Washington — Two years ago, NATO went to war to rescue Kosovo's ethnic Albanians from predatory Serbs. Today the United States and its European allies are taking measured steps to help Serbia and Macedonia resist predatory Albanians. Such is progress in the Balkans.
The eruption of fresh skirmishing on ex-Yugoslavia's merry-go-round of ethnic violence is not a cause for regret, despair, or crisis-mongering. It does not detract from NATO's Kosovo victory, which carried the inevitable seeds of this month's flare-ups in its good works.
Ethnic Albanian guerrillas have been shooting up villages and other soft targets along Kosovo's boundaries with Macedonia and Serbia. Most of the fighting has been done at long distance and has inflicted relatively few casualties.
But this small insurgency has forced Washington and its European partners to focus again on the West's responsibilities and capabilities in the Balkans.
That development actually represents progress compared to the drift and uncertainty of recent months, when it appeared that the new Bush administration might significantly and prematurely diminish U.S. involvement in the peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo.
By demonstrating patience and perspective during this spasm of violence, NATO governments can forge a new sense of unity and purpose for the vital tasks that remain ahead. The important thing here is the trend line, not the latest blip.
And it is clearly progress when the West can cooperate with democratically elected administrations in Macedonia and Serbia on a common program to contain factional violence. Two years ago the intervention was to stop the genocidal impulses of a Serb dictator prepared to scatter a million Kosovo refugees across Europe.
Western cooperation with Belgrade and Skopje is a wholly unintended consequence for the ethnic Albanian guerrillas. Revenge is likely to be the most direct measure of progress for them, as it usually is with ex-victims who can suddenly do unto their tormentors as they were done unto.
But the shadowy guerrillas, whom NATO sources say amount to 100 to 200 fighters in each of the Macedonian and Serbian theaters, have a political program beyond revenge.
They want to expand and internationalize their conflict in hopes of mobilizing Western sympathy and ultimately support against their Slav "oppressors," as the guerrillas' Kosovo brethren did in 1999.
This hope is likely to be a vast miscalculation by the guerrillas, who have unclear ties to the Kosovo liberation movement that NATO did eventually rescue.
The nasty big political secret that the 1999 air war on Serbia obscured was that Albanians and their ethnic kin in Kosovo and Macedonia are distrusted and feared throughout the rest of Europe. Only Slobodan Milosevic's murderous tactics convinced France, Germany and their partners to intervene militarily with the United States and Britain and to detach Kosovo from Serbia's control.
European powers, who have generally tilted toward the Serbs, will now be tempted to say that the Albanian wolves have shed their sheep's clothing to pursue the dream of a greater Albania. This is where the need for perspective and patience comes in.
Determined civilian and military efforts by the United Nations, NATO and the European Union have kept the peace in Bosnia and Kosovo. A functioning local government is slowly emerging in Kosovo, which has settled into an uncomfortable but manageable limbo in which eventual independence is neither guaranteed nor denied by its protectors. The future is still to be gained, or lost.
NATO showed both qualities this week by refraining from direct intervention with its peacekeeping forces in the border conflicts. Instead, NATO successfully pressed Macedonia to use its small, weak army to blunt the Albanian guerrilla challenge. Letting Serb units back into the Presevo Valley near a three-mile-deep buffer zone the guerrillas have exploited for terror attacks is also smart.
These moves subtly underline that Kosovo's independence from Serbia has to be gained responsibly, if it is to be gained at all. NATO did not drive Milosevic out of Kosovo to enable ethnic Albanians to destabilize their neighbors or abuse the Serbs who still live in Kosovo.
Justice cannot be built on new acts of injustice, however traumatic and bloody the past. That holds true even in the Balkans.
Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
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