Kosovo, 82 Days of an Undeclared and Unjust War: A Geopolitical Comment

Abstract

This is an angry and scared comment on the undeclared war in Yugoslavia and its geopolitics, written shortly after its end. Ray Hudson, during his short visit to Athens at the beginning of May 1999, encouraged me to write it, as many of the issues discussed below seem to remain unknown or undiscussed among radical geographers and planners in the West. It is also an invitation for debate, as I still have many unanswered questions. So, what is behind this war? I have some thoughts which I will elaborate below. Before doing this, however, let me position myself. You may blame me because I don’t have a ‘neutral’ and ‘distanced’ position. I can’t, and I have three good reasons for this. First, I was ‘physically’ very close to this war, as I was in Bosnia a few years ago. Pristina and Belgrade are only a few hours from Thessaloniki and I have many friends there. Northern Greece (particularly Makedonia and Thraki) has already suffered war damage to its economy (a decrease of 0.5% in GNP, all routes to central Europe closed and destroyed) and its environment (pollution spread from bombed chemical factories plus unknown effects from ‘soft’ nuclear bombs; see Figure 1). Now that the war is over, the USA still does not provide information about the number and location of soft uranium bombs deployed over the territories of Yugoslavia, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and neighbouring regions of Bulgaria. Soft uranium will have catastrophic effects on the Balkan people and the environment for years to come and remains an important reason for the delay to ground operations (to avoid the ‘Gulf syndrome’ cancers affecting thousands of US and British soldiers). KFOR personnel in Kosovo still wear special clothes and masks in certain regions, while local people and returned refugees remain uninformed. Second, I am ‘culturally and politically’ very close, being part of both the troubled Eastern Mediterranean region and the troubled Balkan peninsula. People in the West, having begun to address their ethnic, religious and state-formation problems in the 17th and 18th centuries (with similar ethnic cleansing, we have to remember), know little about the ‘Eastern Question’, or the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries. The ‘Great Powers’ of the time (the same ones as today but without the USA) introduced the term ‘Balkanization’, the establishment of many, very small and weak nation-states, so that they could control them as protectorates. This is exactly what they do today in the former Yugoslavia. Third, I belong to the first generation of Greeks after the Greek Civil War (1945–9), and memories of foreign interventions (by the British and Americans) using all kind of ‘humanitarian’ and ‘ethical’ arguments are still very much alive, together with their victims. I therefore have difficulty in accepting the NATO arguments of today, because I have suffered from them during seven years of dictatorship in Greece (1967–74), of which NATO and the USA were the prime supporters. This does not mean, however, that I accept Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing policies, nor do I give ‘carte blanche’ to the Serbs, something quite difficult to argue these days, since NATO spokesmen and western media have equated all war critics with Milosevic supporters. I agree with Slvoj Zizeck (1999: 79), who argued: ‘what if one should reject this double blackmail – if you are against NATO strikes, you are for Milosevic’s proto-fascist regime and if you are against Milosevic, you support the global capitalist New World Order?’