Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993 TAG: 9302070260
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASCHENBACH NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
`THE BALKANS COULD EXPLODE'
ALREADY the site of the worst European blood bath since World War II, the Balkan Peninsula is in danger of igniting into an all-engulfing conflict.A widened war would be the destructive legacy of the Balkan heritage of ethnic and religious hatred that was unchained with the collapse of communism.
More than 22,000 United Nations peacekeepers, military observers and civilian police have been deployed in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
An additional 800 recently have been positioned inside the still-unrecognized independent Republic of Macedonia, along its borders with Albania and the Kosovo region of Serbia.
This symbolic show of force underscores U.N. fears that the war in Bosnia and the nationalistic goal of a "Greater Serbia" could spread into Kosovo and Macedonia - pulling Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey into the struggle. The Clinton administration has made the Balkan crisis a top foreign-policy priority.
The once largely autonomous province of Kosovo, 90 percent ethnic Albanian and mostly Moslem, is a powder keg. Serbian nationalists view Kosovo, the heartland of medieval Serbia, as a kind of Serbian Palestine.
"The Macedonian people are prepared psychologically for war. Everyone has two suitcases packed," says Ljubica Z. Acevska, Macedonia's U.S. representative, who recently returned to Washington from a visit to the poorest and most overlooked of the former Yugoslav republics.
"It is a precarious and dangerous situation. There is a buildup of Serbian troops in Kosovo. It's really a very, very gloomy picture," she says. "The Balkans could explode."
It already happened at the beginning of this century. After the Balkan Wars (1912-13), Acevska notes, the large geographic region of Macedonia was divided among Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Greece got more than half.
"There are now disturbances on the Macedonian border," she says. "The Serbs are putting up posters of [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic and other Serbian leaders on our land and calling it Serbian.
"These are the types of skirmishes that happened in Croatia and Bosnia. The Serbs are following a north-south scenario. When they finish with Bosnia, they will focus on Kosovo and Macedonia." The Serbs, Acevska tells National Geographic, still regard Macedonia as part of southern Serbia.
Currently the Balkans are split into 10 independent states: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, the European part of Turkey, Yugoslavia (the two former republics of Serbia and Montenegro), Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia.
Geographically, they occupy a mountainous peninsula between the Adriatic and Ionian seas on the west, and the Black and Aegean seas on the east.
The term "Balkan" first emerged in the 19th century and generally referred to territory under direct or indirect control of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. The Turks swept into the Byzantine-controlled peninsula in the 14th century and dominated it until the early 20th century.
Balkan is derived from the Turkish word for "mountain." It gave rise to the derogatory term "balkanize" - to break up into small, mutually hostile, ineffectual political units, as the Balkans did after World War I. That war started in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo.
The Ottoman Empire itself was a war machine geared to expansion with a dream of a single world united under the green banner of Islam. One reason the Ottomans pressed into Christian Europe rather than eastward was that Islamic sacred law frowned on Moslems warring on one another.
At Kosovo Field in 1389, the Serbian Empire fought to keep Islam out of Europe. Defeated then, the Serbs are still battling to halt Islam's spread into the heart of Europe.
Under Ottoman rule, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina provided the largest number of Slavic converts to Islam. Moslems, recognized as an ethnic nationality in 1969, are now about 45 percent of the country's population.
Another legacy of Ottoman influence is that Albania, although officially atheistic, is today Europe's only predominantly Moslem country.
"The Albanians in 1912 didn't get Kosovo, western Macedonia and parts of southern Serbia. There is a sense of grievance that they did not get their full territory after the Ottomans," says Janusz Bugajski, an expert on Eastern Europe at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"In the worst-case scenario," he says, "the provocation would likely be in Macedonia. There are a lot of nationalistic Serbs who refuse to accept the independence of Macedonia."
A Serb proposal calls for partitioning Macedonia among Serbia, Albania and Greece. Some Serbs see an Islamic threat in Bosnia, Albania and among the repressed Turks in Bulgaria. Any aggression, Bugajski says, would drag in Greece and Turkey and start a full-blown Balkan war.
"Macedonia is the key in all this. If you stabilize Macedonia, you stabilize the Balkans," he says. "I would tell President Clinton to come to grips with Macedonia as soon as possible before he has another war on his hands. It is simmering now."
Macedonia "can act as a buffer for peace in the Balkans," says Andreas Andrianopoulos, minister of state of Greece, which opposes recognition of the country until it stops using the ancient Greek name. Greece refers to its neighbor as the Republic of Skopje, after the Macedonian capital, or as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
The Turkish factor is being overlooked by the West, warns Bulent Aliriza, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
"The Turks today identify with Moslems as very like them, both Moslem and European," says Aliriza. "Turkey is poised to act in the Balkans."