The Specter of Serbian Despotism

Although Kosovo's position within the Serbian political core led to policing, not war, many initially feared otherwise. "When diplomats look on the map for the next Balkan flash point," one journalist confidently opined, Kosovo "is where their finger falls," while another argued that

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Kosovo's forced depopulation was next on Belgrade's agenda due to the proximity of international borders to Kosovo's population centers.^[24] This concern was fueled by warnings from ethnic Albanian political leaders, who drew parallels between their plight and that of Bosnia. Ibrahim Rugova, for example, said in 1993 that Serbia's "ultimate goal" was to "create their own cleansed territory here in Kosovo, a territory without a people. They do not even want to have us as slaves."^[25] Bujar Bukoshi, another top LDK official, wrote that Kosovo was potentially "more dangerous" than Bosnia, and that Serbian ethnic cleansing had begun in Kosovo "long before the first Muslim villages were attacked in Bosnia."^[26] Yet since Serbia continued to use policing rather than Bosniastyle depopulation, ethnic Albanian politicians developed new terms to describe Serbian policy, including "institutionalized" or "quiet" ethnic cleansing.^[27] As evidence, they pointed to the emigration of some 300,000 Kosovo Albanians during the 1990s to escape Serbian police repression, military conscription, and job-related discrimination.^[28]

When it became evident that Serbia was not about to forcibly empty the province, however, foreign observers began to describe Kosovo as a "time bomb" that had failed to explode.^[29] By 1997, the correlation between Kosovo's position within the Serbian core and police-style repression seemed solid, taking Kosovo off the West's crisis agenda. As one Kosovobased Western aid worker said in winter 1997, "Kosovo is no longer a major worry for us."^[30] As long as Kosovo remained securely trapped within Serbia, ethnic cleansing seemed unlikely, and Western powers were content to call for improvements in Serbia's human rights record. Like Sandžak and Vojvodina, Kosovo seemed destined to languish indefinitely under Serbia's thumb, spared Bosnia-style destruction while experiencing a harsh, police-style regime of national domination. Arbitrary arrests, torture, press restrictions, house searches, and myriad bureaucratic harassments were widespread, but there was no violent ethnic cleansing.^[31]