by Rade STANIC
Incorrect assumption: Observers of conditions in the southern Serbian province see Rugova's victory as, first and foremost, a consequence of the plundering by Thaci's KLA of which the local population has tired after more than a year. The second point on which Rugova carried victory is Thaci's militancy with regard to realizing the end goal of all Albanian parties - the independence of Kosovo. Rugova's readiness to use political means to complete this process meets with the approval of the Albanians, and appears to meet with the approval of both the international community which is compromised by its passivity with regard to crimes against the Serbs, but also Serbia, which through eventual negotiations and talks on the status of the southern province may profit more with Rugova than with Thaci.
"You think that you will get off easier with Rugova. You are wrong," announced Adem Demaci during his recent visit to Belgrade. Perhaps it will turn out in the end that the Albanians may profit more with Rugova than with Thaci. After the elections in Kosovo, Richard Holbrooke announced that "the future status of Kosovo, as far as the American administration is concerned, still remains an open issue", that is, that "he (Holbrooke) and Madeleine Albright have always emphasized that they believe that Security Council Resolution 1244 does not preclude the independence of Kosovo".
Whether by coincidence or not, only in an interview given to "Der Spiegel" in May of this year, in speaking of the future of Kosovo ("For us anything other than independence is unimaginable") Rugova used the same argument and almost the same wording: "In it (the resolution), the independence of Kosovo is not excluded. The door to this remains open."
Image: Available information discretely presents Rugova as a hero from romantic novels who has dedicated his entire life to an ideal - the battle for the independence of Kosovo. Only sporadically do facts appear which describe Rugova as a man of flesh and blood: his membership in the League of Communists since 1986, his house of 160 square meters [approx. 1,720 sq. feet] for which 450,000 marks were paid (half of the real value, according to the claims in the media), the education of his children abroad.
If some of the facts do not correspond to the above mentioned romantic presentation, so much the worse for the facts. Rugova transformed the claim that he is descended from a Partisan [WWII Communist fighter against the Fascists] family ("My father was a Partisan; I have a certification from SUBNOR [Partisan WWI war veterans organization] that he was a fighter missing in action who immediately after the liberation was the first president of the village board") in accordance with his image of a fighter for Albanian national interests into the story that his father and grandfather fought to find a global solution for Kosovo and Metohija. The only thing that is certain is that Rugova's father and grandfather were executed in 1945, one year after his birth. The Serbian regime-controlled papers used this information to explain to the public of the former Yugoslavia the origin of Rugova's "hate" toward Serbs and Serbia.
Truth to tell, it is difficult to find a statement by Rugova in which one can explicitly recognize or demonstrate hatred toward the Serbs; since 1989 and his election as president of the DSK in his statements he treated them as a national minority in Kosovo whom he promised full civil rights upon the establishment of the province's independence. He hasn't, however, done much to protect the Serbs since the arrival of UNMIK. "My people would not understand such an act," responded Rugova when asked why he did not make an appearance as a gesture of solidarity at funerals of Serbs killed as a result of "collective blood revenge", as Father Sava described the murders occurring in Kosovo. Rugova either explained the murders of Serbs that occurred at the beginning of the 1990's as police plots or avoided answering the question; he claimed - at least according to the media - that the expulsion of Serbs from the province never happened.
President: According to existing information, Rugova first became politically active in 1968 during student demonstrations at which the demand for an independent Kosovo was heard for the first time. He was expelled from the League of Communists for signing the Appeal of 215 intellectuals against the adoption of constitutional amendments by the Socialist Republic of Serbia; by the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo he was a nationalist but still without radical goals - at least publicly stated ones. "The Serbs cannot accept the fact that Albanians are taking over leadership positions. They want to stop time," Rugova, who already had a Ph.D. earned at the Paris School for Advanced Studies of Social Sciences with Roland Berthe, explained in 1989, when the new Constitution of Serbia was adopted.
Rugova and his associates in the LDK knew how to make use of the cretin-like policies of the Milosevic regime, which had the result of making the majority of Albanians feel like they were not citizens of Serbia with full rights. The Albanians were never convinced that the Serbian state cared about them and they were frequently treated as second-class citizens. In 1992, during elections for "president" of the "Republic of Kosovo", Rugova, the only candidate, received 867,557 votes even though the electoral body numbered only 762,267. It is irrelevant whether this difference is truly the result of votes from abroad; the important thing is that the Albanians declared Rugova their spokesman almost unanimously. And the spokesman claimed the following: "Serbia has never had sovereignty over Kosovo; Serbia occupied Kosovo and is holding onto it by force, even though it itself is not a recognized state." "The Albanians, like all other peoples of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, have the right to self-determination."
Recognized nationalist: Rugova's greatest success is that he succeeded in internationalizing the Kosovo issue; this occurred as early as the 1990's. It was only 1991 when the U.S. "promised" the Serbian regime that it would intervene should it choose to use force [in Kosovo]; some ten years later, that promise was kept. By drawing the attention of the global public during the course of the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, Rugova repeated from 1992 to today his vision of the solution of the Kosovo problem: an international protectorate over the province, the referendum of "the people of Kosovo" and an independent state. To date, at least a part of Rugova's vision has become reality.
Advocacy of Gandhi-like resistance among the Albanians to the Serbian regime won Rugova the favor of the West. Were it not for Demaci, Rugova would be the only nationalist in Europe to receive the "Sakharov Award" from the European Parliament for his political activities, that is, for his advocacy of a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo. Somewhat less Gandhi-like, but greeted with much understanding by the West, was Rugova's demand to NATO of two years ago for air attacks against Serbian and Yugoslav armed forces "as a preventive measure for the safety of the Albanian population".
This year Rugova, who rationalized demands for the use of force by violence against Albanians and ethnic cleansing, became even more radical. In the above mentioned interview for "Der Spiegel", Rugova was more explicit than ever before in response to the question what would happen if the world insisted on the integration of Kosovo into Yugoslavia: "Then there will be another war. All of us, the entire population of Kosovo, will go to the barricades". He claimed that "[The Kosovo Albanians] are already outside of Yugoslavia." Democratic changes in Serbia have not, as expected, changed Rugova's stance on the status of Kosovo. Before there was any hint of a change, Rugova announced that the Kosovo Albanians "do not have time to wait for Serbia, with its aspiration to dominate and its nationalism, to become democratic," while on another occasion he equated, in advance, every view of the Serbian opposition on Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia with nationalism and the Milosevic regime. With this position it is difficult to expect anything from a meeting with FRY president Vojislav Kostunica, the possibility of which Rugova has not rejected. Perhaps Rugova is not expecting anything. If his statement that "UNMIK will be here (in Kosovo) for quite some time but then it will have to leave" while "on the other hand, NATO will stay forever" is the product of not just wishful thinking but of knowledge.
In any case, Richard Goldstone, a former prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal, on the eve of the elections in Kosovo, in the capacity of the chief of an international commission, in a report to Kofi Annan, the leader of the United Nations, recommended that Kosovo become an independent state after meeting several preconditions, one of which is protection of "minorities". The commission, for the time being, rejected independence and concluded that military troops will be necessary in Kosovo for a long time to come.