Kosovan war is result of calculated manipulation

`If you start a war, you'd better be sure you can finish it." This advice for NATO has been repeated countless times in the past weeks. It was proferred more in hope than reproach by the wretched Albanian, caught by the camera as he recalled his family and home abandoned to the Serb militias in Kosovo.

Nothing is clear in Kosovo except the despair of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the fears of others trapped as they wait to see if the Serbs will come before NATO, if the Serbs will come all the faster because of NATO. And something else was powerfully argued in Noel Malcolm's recent book Kosovo: A Short History.

The war in Kosovo is not the inevitable outcome of ancient hatreds between the peoples who inhabit it, but the consequence of the calculated manipulation of nationalist feeling by political elites, spearheaded by Slobodan Milo sevic.

Serbs and Albanians have lived and intermittently quarrelled in Kosovo, occasionally uniting to fight the common Turkish enemy, for over six centuries. After the imposition of Turkish rule in the mid-15th century, the demographic balance shifted in favour of the Albanians.

They lived under Turkish domination until just before the first World War, when the Serbian army drove out the Turks and began the modern phase of brutal discrimination against the majority Albanians. During the 1920s and 1930s, Serbia attempted unsuccessfully to redress the population imbalance by settlements.

Italian fascists ruled in most of the territory of Kosovo during second World War, while Germany occupied the wealthier area in the north, bordering on modern Serbia.

Tito tried to attract Albanian recruits to his anti-fascist partisans with the hint of independence after the war, but it was not until 1974 that Kosovo was granted autonomy, not the status of a full republic. By then, 90 per cent of the population of Kosovo was Albanian. Most of the remaining Serbs lived in the mineral-rich northern region.

If the Balkans were seldom a happy family, with cross-cutting linguistic and religious divisions waiting for a spark to ignite, neither were they so divided in hatred as to offer an adequate explanation for their current tragedy. The spark fell on Kosovo in the shape of the Serbian Communist leader Milo sevic in 1989; and the Muslims woke up to realise that they hated the Serb Orthodox, and the Orthodox hated the Catholics and everyone hated someone.

The Croatian writer Slaveka Draculic captured the sudden change: "Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood. So right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat".

FOR almost 10 years, Kosovan Albanians organised non-violent resistance to Serbia's rule, until last year when radicals in the Kosovan Liberation Army opted for violence and Milosevic retaliated with ethnic cleansing.

The immediate problem is clearly to stop the violence and restore some dignity to the refugees. If NATO can do this with its planned two-phase campaign, it hardly matters that the operation is in breach of international law, that NATO has its own agenda in Kosovo which may distort its campaign, and a poor record of success in achieving a humanitarian solution in other emergencies.

Brutal as it sounds, it hardly matters that innocent people are being killed if the numbers are proportionate and the targeting is kept within the bounds of military necessity.

At the minimum, success will be measured by a cessation of violence for some months, to give other organisations like the United Nations and the OSCE the opportunity to renew diplomacy and provide an environment for humanitarian relief.

But if NATO has got it wrong, it has got it culpably wrong, and its own agenda in moving rapidly to armed conflict and excluding Russia and the UN from the process will come under humiliating scrutiny. If the mission fails and the targeting results in the escalation of innocent deaths, or if the demand for some 150,000 troops to continue the fight on the ground cannot be met in time to prevent further bloodshed in Kosovo - as is likely - then the insecurity of the Balkans could envelope most of Central and Eastern Europe.

An Albanian diaspora, scattered throughout the neighbouring countries, could become the focus of widescale chaos.

In the worst case, NATO's actions - not just during the Balkan tragedy, but over the whole period of its reconstruction after the end of the Cold War - may raise the question of security in Europe in a familiar and dangerous light.

Whatever about the UN, the humiliation of Serbia's Russian ally was foolish and unnecessary. If the Founding Act which offered Russia the sop of consultation in return for ignoring its concerns over the eastward expansion of NATO in 1997 appeared condescending then, not even lip service has been paid now to Russia's diplomatic competence or Russia's needs.

Waiting for Russia to come on board and share in the triumph of peacemaker might have cost lives and dented NATO pride. But it would have been more prudent than snubbing it and relying on technology yet again for the quick kill; it might have rescued more and strengthened the wider security framework in Europe as a whole.

Russia is the major arms supplier to the Serbs and still a nuclear superpower. What will happen if Russia or China decide that they too can break the law and mount their own "humanitarian" campaign over neighbouring sovereign states? The law which protects brutal regimes because they are sovereign doesn't matter if NATO succeeds. If they do, we shall all be in their debt and NATO will be allowed its triumphalism at its coming anniversary.

But if they don't, God help us. Next time they start a war they had better take the Albanian's advice first. They'd better be sure they can finish it.

Dr Bill McSweeney teaches at the Irish School of Ecumenics in Dublin. His book, Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations, is published in September by Cambridge University Press.