Illyria Americana
Walt Whitman was a bad poet, but he might have made an excellent American statesman,something like an effeminate Madelaine Albright who can switch from one basic principle to the next with the duplicity that even dewy-eyed fairy godmother of the battlefield would have admired. In the course of a day, she can be lecturing the Republika Srpska of Bosnia on the rights of Muslim and Croat minorities; then, without batting a reptilian eye, she can champion the right of the Albanian majority in Kosovo to gain autonomy, which will inevitably entail the right to expel (or extenminate) the Serb minority that has clung to its ancient land in the face of over half a millennium of persecution andethnic cleansing.

Perhaps in their hearts, many statesmen are really bad poets: they prefer lies to truth and rely on poetic license as an excuse for incompetence and incoherence. I have been trying to figure our American policy in the Balkans for six years, and the best I can come up with is that we are hostage to special interests - the Croatian and Albanian lobbies obviously, Arab oil interests, and (strange as it seems) the Israelis, who have found a way of doing something to please the Muslims. The United States and Israel, in other words, are making the Serbs pay the price for what we are doing to Muslims in the Middle East.

But even bribery and cowardice don't fully explain the zeal of the American foreign policy establishment and the media it controls. Their minds are already formed in globalist categories to see nationalism, Christian piety, and attachment to tradition as the last vestiges of a savage old world that must be rooted out no matter what the cost, and although the Albanians and Croats are, each in their own way, as atavistic as their Serbian neighbors, it is the Serbs who have historically been predominant in the region, and it is the Serbs who sing the loudest songs about their heritage and their destiny. The globalist elites hate the Serbs for the same reason that they hate all real Americans who wish to preserve their traditions, their religion, their identity. This point was rammed home to me on the SFOR base in Sarajevo, where American soldier-girls lugged their lard-bellies, huffing and puffing, up the steps of the cafeteria - an oasis of bad cooking - where the bulletin boards featured (on paper of U.N. blue) advertisements for Black History Month.

The Balkans were heating up again early this year: riots in Kosovo followed by a Yugoslav crackdown followed by an American crackdown, renewed talk of Montenegrin independence, Bosnian Muslim threats over the postponed Brcko decision. By March, Boris Yeltsin's intoxicated hints about World War III breaking out over Iraq seemed more likely to be realized in Europe.

In tripartite Bosnia, the Muslims are no longer content with the cards they were dealt in the Dayton Accords: so far, they have been disappointed in the expectation that a liberal interpretation of the agreement would improve their hand. The Republika Srpska remains divided between the old warlords of Pale, who exploited their political ineptitude - they never devised a tax system, much less a strategy for victory - as an excuse for massive corruption, and the democratically elected government of President Biljana Plavsic, a staunch Serb patriot whose sense of justice and integrity has been misinterpreted as proof that she is a Quisling who would betray her country to the United States.

Kosovo is, for the moment, and even more serious question. We saw last year what Albanians can do to each other if they are allowed to go on a rampage (to say nothing of the crime waves Albanian immigrants have inflicted on Europe and the United States), and this violence is nothing compared to what they will do, with a little air support from their American friends, when the Shiptar begin to riot in Macedonia and Greece.

Meanwhile, the Hungarians of Serbian Vojvodina are clamoring for their autonomy, and their cousins in Slovakia are pressuring the Slovak government to demand autonomy for Kosova (notice how many American journalists, by the way, are adopting the Albanian pronunciation of a purely Slavic word - from kos, blackbird - that means nothing in Albanian). The Slovaks, who have had the chance to bear the gentle yoke of imperial Hungary, are quick to understand that the call for greater Albania being heard in Kosovo (and echoed by Albanian spokesmen in the United States like former congressman Joseph Dio-Guardi) will soon reverberate in hamrony with demands for a Greater Hungary that will include parts of Serbia, Romania, and Slovakia.

Belgrade

Caught in a three-way bind - Albanians, Hungarians, and the American-backed jihad in Bosnia - the Serbs see the handwriting on the wall, and the letters are not Cyrillic. The mood in Belgrade is deep depression. No gypsy bands play in the streets, no one sings patriotic songs in the cafes. The gray buildings seem silent - "bare ruin'd choirs, where no birds sing." Since the United States quashed the demonstrations last year by reaffirming its support for Milosevic, people do not know where to turn.

Srdja Trifkovic arranged a dinner in Belgrade with Serb intellectuals, and over a first course of bull's testicles and Vranac (a Montenegrin red wine), Dragomir Acimovic (architect Rotarian, and royalist) observed with a cheerful gloominess that the Serbs "are dying as a nation and dying as a people." Acovic, a man of affable wit and vast erudition, must also know that quite apart from his notion he belongs to a dying breed of civilized men who will never fit into the New World Order. He has good reasons for despair: the "ex" communists still hold his family's property, and he knows that more than one of the so-called opposition leaders is willing to sell out Milosevic.

When I pointed out the parallel with the mood in 1865 of defeated Southerners, who thought that God was punishing them for their lack of faith, Dusan Batakovic (research director of the Institute for Balkan Studies) quips, "I always sided with the losers in America - Indians and Southerners." Such sympathy is natural for Serbs who have been subjugated by Turks, Hungarians, Austrians, Germans, and Americans, and whose great national myth is their failure to defeat the Turks at the battle of Kosovo in 1389.

The general pessimism is shared by Dr. Vojislav Kostunica, leader of the Democratic Party, virtually the only major political party that has preserved its reputation for integrity. Kostunica takes a gloomy view of Serbia's political future, and his prediction that one or another of Milosevic's opponents will lead his party into the government is fulfilled within two weeks.

Serbian politics is complicated by the rioting in Kosovo. Imagine the situation in the United States if Mexico immigrants became a majority in Texas and, aided and abetted by Mexico, plotted a violent insurrection. When police arrest one of the terrorist leaders, the insurgents riot in San Antonio, and when the governor calls in the National Guard, the international community threatens sanctions.

The Mexicans or rather, to drop the analogy, the Albanians are pursuing a two-tier strategy. They insist they are open to dialogue, but the only question they are willing to discuss is the timetable for independence. The crackdown, although completely justified from the standpoint of law and order, was a bad move, as Kostunica points out since it had the effect of reversing the progress Serbia had been making in the international community.

Milosevic, who lost the Krajina and bargained away Sarajevo, is now in a position to lose the ancient heartland of the Serbs, and Kostunica ruefully concludes: "One always hopes that Milosevic will learn from his mistakes, but one is always disappointed." Asked if the leader may be conspiring with the Americans - as it sometimes appears - Kostunica points out that Milosevic simply cannot afford to pay the price. The loss of Kosovo will be a greater blow to his government than even the debacle in the Krajina, where U.S. military intervention paved the way for a Croatian offensive that expelled whatever Serb civilians managed to escape. Milosevic's rise to power began when he took up the cause of the downtrodden Kosovo Serbs, and because the Albanians refuse to vote, he can count on 35 "cheap" deputies elected by Serbs who are naturally loyal to their champion. The career that began in Kosovo may end there as well. Still, despite Albright's threats, Slobodan Milosevic's shelf-life has not yet expired.