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Divide and survive |
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May 1999 |
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History shows that partition and
population exchange is often the least bad answer to ethnic
conflict. Western reluctance to accept this fact prolonged the
Bosnian war and could complicate the exodus from Kosovo. The
alternative to partition in the Balkans is the presence of a
large outside force-indefinitely. |
Anatol
Lieven | |
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In the run-up to the Nato intervention in the
Kosovo conflict, I was told by several Nato advisers: "The only
question is whether Milosevic will give in just before or just after
the start of air strikes." It is easy to be wise after the event,
but this phrase illuminates the multiple errors which led Nato into
war. To begin with, in the whole lexicon of international relations,
there is no such thing as "air strikes." Even a limited armed attack
on another country constitutes an act of war. And in war, the enemy
can be expected to hit back with every means at his disposal.
Furthermore, a war over Kosovo was never going to be with
"Milosevic." This war is with the Yugoslav state and the Serbian
nation; like so many wars, it began between the Serbs and the Kosovo
Albanians over control of a particular territory, and Nato has now
ended up on the side of the Albanians. As in any war, a Nato victory
will require a partial or even complete Serbian defeat.
The
question now facing Nato leaders is the extent of the defeat they
can or wish to inflict on the Serbs; what this comes down to, in the
end, is how Kosovo is going to be divided or whether Nato means to
give the whole province to the Albanians, leading to a voluntary or
forced exodus of the Serb minority.
In other words, this
means the terms of an ethnic partition. No significant number of
Albanians will be able to live safely under Serbian rule in the
future-and the much smaller, but deeply-rooted, Serbian population
will also not be able to live under Albanian rule. This has become
obvious in recent weeks, but the breakdown of ethnic relations in
the province was evident in the 1980s; it has roots in territorial
conflict going back 1,300 years, exacerbated by the Albanian role in
the crushing of Serb revolts against the Ottomans and the atrocities
committed by both sides in the wars since the Ottoman empire's
collapse.
War is a school of realism, a solvent of
established beliefs and an impetus to harsh, but clear decisions.
The fact that, in going to war, Nato has stepped outside the usual
bounds of international legality (such as it is), should help us to
take a hard look at some of the shibboleths on which western policy
towards ethnic conflicts have been founded. Having gone to war to
prevent the violent suppression of an ethnic rebellion, and
having-as will surely be the case-gone on to divide up a state, it
would be strange now to return to a rigid adherence to the
principles of territorial integrity. The fact that our servicemen
are risking their lives in a conflict in which Britain's interests
are hardly at stake, should make us focus on what history can tell
us about achieving lasting ethnic settlements.
in a recent
essay on Kosovo in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash
argued that "good fences make good neighbours"; contrary to current
western beliefs in "integration" and "multiculturalism," the best
chance for the Yugoslav peoples to progress would be as separate
nation-states with clear ethnic majorities. This has, after all,
been the pattern across much of western Europe over the past few
centuries, and the process is not finished yet.
This
argument goes back to liberal nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini,
ideologist of the Italian risorgimento. He and his contemporaries
argued that real cooperation between European nations could only
come after those nations had separated themselves into free and
democratic, but also independent, national states. The whole project
of European integration can be said to be founded on this argument.
The main objection to this argument is that ethnic nations
are often mixed up together and cannot be separated without
bloodshed (witness the conflicts over the Italians in South Slav and
German lands). And given the disasters which have befallen Europe in
the 20th century, many historians mourn Mazzini's great enemy: the
multi-ethnic Habsburg empire.
But the Habsburg or
Austro-Hungarian empire-like the Soviet Union in our own time-did
not in the end survive. Moreover, the Habsburg empire possessed
virtues denied to most multi-ethnic states: the state was founded
neither on nationality, nor on popular sovereignty, but on
supra-national principles: dynastic legitimacy; the rule of law; and
the Catholic Church. Further, the Austrian half of the empire
contained a number of large nationalities, none of which was in a
position completely to dominate the others-unlike the Kingdom of
Hungary (where the Hungarians dominated absolutely) or other
"multi-ethnic" states, where one dominant majority faces a single
large, restive minority. Finally, the empire possessed a state
language, German, which in those pre-1914 days was a cosmopolitan
language of European civilisation capable of assimilating people of
many ethnic origins-as witnessed by the flowering of Jewish thought
and culture in Habsburg Vienna.
Elsewhere, by contrast,
states which began as multi-ethnic were able to assimilate minority
peoples into the dominant nationality by means of the power and
prestige of the dominant language and culture-at least if they began
the process long ago in pre-modern times. Thus France achieved its
20th century ethno-linguistic homogeneity (until the arrival of the
new immigrants) by means of a mainly peaceful, but culturally
ruthless, process of destroying the traditions of minorities such as
the Bretons, above all through the national school system. Russia
would have done the same to Ukrainians and others if it had been
able to start a bit sooner. It is hopeless, however, to expect that
linguistic cultures such as Serbian or Albanian, the reflection of
one small ethnos on the periphery of European civilisation, will
ever be able to play this role in assimilating large ethnic
minorities-especially where these have access to the culture and the
mass media of neighbouring ethnic homelands.
Tito was called
"the last Habsburg," and Yugoslav communism (like Soviet communism)
was an attempt to overcome national divisions by a supranational
ideology focused on the worship of a quasi-emperor. But although
Yugoslavia was not (until today) threatened from outside in the
manner of the Habsburgs, its internal cultural resources as a
multi-ethnic state were weaker. With the waning of communism, some
sort of Serb-Albanian war over Kosovo was likely. Several such wars
have occurred over the past 100 years, and the struggle in fact
resumed with the Kosovo Albanian protests of 1981.
The way
in which Nato and its political masters misunderstood the real
dynamic of events in Kosovo reflects a characteristic failure of the
liberal mind (including most of the western left and the great
majority of Americans), which clings to a basically optimistic view
of human nature. Such a habit of mind finds it hard to grasp that
certain nations really are implacably at odds over the control of
ethnically-mixed territory. Instead, the automatic belief is that
the innocent masses have been led astray by evil individuals
(Milosevic)-or, for the left, by evil ruling classes. These in turn
are not motivated by emotions of nationalism, pride or hate, but by
"rational" ones of the defence of their political or economic
privileges.
This illusion was of little practical moment
during the cold war; but thanks to the decision to turn Nato from a
defensive alliance into a force for democracy, stability and even
market economics in Europe, it has become quite dangerous. Nato has
been trapped into becoming the instrument for the policing of ethnic
conflicts and the administration of ethnically-mixed societies
through protectorates. This is what the Dayton accords have created
in Bosnia; it was what the Rambouillet accords laid down for Kosovo;
and such a protectorate is also taking shape in Macedonia.
The precedent for this development is the League of Nations
"mandate" system, introduced at the Congress of Versailles for
territories in the middle east and Africa. This was usually a
barely-veiled formula for indirect imperial rule by one of the
victorious allies, which is how most of the world sees Nato's
aggression ("US imperialism") in Serbia. And, to play the mandate
role effectively, we will need something akin to imperial qualities,
albeit of a civilised kind.
When divided nations cannot be
ruled, mandate-style, by a moderately impartial force, the only
"solutions" will be very illiberal ones: either victory by one side,
leading to the subjugation or flight of the other's population; or
partition and population exchange; or some combination of the two.
Although it is natural to recoil from such outcomes, the
unwillingness of western diplomats even to admit their possibility
in several parts of the world is strange. Not merely has the
"international community" accepted several such partitions and
population moves in the course of this century, this is exactly what
we have ended up with in Bosnia. Between 1992 and 1995, an
unwillingness to accept partition helped to prolong the war. Today,
it has committed us to the hopeless task of trying to turn Bosnia
back into a working multi-ethnic state (assuming that it ever was
such a state). An international role in policing Bosnia is
essential-but those who pretend that this is leading to
re-integration are deceiving themselves and everybody else.
The only realistic choice for Macedonia may also soon be a
Bosnia-type partition or a Nato protectorate. Discussions of a
possible division between the Albanian, Serb and Macedonian Slav
areas are reportedly already taking place in private between
Albanian representatives and pro-Bulgarian Macedonian Slav
"nationalists"-the idea being that most of Macedonia would join
Bulgaria. Even an agreed partition of Macedonia would be a dangerous
development, but it may be even more dangerous to keep an
African-style artificial legacy of empire in the middle of the
Balkans. Macedonia might be able to form a stable multi- ethnic
state if its national proportions were stable-but they are not. In
fact, the Albanians, who a generation ago were about 20 per cent of
the population, may now be as much as 35 per cent thanks to their
higher birth rate. By 2020, they could become a majority. It is
doubtful, however, whether the Slavs will simply go along with
becoming an increasingly small minority in what would ultimately
become a de facto part of a Greater Albanian confederation.
Partition and population exchanges are certainly not a
universal solution. But when everything else has failed, we need to
have the courage to take responsibility for the solution. The
alternative is to summon up the ruthlessness to support one side in
the conflict-as in Croatia-or be prepared to commit ourselves to the
long-term, heavy and sustained policing role necessary to prevent
two hostile and mingled populations from tearing each other apart.
in the end, policing and security are what these conflicts
are about-the actual physical security of individuals at risk. This
raises an important point about the nature of modern nationalism. We
must distinguish between classical nationalism and ethnic (or one
might say skinhead) hooliganism, and the role of such hooliganism in
ethnically-mixed societies. In other words, it is often not a
question of protecting a whole population from assault by
state-backed ethnic forces, but of protecting families and
individuals from being attacked by members of other ethnic groups
with the acquiescence of the police-a problem with which we are not
wholly unfamiliar in Britain.
A Russian who had moved to
Russia in 1992 from a village in southern Kazakhstan once explained
to me how this kind of thing occurs: "There were only four Russian
families in our village, and many of the Kazakhs wanted us out.
People started jeering at me on the street, saying-'we're going to
fuck your daughter,' that kind of thing. Nothing happened, and
perhaps nothing would have happened. I'd lived there for years, and
I had good friends among the Kazakhs. But we knew that the police
would never have done anything if we were attacked. So we got out."
Recent decades have indeed seen a decline in certain aspects
of classical nationalism, both in the west, and, to a lesser extent,
elsewhere. This has been associated with the demilitarisation of
society and the spread of modernisation. As a result, there has been
a reduction in the willingness to fight for disputed national
territories. But this has been paralleled in western Europe and
elsewhere by the persistence-or even growth of-ethnic hooliganism. I
was in Germany in 1992 at the height of the attacks on immigrants by
skinhead and neo-Nazi groups. Headlines outside Germany raised the
spectre of the return of aggressive nationalism in Germany, but such
fears were almost totally misplaced. These skinheads were up to
slouching a block or two in order to terrorise a helpless Turkish
family or kick to death an African asylum-seeker; they were not
about to join the army, risk death and spend years in trenches to
reconquer Danzig for a new German Reich. Their motivations were
local: a desire to defend working class jobs, maintain pure
neighbourhoods and support local football teams. They did not flow
into wider national conflicts because the minorities being targeted
have no territorial conflict with Germany and are too small in
number to have a significant political presence.
But as we
know from Northern Ireland, it is quite different in an
ethnically-mixed society where conflicting national-territorial
claims exist. There, "skinhead" nationalism and classical
nationalism run into each other. Arson, robbery, beatings, rape or
murder against members of the other community may be communally
encouraged, excused and sheltered. These will contribute in turn to
mobilisation along defensive ethnic lines, and to the reliance of
ordinary people on any force-however hateful-which will protect
them, their families and homes. Such violence does not even need to
be condoned by the national leadership of the country or the
community concerned. In Chechnya, for example, neither under
President Dudayev nor under President Maskhadov has there been any
official policy of driving out the local Russians. Dudayev's wife is
Russian; and Maskhadov-like Dudayev, a former Soviet officer-always
seemed sincere in saying that he felt no hostility to the Russians
as a people. None the less, the position of those Russians in
Chechnya who enjoyed no protection from a powerful Chechen
individual became increasingly desperate; as a result, most had left
even before the Russian invasion of December 1994. Chechen
traditions of banditry and armed violence are constrained when it
comes to attacks on other Chechens, but are unconstrained when it
comes to non-Chechens, infidels and especially Russians. A sharp
contrast may be drawn with Latvia and Estonia, which have limited
the rights of the Russian immigrants, but by peaceful and legal
means-with the result that there has been no violence in return.
Where a tradition of socially-sanctioned violence and
banditry is present in both parts of an ethnically-mixed society,
the only way of containing this in a reasonably equitable way is
sustained policing by an outside power-something of which the
British empire had immense experience. But for this to work, a whole
series of factors have to be present, which Nato can barely begin
thinking about in the Balkans. First, the outside power has to be in
control of local law and order, and capable of handing out real
rewards and punishments. It needs to have a sufficient number of its
own men in command of forces on the ground, speaking a local
language and understanding local society. In this context, the
unarmed EU policemen in Bosnia look quite fatuous.
Second,
the presence of the outside power has to appear pretty much eternal.
As the British experienced in India in 1945-47 (and on other
occasions elsewhere), when the population at large, and locally
recruited officials, have a strong sense that the outside power's
rule is provisional, then no order will be implemented which risks
compromising the official concerned with his own community. No
police officer who values his future career or perhaps even his life
is going to pursue a charge of ethnically-based theft or murder
against a member of his own group. I saw this process at work among
Lithuanian and Georgian KGB officers in the Soviet Union in 1990 and
1991. They were still afraid of Moscow, and they would have gone on
obeying Moscow if they had been sure that the Soviet Union would
last. But because its survival was questionable, it was safer for
them to pretend to obey, while in fact doing discreet deals with the
nationalists. This contributed significantly to the crumbling of
Soviet control over those republics.
Third, the outside
policing force will have to adopt an approach very different to that
common in modern western societies. In circumstances where
criminality is ethnicised and enjoys communal protection, it may be
more effective and less provocative to resort to a system of
collective punishment; not, of course, mass executions, burning of
villages or deportations, but fines, confiscations and restrictions
on movement. All of these were employed by the British in India.
If this seems rather strong to some readers, it suggests
that they should not choose a career in the policing of ethnic
disputes. Because the question of security for individuals and
communities is what any settlement of such conflicts is about. The
inability of Nato to provide such security in Bosnia has been
responsible for the curious state of semi-partition now operating
there. On the one hand, Nato and the EU have not been able to accept
the truth of Bosnia's three-way partition and withdraw; both because
of shibboleths concerning territorial integrity, but also because
while the Croat and Serb regions would survive, the Muslims, like
the Palestinians, would be left with an unviable two-part state. On
the other hand, Nato is incapable of providing the kind of policing
on the ground which would allow refugees to return home (Muslims to
Serb areas and so on) and begin to make a reality of the
reintegration of a united Bosnia which Nato has as its formal
objective. Instead, Nato has to work by attempting to coerce
Serbian, Croat and Muslim authorities-without the means to control
developments at village level.
Policing a violent,
ethnically-mixed area is difficult enough even before atrocities
have occurred. Afterwards, it is impossible. This is what makes so
many peace plans seem like so much waste paper. In the southern
Caucasus at present, western diplomats are giving their sympathetic
consideration to Georgian suggestions of a peace settlement for the
rebel territory of Abkhazia which involves Abkhaz acceptance of
Georgian sovereignty, including the disbandment of the Abkhaz army,
in return for various constitutional guarantees, including
chairmanship of the upper house of the Georgian parliament. The
Abkhaz war, parts of which I witnessed, was small-scale, but very
brutal. Georgian commanders threatened to kill or expel every single
Abkhaz; the Abkhaz ended the war by winning and expelling almost
every single Georgian and killing a large number of them. Many of
the atrocities on both sides were committed by neighbours who knew
each other (also true of Bosnia). Do western diplomats expect that
in these circumstances the two populations will agree to live
together again? Is it rational to think that any Abkhaz leader will
resign the safety of his people into the hands of the Georgians-or
that a Georgian would do so if the case were reversed? For my own
part, if I knew that someone in my town had killed my parents, and
there were no other way of getting justice, sooner or later I would
kill him-that is the human response. It is different, of course, if,
as in South Africa or the Soviet Union, the atrocities have been
committed not by neighbours but by the servants of an anonymous
state, with whom the relatives of the victims are not required to
live in close proximity.
The Abkhaz case also illustrates
how changing demography can affect such disputes. In some cases,
like Abkhazia, the Baltic States, Fiji or Malaysia, this has been
because of immigration, but elsewhere because of the tendency of
certain ethnic groups to have more babies-sometimes as part of a
conscious strategy of outnumbering the ethnic enemy. Thus the
Albanian proportion of the population of Kosovo rose from 68.5 per
cent in 1948 to 77.4 per cent in 1981 and more than 90 per cent
before the ethnic cleansing. In Bosnia, the Muslim proportion rose
from 31 per cent in 1948 to 43.7 per cent in 1991, while the Serbs
fell from 44 per cent to 31 per cent. In both cases, the nations
concerned resorted to arguments about which community had been there
first and had originally been the largest. In these circumstances,
trying to solve ethnic disputes by majoritarian democracy at a given
moment is inadequate.
Americans find such dilemmas hard to
understand, because they live in an immigrant society, where they
have been accustomed to seeing the ethnic composition of whole
regions transformed in a single generation. But, in America's case,
the immigrants presented no threat of ethnically-based territorial
secession. "Native Americans" could have presented a threat, but
they were few in number and were soon disposed of, by Serbian
methods.
In Britain, however, we have a more persistent and
bitter experience. In 1926, catholics in Ulster made up 33.5 per
cent of the population (down from 40 per cent 65 years before), and
protestants 62.2 per cent-with the catholics basing their national
claim on the principle that up to the late 16th century the native
Gaels made up 100 per cent of the population. Thanks to their higher
birth rate, by 1991, catholics were 38.4 per cent of the population
and protestants only 50.6 per cent (the remainder of the population
refused to state any religious allegiance). But if the catholic
birth rate in Ulster had been a bit higher, or catholic emigration a
bit lower, it is possible to imagine a situation in which by 1975,
say, the catholics would have been a majority, and could have voted
democratically for union with the Republic, which the British
government would presumably have felt bound to accept. But does
anyone imagine that the main protestant groups would have accepted
"the will of the democratic majority"?
In these
circumstances-as in Ulster now-the only solution appears to be some
form of guaranteed power-sharing with permanently fixed ethnic
proportions. This is now very popular in political science; it is
called "consociational democracy." But such systems are inimical to
many aspects of democracy, because they limit the ability of the
electorate to bring about any real change in government-they are
more like a medieval estates system. Moreover, they are almost
always held in place by an outside force: in Ulster, by the British
and Irish governments and the British army; or, in the first modern
example of this kind, Moravia, by the Austrian army. The Soviet
Union operated a similar system in the ethnically-mixed republics of
the north Caucasus-now dissolving in the absence of the Soviet army.
Where such systems have broken down, atrocities have often
resulted; if no new imperial rule is on hand, the least worst
solution is partition. But one official of a UN agency dealing with
ethnic conflict told me: "Officially, we're not even allowed to
think about partition." Western diplomats intone "territorial
integrity" like a prayer. In Africa, the notion that colonial
borders are inviolable has been elevated to a sacred principle. But
almost every Africa expert would agree that it is unlikely that in
the long run-say, in 200 years' time-the borders established by
colonialism, will remain. To point out that the "long run" begins
today, that several states have already split along ethnic and
historic faultlines, and that it would be better to recognise the
fact and work with the results, is taboo.
in the course of
this century, the west has accepted or even promoted partition and
population exchange on a number of occasions. In 1923, Greece and
Turkey negotiated a bilateral agreement whereby some 1.2m Greeks
left Turkey for Greece and about 500,000 Turks moved in the opposite
direction. In 1948-49 in Palestine, the UN brokered a partition
agreement, which was rejected by the Palestinians. During and after
the ensuing war, some 750,000 Palestinians were driven out. The west
has in effect accepted this, on the grounds that their return would
destabilise the Israeli state. UN resolutions on the subject have
therefore remained a dead letter.
The deportation of Germans
from central Europe (and of Poles from Ukraine, Belarus and
Lithuania) in 1945-46 was a ghastly affair (to say nothing of the
Holocaust); yet the resulting ethnic homogeneity has allowed the
states concerned to become more politically stable than they were
between 1919 and 1939, and than their surviving multi-ethnic
equivalents have been in the 1990s. A Poland with the ethnic
proportions of 1939 would be racked with violent Polish chauvinism
and ethnic secessionist movements.
The most infamous case of
partition and population exchange is India and Pakistan in 1947, in
the course of which at least 300,000 people died. Many of these
deaths could have been avoided if the exchange had been properly
supervised. Congress and the Muslim League promised that the rights
of minorities would be respected after partition. But the violence
was largely an upsurge of hatred and fear from below, by populations
maddened by years of propaganda.
The division of India and
Pakistan has proved an enduring wound for the subcontinent,
burdening it with hatreds, wars and grotesque levels of military
spending. All the same, it is hard to imagine that a united India
would have been a better prospect. Would a constitutional compromise
have lasted? The minimum demand of even moderate Muslims was for a
loose federation and for some form of permanent guaranteed
power-sharing at the centre. This would have led to a desperately
weak and unstable state. Under the pressure of Islamist radicalism,
Muslim population growth and Hindu nationalism, such a state would
very probably have disintegrated. Such a disintegration would have
been more chaotic, and perhaps even bloodier than the events of
1947. It might have led to the separation of still more states from
India, and the descent of the region to west African levels of
disorder and poverty. As it is, India has remained a rather
successful constitutional federation, while its Muslim minority,
although distrusted and sometimes attacked, is too small to provoke
an overwhelming wave of Hindu fear and anger.
To mention
India in 1947 is to underline how partition and population exchange
should be the last resort in any ethnic dispute. But it also
underlines how those outsiders who oppose such a solution by force
or diplomatic pressure have a responsibility to prevent future
conflict. The British by 1947 were no longer capable of keeping the
peace in India, and so were right to get out. Nato must be prepared
to police parts of the Balkans permanently, or it must bring about
settlements which, however harsh, will prevent future instability.
From this point of view, the Rambouillet accords were deficient in
one key respect. They set up an elaborate system of "consociational
democracy," full of checks and balances, and they provided a Nato
force to guarantee these. But they did not guarantee that the Nato
force would stay.
The partition of Kosovo-let alone
Macedonia-and the acceptance of solutions involving partition for
the Caucasus will take courage on the part of western leaders, both
because it would expose them to howls of protest from different
sides and because it would require deals (especially with Russia)
which will be unpopular with the US Congress. But at a time when
western servicemen are being required to show physical courage in
the field, it seems not inappropriate to ask their leaders to show
both moral courage and historical awareness. |
Anatol Lieven is the author of "Chechnya: Tombstone
of Russian Power," out in paperback in June |
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