actual reason why Macedonia avoided wars might be the quite little known fact that the Macedonian Slavs were the most pro-Serbian of the non-Serbian ethnic groups of former Yugoslavia. Skopje’s regime was the only one of the "separatist states" that all the time kept behind Belgrade on some level. So there was no need to throw Macedonia into a war. Conflict still smouldered in Skopje’s nationalism, which did not grant the Albanian third-part of the country’s population even the basic rights.
In fact, the most "multi-ethnic" and integrated of the areas of former Yugoslavia was Sarajevo, the cosmopolitan and Muslim majority capital of Bosnia. Sarajevo could have been taken as a model of integrated and tolerant multi-ethnic population up until Miloševic’s Greater Serbian policy destroyed social peace between the three Bosnian "peoples" speaking the same language but confessing three religions – the Muslim Bosniaks, the Orthodox Serbs, and the Catholic Croats. It was Serbian nationalism that provoked Croat nationalists into the leadership of Franjo Tudjman and gave some potential support for marginal but easily fear-raising radical Islamic groups in Alija Izetbegovic’s Bosnia. Multicultural Sarajevo was ruined.
All Yugoslav wars have started in the same way: Serbs, backed by Belgrade and Moscow, have attacked other nationalities in order to prevent them from releasing themselves from Belgrade’s grip. Slovenia got free after a week’s war only, while for Croatia it took two separate wars: In the first one the Serbs occupied Krajina and Eastern Slavonia and in the latter one Tudjman’s Croatia reconquered these areas. Refugees were fleeing both the ways. The Bosnian war was started by Serbs, too. Local vassals were the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic but it was an officially denied matter of fact that the real command was in Belgrade. The long and bloody war finally ended with Western intervention, but that was possible to be done under the UN’s mandate only after Serbia’s allies Russia and China had removed their veto in the UN Security Council. This happened only after the Russian-backed Serbs had started to lose and it started to seem that they would be defeated by the alliance of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, who could finally co-operate and thus threatened to liberate all Bosnia.
Thereby, the Dayton Accord maximised Serbian territorial victory and also sealed their control over all the area of their artefact the Serb Republic. Republika Srpska was moreover divided into eastern and western parts, a kind of principates controlled by two gangs, one in Banja Luka, another one in Pale. The Serb Republic is still a gangster state where Karadzic and Mladic are living at large and international crime flourishes. Muslim refugees have no return to the ethnically cleansed former Muslim areas, like Srebrenica. At the same time the Muslim and Croat Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has turned into a UN protectorate, is forcefully kept together as a laboratory of forced "multi-ethnicity". Here, the Serb refugees returning with full Western support from the Serb Republic are being given their old homes, and Muslims who have taken over these houses are facing homelessness, as they cannot return to their houses, which have been left in the Serb Republic or destroyed. The Croats are forcefully prevented from founding their own autonomy, and recently the UN administration has even confiscated their companies and property.
The Dayton regime of "united" Bosnia-Herzegovina is not only ironically pro-Serbian, but the greatest failure is that the whole experiment of engineered society represent a forcefully maintained artefact that cannot work unless enforced. The patron of this failed creation is a German, Wolgang Petritsch, however finds it proper to slander all those researchers and experts, latest a team of Columbia University, who have recommended sensible changes of borders, granting autonomy and recognising independence for Kosova as only means to bring about lasting stability. The present status quo needs immense constant involvement and enforcing in order to be maintained, and still the result is that none of the parties is satisfied.
Even the former UN envoy to the region, Lord David Owen, has learned enough of his experience to lean towards changes in the status quo. When speaking in Jyväskylä in November 1999, Lord Owen warned the Western countries and UN of repeating all over again the same mistakes that were made with Bosnia. Anyway, the same basic mistake was repeated again in Kosova: Western governments refused from seeing the facts and from considering independence of Kosova as an option. What happens in Tetova is as logical a result from this mistake as were the events in Kosova from the mistakes in Dayton.
If Macedonia would have granted her Albanians autonomy and especially if the Kosovar independence would have been recognised – preferably in 1992 already, but latest in 1999 – Miloševic would not have stayed in power to start three new wars. To gain something with interventions – which in the Balkan case would have become inevitably anyway sooner or later – the most important prerequisites for success are correct timing and purposeful goal with consistence. A military alliance must have an ally, a client.
During this early spring media has once again adopted one of the permanent favourites of Panslavist propaganda: "Greater Albania". Besides, it has been compared with the policy of Greater Serbia that Serb nationalists have been driving with disastrous results. This comparison is ignorant and tasteless and it just shows the historical amnesia and poor knowledge on Balkans history of the journalists aiming at apparent objectivity. Their ignorance covers even the near history of 1990s. Yet it has indeed been visible for some time already how especially in the Balkans case history is being read and remembered in a very selective way: Even the Kosova war seemed to many to have began only in Rambouillet, 1999, although the decades of tradition of persecution of Kosovar Albanians grew into a war long before Bill Clinton had his personal reasons to pay attention on the war. Columns of Kosovar refugees had been wandering over the mountains into Albania and Macedonia for a long time before the Serbs rejected the Rambouillet Treaty which would have been most generous to them and would have left Kosova a part of Yugoslavia.
Of course the intervention to Kosova was a product of "Wag the Dog", but it is only a result of the sad fact that the Western people cares only when American media cares, and constantly finds a reason to care only when the TV shows a couple of cute children suffering or Buddha status blown up, ignoring the years of massacre preceding the selected details that suddenly become an issue. Western ignorance and hypocrisy does not mean that the intervention would have been "absurd" or "a crime against Serbian people" or "defending Muslim invasion" let alone that the Albanians would not have deserved being liberated. Indeed they would, and one can only think about the disappointment and frustration of Bosniaks, Herceg-Bosna Croats and Kosovar Albanians when they instead of liberation and normal society get protectorate regimes that purposefully avoid all the lasting solutions and lack all political willingness to find one.
The state presently known as (Former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia is an artefact of Belgrade. Creation of a Macedonian Slavic nation aimed at "Yugoslavification" of the Slavonic population of the Vardar valley, annexed from Bulgaria by Serbia. The name was borrowed from a historical Greek state, which of course is nothing new, since also Bulgarians are named after a Turkic people that once ruled over the Slavonic majority of the area. Macedonia is a territory in present Greece where also Slavs lived since 600s. Ethnically these Slavs are much closer to present day Bulgarians than to Serbo-Croatians.
Greeks, of course, were most irritated of the "robbery" of the name Macedonia, especially as this borrowing of history did not remain in name, but Yugoslavia also started to rewrite history starting with ideas that tried to claim the legacy of Alexander the Great to the Slavs and not to Greeks. Since a vague "Slavo-Macedonian" theory was invented (suggesting that present Northern Greece’s Macedonians turned into Slavs sometimes in early Middle Ages by mixing up with Slav settlers), it did not matter any more in the historical argument that the Slavs arrived in the Balkans only in 600s a.D. while Greeks had inhabited Macedonia from 3’000 b.C. onwards and the Northern Greek militarist kingdom of Macedonia, which was at first discriminated by the Southern Greek city-states of Sterea Hellas, rose into hegemony in 300s b.C. Present Europe mainly remembers the confusing quarrel between Athens and Skopje about the name of the newly independent republic and the right to use Alexander’s sun flag, which is also the flag of Greek province of Macedonia (Makedonia).
The Albanians are usually considered to descend from Illyrians, who belonged to the oldest known nations of the Balkans. The Macedonian Albanians would like to call their region, whether they wanted it to be an indepent state or an autonomous area, with the name Ilirida, after Illyria. The most important predominantly Albanian city of Western Macedonia is Tetova. Two other predominantly Albanian cities are Dibra (Debar) and Gostivar. The present predominantly Albanian Kosova is only a part of the historical area of Kosovo, wherefrom the predominantly Slavonic parts were for a long time ago annexed to be direct parts of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. What remained was the area that had historically Albanian majority. Besides Slovenia, Kosova is the most united and homogeneous part of former Yugoslavia. The Slavs consist less than 10 % of Kosova’s population, and Serbian minority in Kosova is (especially nowadays) concentrated in the area north of Mitrovica. The Albanian areas of Macedonia are more heterogeneous, but for instance Tetova has 70-80 % Albanian majority.
Slav nationlists claim that Albanians would be new settlers who invaded Kosova and Macedonia during the Ottoman Empire’s reign, and that they would be immigrants who have later "spread like rabbits" like a favourite expression of generally racist Slavs goes. In reality, the ancestors of the Albanians, the Illyrians, inhabited the Balkans long before first Slavs ever came nearby, and during the Ottoman reign, the Albanians never violently occupied Kosova anu more than Ilirida from the Slavs. Before the Turkish conquest and colonisation of Balkans, the Albanians had been Christians just like most Slavs (many Slavs were actually pagans and most regularly fought the Christians). The Albanians still respect as their national hero Georg Kastriota, or Skandërbeg, who fiercely defended Albanian independence against the Turks.
The most original logics of the mythology of Slav nationalism however claim that Kosova is the holy craddle of the Serbs, because in 1381 the Serbs were defeated by Turks in the battle of Kosovo Polje, and thereby lost their Greater Serbia. Greater Serbia had been an aggressive militarist empire led by the Serbian Czar Stjepan Dušan, who tyrannised his Balkanian Christian neighbours so much that the Greek Byzantine Emperor Ioannis Kantakouzenos called the Turkish Sultan Murad I to his ally against Greater Serbia. Murad himself was killed in the battle of Kosovo Polje, but his son, the famous Bajasid the Lightning defeated the Serbian hordes and thus sealed the hegemony over the Balkans for Turkey, for hundreds of years to come. According to the Serbs, however, the fact that they lost to Turks in a war 600 years ago justifies them to expel Albanians from Kosova today.
Besides the present state called Albania, the Albanians a.k.a. Shqipëtars consist majority of population in Kosova (by its Slavonic name Kosovo, in Albanian also written Kosovë), in the western and north-western parts of Macedonia (or Vardaria), in Presevo valley in Southern Serbia, and in a narrow stripe of Montenegro. When speaking about Greater Albania, it is indicated that all these Albanians of Kosova, Ilirida, Presevo and perhaps Montenegro would aim at political unification with mother Albania to form Greater Albania, and that they would proceed for this goal by the means of armed separatism from the Slavonic-controlled Yugoslavia and Republic of Macedonia.
Then what would be so threatening in the idea of Greater Albania? After all, it could hardly be something worse than the experiments of Greater Serbia and Serbian-controlled Yugoslavia, since Greater Albania would clearly be satisfied with predominantly Albanian territories and would not be interested in annexing Skopje, Belgrade or Podgorica. Is it the threat that a "Greater Albania" would redraw some borders towards more justified around Kosova, Presevo and Ilirida?
Or is it the terrible threat that majority of Albanians are Muslims and – like Huntington explicates, Europe doesn’t want new Muslim states within Europe? Yet also the Catholic Albanians supported Kosovar independence, and neither the UÇK leader Hashim Thaci nor the moderate Kosovar president Ibrahim Rugova were ever "Muslim extremists". Nowadays the "Muslim card" is a trump especially in Slavic propaganda, since all the present Russian and Serbian propaganda, designed to attract also Western islamophobiacs, is based on the myth of "Islamic danger" and a holy war against Muslims, "terrorists and separatists".
Of course, the rhetorics agitating fear for Greater Albania also follow the lines of Tito’s Yugoslav and Soviet conditioning where "Greater Albania" is meant to remind us of the "fascist danger" – also effectively used against Croats, but always ignoring Serbian fascism from Chetniks to Miloševic – as the pro-Italian puppet regime in Albania got Kosova and Ilirida back as presents from Benito Mussolini, that is, a "Greater Albania".
It is regularly forgotten that these territories with Albanian majority were not first time annexed by fascists. Once they were annexed to Serbia in most unjust ways when the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were being split and shared. Russia favoured Serbia and originally wanted to annex all Albania to Serbian control, but Britain saved the rump Albania by granting it independence. From the very beginning, Yugoslavia (or first the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) was an actual Greater Serbia, which robbed territories from Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Albania with the blessing of the superpowers Russia, France and England, and besides all these areas, Yugoslavia also desired Northern Greece.
Who remembers any more that the World War I was started by pro-Russian Serb terrorists, the terrorist organisation "Black Hand", which assassinated the Austrian crown heir Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg in the Sarajevo shooting? The terrorist group, led by Gavrilo Princip, was caught and its members were executed, except one, who was underaged, 17 years old, when participating the murder. So he spent the WW I in prison and later became an eminent Serb nationalist, a hero of socialist Yugoslavia, and finally a professor of the University of Belgrade. He produced the notorious plan known as "Operation Horseshoe", first to Tito, later to Miloševic. According to the plan, the Kosovar Albanians should be driven into a conflict by systematic terror and oppression and to provoke them into armed resistance which would give the final justification for Kosova’s "ethnic cleansing".
For socialists, "Greater Albania" is a red blanket, because Soviet rhetorics condition the word directly to Italian fascism. Also the Croatian fascist organisation Ustaša is much better known and remembered of its crimes than Serbian Nazis, the Chetniks, although the latter were responsible of more death. Nothing is heard of the crimes of communist partisans, so-called Macedonian terrorists, or the massacres of Tito’s era. In the present day’s rhetorics the word "terrorist" is both intendedly and unintendedly connected with Muslims who have replaced Jews in the prevalent forms of fascist agitation of hatred today. When only Muslims are supposed to be terrorists, the journalists expect to find terrorists in the Balkans in Albania and in Bosnia, while the Serbian terrorists are called with respectful names like "paramilitaries". This is the name used of the gangs of the Serbian fanatic and terrorist Zeljko Raznjatovic, better known as Arkan, who is wanted by Interpol for international crime, armed bank robberies and murder. They are also called paramilitaries when it is not wanted to be recognised that they worked as a part of Miloševic’s Yugoslav army.
When Macedonia witnessed the long-awaited shift of power from ultra-nationalists to more moderate parties and the presidency was won slightly by president Boris Trajkovski, much thank to the votes of the Albanian population, there were large hopes of quick improvement in the situation. The moderate Albanian party even gained government position. Co-operation has not, however, been very unproblematic and no real progress has taken place in the issue of Albanian autonomy. The present explosion did not come as a surprise. More surprising was the eagerness with which the international community has seized the provocation to back Belgrade and Skopje in all their anti-Albanian efforts to block wishes of Albanian autonomy in Macedonia and Kosovar independence. Once again the Albanians of both Kosova and Macedonia have been branded as "terrorists" when a mysterious provocateur bunch of about a couple of hundred (or maybe less) armed men was shooting at the borders of Macedonia and Kosova, and when the Presevo valley, neglected in the twilight zone of artificial pseudo-solutions, has been sparking with restlessness.
In the media it seems to be most important to believe that "the action of Macedonian Albanian guerrilla is now making ever further damage to any Albanian wishes for Kosovar independence". Much less attention has been paid on the attitudes of the Albanian leaders: Both the moderate Kosovar president Ibrahim Rugova and the UÇK (KLA) leader Hashim Thaci have condemned the action of the militant group in Tetova area. No representative or speaker has been found for the militant bunch and neither a credible background.
The conflict which started in Tanusevci smells like provocation and recalls the "Dagestan incursion" of summer 1999, where a provocateur force of 1000 men (only 300 of whom were Chechens, the rest being mainly Dagestanis) "infiltrated" into Dagestan, led by the Jordanian-born Amir Hattab and the Chechen Shamil Basayev. The connections of this unsuccessful operation to the Russian intelligence and to Boris Yeltsin’s favourite oligarch Boris Berezovsky have ever since thrilled researchers and journalists. Anyway, the provocation by Hattab and Basayev was used by Moscow as a casus belli, along with another obvious provocation, the bomb blasts of Moscow in September 1999, to re-invade Chechnya, to break the treaty with Chechnya and to start a new catastrophic war.
Then what is being prepared with the events around Tetova, considering that they would turn out to be provocation? At least Greater Albania seems improbable. For the Kosovar Albanians the provocation means worst possible strike against their wishes to recover negotiations on Kosova’s status. Even less than Kosovar Albanians, any agitation among Kosovar and Macedonian Albanians has been done by Albania proper. Throughout all the Balkan conflicts, Tirana has remained almost entirely neutral and quiet, although the poor country has time after time been obliged to receive thousands of Albanian refugees from the neighbouring countries and to powerlessly look aside when their own brethren are being massacred. After Berisha gave up power, Albania has not done a single effort for creation of Greater Albania.
Croatia has been fighting on the Bosnian side of the border for liberation of Herceg-Bosna from sometimes Muslims, sometimes Serbs, in which mess the Mostar bridge was blown up, too. Serbia has sent soldiers and guns to every single conflict of the Balkans to fight on the Serbian side. Russia, and latest Ukraine, have been actively arming their Slav brethren, and Russian mercenaries were flooding into Kosova to participate in the genocide on the Serbian side. Albania seems to be about the only Balkan country that has not been involved in the wars of former Yugoslavia, although it would have a most grave interest to intervene. Still we are daily being frightened with Greater Albania and not with the threats of Panslavism and Greater Slavonia.
Would it be time to learn something about what the Albanian patriots really think about the Balkan affairs? When speaking with Albanians, even with significantly patriotic ones, one cannot fail to wonder on which information all the rumours about the Albanians’ "Muslim fundamentalism" or "terrorism" are founded, since nothing like that can be heard from their opinions – unlike Serbs and Russians who regularly repeat most harsh religious fundamentalism and agitation of massacre in their speeches as well as in their media. It seems to be the Christians who are making religious war out of the Balkan and Caucasian conflicts, not the Muslims.
Pandeli Majko, who became the youngest prime minister in Europe when acting as Albanian premier in 1998-1999, represented liberal economic policy and spoke for integration of Europe. Arben Xhaferi, who leads the Democratic Albanian Party of Macedonia, does not demand full independence for Macedonia’s Albanians, but just autonomy, considering the position of Finland’s Swedish speakers as an example. In an interview of Svenska Dagbladet on 29th March, Xhaferi reminds us that in Finland there are even well-known generals who are actually "ethnic Swedes", like Gustav Hägglund, who was recently appointed as European Union’s military commander. Xhaferi finds also Belgium as a suitable example for Macedonia. Belgium is a federation consisting of the Flemish majority part, the French-speaking Wallon part, and the Ardennian German part, and yet Belgium has successfully kept together. Are Majko and Xhaferi still proponents of "extreme nationalists" or "Islamic terrorists" aiming at "Greater Albania"?
There is no Greater Albania. Instead, Greater Serbia is still living on under the name Yugoslavia. The West had better finally encourage the claimed democrat, Vojislav Koštunica, to give up Serbia’s imperialism and Greater Serbia and to support the independence of Kosova and Montenegro as well as large autonomy for Voivodina’s Hungarians and Sandzak’s Muslims. As a compensation, the Bosnian Serb Republic, which has fallen into miserable state of affairs, could be offered to be integrated into new, federal and democratic, Serbia. That kind of Greater Serbia would be much more supportable for both Serbs and for their neighbours than the present status quo, which is maintained with force, illegitimacy and extremely high costs. Yet the present status quo is one that does not really enjoy any Balkan nation’s sincere support. It only awaits the next round of Balkan wars.
Today’s decision-makers should not be at all concerned of Greater Albania. Much more they should concentrate in the problems that the creators of Greater Serbia, Greater Macedonia and Greater Croatia have already brought about – let alone the destruction caused by such "multi-ethnic" but in fact imperially formed experiments as Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, rump Yugoslavia, or "Western Balkans". Of course it is clear that the small nations and states of the Balkans should by the time learn to live along with each other and to integrate – with each other as well as with the rest of Europe. Integration will however not be achieved, if the unity is being enforced from up to down. Like Europe can only integrate through the principles of subsidiarity and local autonomy, also the Balkans can only calm down if its "oppressed peoples" first gain their liberty, and then, when time has healed their wounds, they will freely choose co-operation with their neighbours. Regionalism follows self-determination.
AKK