Assessing Serbia's 1998 Violence in Kosovo

Although some dubbed Serbia's 1998 repertoires of violence "ethnic cleansing," they were in fact quite different than the violence to come. During 1998, Serbia did not seek to expel Kosovo's ethnic Albanians from the province altogether, choosing instead to raid villages suspected of supporting the KLA; in response, many villagers fled into the hills. Although this certainly was forced displacement of a sort, it did not amount to a wholesale ethnic cleansing effort. Most importantly, Serbian forces did not move against Kosovo's urban population. The state's monopoly over violence was threatened in several key rural areas and that, for the most part, was where Serbian efforts were focused. Thus by the fall of 1998, Serbian authorities were pursuing a bifurcated strategy in which piecemeal rural cleansing existed alongside ethnic policing in the

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cities. This mixed approach was sparked by changes in Kosovo's institutional conditions, the most important of which was Serbia's increasing loss of empirical sovereignty over parts of the province. The Kosovo Liberation Army had created semi-autonomous pockets and pierced the Kosovo ghetto's walls, but Serbia's loss of control was sporadic and localized, as were its ethnic cleansing operations.

Another factor inhibiting full-scale ethnic cleansing was the Western world's unwillingness to cut Serbia off entirely. By insisting they still recognized Serbia's juridical sovereignty in Kosovo and by continuing to negotiate with Serbian officials, Western powers and international institutions signaled their acceptance of Serbia as part of the international community. This was expressed most powerfully in October 1998, when the OSCE sent unarmed monitors into Kosovo, thereby respecting Serbian rights over the province.

These monitors, however, created a major contradiction for international actors. Their job was to record events on the ground in detail, bringing the media, human rights organizations, and Western governments into immediate and intimate contact with the effects of Serbian state violence. With this level of proximity, it was difficult for Western governments to downplay Serbian human rights abuses in the name of stability. Given the power of international human rights norms and the density of human rights groups clustered around Balkan events, Serbian massacres were bound to excite tremendous international attention, pushing Western governments to take concrete action. The monitors brought the reality of Serbian massacres to key Western audiences in a way that was difficult to ignore.

There is little doubt that Serbian operations against suspected KLA supporters in 1998 and 1999 were entirely brutal affairs. At the same time, however, Kosovo suffered equally or less than other areas of the world during those same years.^[101] Those conflicts did not have hundreds of human rights monitors on the scene, however, with a direct line to powerful diplomatic offices and Western journalists. The discourse and actors of the international human rights norm had by now fully enveloped and penetrated Kosovo and Western agencies concerned with Balkan events, transforming Serbian massacres into major international political events.