Andreas Papandreou was the prime minister of Greece from 1981 to 1989. According to recent polls, Pa-pan-dreou and his Pan Hellenic Socialist Party are expected to return to power in Greek elections this October.
The United States has begun dispatching troops to Macedonia to join the 700 Scandanavian troops already there as U.N. observers. The stated aim is to prevent the already-raging war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from spilling over into yet another former Yugoslav republic.However, the fuse that would ignite the Balkan bomb and put those peacekeeping troops in real jeopardy lies in the potential outbreak of a "liberation" war launched by the Albanian Muslims who comprise 90 percent of the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo.
For this reason, the world community must resist the pleas of Albanian President Sali Berisha, now apparently under serious consideration, that Kosovo be placed under U.N. or NATO control in order to prevent a new "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Albanian Muslims there to fulfill what he says is Slobodan Milosevic's plan for Greater Serbia. My fear is just the opposite: the presence of U.N. or NATO troops will embolden the Albanians to feel secure enough to revolt against the Serbs.
I have personal knowledge that the last thing the Serbian leaders want now is to have another war on their southern front. But I also know that, if war breaks out in Kosovo, the Serbs will fight to the last man, woman and child to prevent independence of that province.
Kosovo is the birthplace of their ethnos. It is, so to speak, their Jerusalem. Why then would Albanian Muslims risk igniting a new and even more bloody episode of war?
Albania is a deeply impoverished country, despite its wealth of mineral and oil, destroyed by decades of harsh communist rule that made it the most isolated place on the planet. Unemployment in Albania today stands at a stunning 50 percent. In part to compensate for the hellish devastation of his society, Berisha has a vision of building a Greater Albania, a Muslim state that would include those Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia.
In this vision, he is supported by other Muslim states, especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The attempt to intervene with U.N. "blue helmets" as "peacemakers" in this context would serve the desires of those circles that want to provoke a direct confrontation between the Serbian authorities who control Kosovo and the Albanian ethnic population. Such a confrontation would achieve just the destabilization that would offer the opportunity for attacking Serbia from the south when they are already preoccupied in Bosnia.
Of course, if there is an attempt to send U.N. or NATO troops into Kosovo without the consent of Belgrade, that would in itself constitute an act of war because Kosovo is part of the Yugoslav state structure. Once the troops are there, their presence would signal to the highly anti-Serb population that they will be protected if they rebel and militarily confront the authorities.
At that point, it is inevitable that the troops deployed under U.N. blessing for preventive peacekeeping would then be forced to occupy Kosovo, pushing them into the costliest of battles with the Serbs and sparking the prairie fire we all worry will engulf the whole of the Balkans.
The best way to avoid this outcome is to avoid provoking the Serbs by placing "blue helmets" only on the border between Albania and Kosovo. A deployment of international troops along the frontier, and not in the interior, would not give the Albanian Muslims of Kosovo the idea that "Now the big guys are with us, so we can start struggling for our inde-pen-dence."
All the political parties in Greece are opposed to military intervention in Kosovo, particularly if it includes under the NATO banner countries in the Balkan region itself, such as Turkey. It would be devastating to the fragile security balance in our area if there were troop movements in this or that direction based on taking sides in the current conflicts that have resulted from the collapse of Tito's Yugoslavia.
When my government returns to power, as I expect it will in October, we will of course support peacekeeping efforts wholeheartedly in the Balkans. However, we will be very careful about limiting and closely defining the destabilizing proposition of "peacemaking."
In the future, I'm afraid, issues of war and peace in the Balkans will depend less and less on post-World War II institutions like NATO, and they will be based increasingly on the foundations of the deeper past. Whether we like it or not, this is becoming a fact.
We must remember that the current crisis in the former Yugoslavia was fomented by those old World War II companions, Germany and the Vatican. On December 16, 1991, the European Community, at the behest of Germany and in the name of EC solidarity, decided unanimously to break up Yugoslavia and recognize Slovenia and Croatia (both Catholic populations). That was the first act of the former Yugoslavia's descent into hell.
Now it is becoming obvious to everyone that the only realistic way to finally end the bloodshed, despite noble hopes, is by partition - three ethnically separate states of Catholic Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Orthodox Serbs. Population movements among them will have to be monitored by the U.N., and perhaps one day a federation among them can be formed.
Another consequence of the German leadership of Europe and the Vatican's vision, which seeks a Catholic Europe of Christian Democratic regimes, is the revival of old ties among the Orthodox powers - Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Belgrade.
While no one was thinking about it until recently, events in the former Yugoslavia have given form and shape to the "clash of civilizations" that American political scientist Samuel Huntington argues is replacing the conflicts of the Cold War.
The more blood is spilled in this part of Europe, the more this clash will come to be true. Already the climate is very fertile. The bottom line for all who want to avoid such a future is this: Don't touch Kosovo. Otherwise, we shall all be in flames.