Heni Erceg of the Split weekly "Feral Tribune," discusses the Kosovo events and its effects in Croatia in the March 16, 1998 issue of this weekly.

When more than 10 years go young Yugoslav communist Slobodan Milosevic took long hard line steps into a great nationalistic trek through Yugoslavia, successfully tricking everybody around him, the rest of the country did not worry, nor did it actually care about the situation in Kosovo. While Albanian nationalism expressed itself through "psychological pressure," Milosevic?s was "acting." But this did not worry the rest of Yugoslavia. Moreover, the nationalistic parties that were raising to power in the Western part of Yugoslavia, Kosovo served well as an argument.

The Slovenians now admit that at that time they told the Serbian leaders to regulate the constitutional situation in their republic as they wish, hoping that they will be told the same when they change the Slovenian constitution. It seems that constitutional accounts in Yugoslavia were settled across the back of Kosovo, that is, the Albanians. But such Chamberlain policy of Slovenia and Croatia has shown to be short sighted, as the events in Knin prove," said at that time Kosovo academic Rexhep Qosja.

Ten years later, everything in Kosovo is the same. Kosovo reality today speaks of half a million exiled Albanians in the last 10 years, bout hundreds of thousand of families without social insurance, about 80 percent unemployment, about segregation? Kosovo streets are flooded by well armed Serbian police, and Arkan's killers are criss-crossing Kosovo villages again. But now the Albanian "minority" is not called "irredentist" but "terrorist." The intolerance between the two nations in Kosovo has again reached a boiling point, while the Albanians, thanks to Slobodan Milosevic, instead of autonomy and civil rights, got Serbian police, ghetto schools and hospitals, permanent state of emergency, but also something else, much more dangerous: the cancer of extreme nationalism, deep in its national being.

If they definitely opt for their own state, the Albnins will be, and not Slobodan Milosevic, proclaimed as the sole culprits of instigating a war of a wider scope. Will there again be only negotiations with the one who is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people of different nationalities, including his own, in the region of former Yugoslavia ?

Of course, it is most probable that this will be the case, since "Kosovo is an internal matter of Yugoslavia." That is how one could comprehend a brief comment of the Croatian Foreign Ministry , concerning Kosovo events. Those to whom, at the time of their own nationalistic euphoria Kosovo served as a red rag, today evade from condemning the terror against two million people, since this is "an internal Serbian matter."

Actually, as Milosevic did not complain when his Zagreb buddy finally solved "the Serbian question," making most of the Serbs run way from Croatia in 1995, so now Tudjman is telling his war comrade: Kosovo is your thing !

But, on the other hand, in difference to Tudjman ­ who "successfully" solved the Serbian question in Croatia and created an ethnically pure state ­ Milosevic will hardly be able to solve the Albanian question in Kosovo in the same manner. The numbers are simply different. It is not possible to "humanely relocate" two million people. Or is it ? Milosevic cannot win a war in Kosovo anymore, but he is capable of instigating it, spreading it to Macedonia and Albnia, reopening the war in Bosnia, involve Croatia?

Source: Split weekly "Feral Tribune," March 16, 1998