A World Made Safe for Multi-Ethnic Societies

The president visited Slovenia this week, and congratulated the Slovenes for declaring their independence in 1991. He saidthey were a model for people everywhere, and especially for the Serbs. Serbia, he said, must now "choose the path that Slovenia has chosen, where people reach across the old divides and find strength in their differences and their common humanity." Actually Clinton was restating what had once been his rationale for NATO bombing: Yugoslavia must be made safe for multi-ethnic societies.

When the Roman Catholic, Slovenian-speaking Slovenes declared independence, however, they were hardly reaching across old divides. They were separating themselves from the Orthodox, Serbo-Croatian-speaking Serbs, and they most certainly did not want a multi-ethnic society; and when they declared independence, they further destabilized the already unstable Balkans.

But none of this mattered to the president. Administration foreign policy is based on what looks good today. Yesterday was a long time ago, and anything further back than that is irrelevant. Also, B does not necessarily follow A, and actions have no consequences.

Thus the transformation of the Kosovo Liberation Army: It was supposedly financed by drug smugglers, connected to terrorists, and of doubtful military value. Sometime last month, however, its reputation started to change. The Pentagon began hinting that it was a real military force. Meanwhile the administration appeared to discover more Serb atrocities. Defense Secretary William Cohen declared that the Serbs might have executed 100,000 Albanians. "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing...They may have been murdered," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

The KLA, of course, was being sanitized. Its past had disappeared. No one seemed to remember the report the U.N. Human Rights Commission released the first week of the bombing. Atrocities, it said, had been committed by both Serbs and Albanians. Brutality was being met by brutality. The badly mutilated bodies of 14 Albanians, among them women and children, had been discovered in a forest; but it seemed that in two other locations were the bodies of forty Serbs.