Don’t Kill the Balkan Baby, Please

Srecko Latal

They tried massive dosages of expensive antibiotics. Medicines temporarily alleviated some of the effects of the baby’s illness but they were never able to resolve the core of the problem.

Fed up with years of efforts and a fortune spent, dad one day said: “Maybe we should kill the baby. We can always get another one if we need it.” Onlookers gasped in shock.

This sort of drama played out in my head as I read an article written by a distinguished US diplomat in a respected US newspaper last week. The article was about the Balkans. The author suggested that after years of failed efforts, America should consider allowing the final disintegration of Kosovo and of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The absurdity and the weight of this idea was even greater in light of the fact that it was coming from an eminent diplomat who was a veteran of the Balkan region. Who could know better than he, many would say?

And so, this allegory played out in my head. The Balkans was the unwanted, troubled and overprotected baby, America was the bullish, tough dad and Europe was the soft yet confused mother.

You too may wonder why mom and dad should keep on spending their efforts and money on a baby that seems not to want to get better.

I’ll give you few reasons, and I’ll stay away from ethical and moral arguments because they are often used only when all other, more concrete, arguments have failed. 

Even beyond those “last resort” motives, I believe there are several concrete arguments for a continued parental presence in the Balkans.

First, let’s look at the issue from the perspective of the recent history; neither America nor Europe ever tried some other tactics in the Balkans. Since the early 1990s, they have stuck to the same approaches:

America has been focusing on end-results and has used its tough diplomacy, accompanied with implicit threats to use force and political and financial arm-twisting. This approach, reinforced with NATO bombing, managed to stop the fighting but failed to achieve much more than that.  

The EU’s tactics have been even feebler. Focusing on process and lacking a coherent foreign policy, the EU has relied heavily on its thick wallet and on the attraction of an EU membership card. This carrot never really worked for the Balkans but the EU never understood why, so it has just kept on repeating the same old message over and over, louder and louder.

In addition, neither America nor EU ever looked for a second opinion. They relied heavily on their own poor analysis and understanding of Balkan issues. When the situation got tough, they would seek additional opinions, but usually from within their own ranks. Then they would only get reconfirmation of the same illusions or semi-truths, which had little to do with reality but were easier for them to understand and address.

So, in a sense, after all these years, neither America nor Europe have truly understood complex Balkan issues and relations and have never attempted other approaches than their usual ones. As a brief digression, I would suggest that we can see the same pattern repeating itself in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

But let’s also take a look at this issue from the Americans’ and Europeans’ own perspectives. Why should this small, God-forsaken region be so important for them? Why should they keep spending taxpayers’ money on preventing Balkan countries from breaking up?

The answer is because, contrary to general Western understanding, most people across the various ethnic divides actually don’t want these countries to disintegrate. They just want these countries to function better in respect of everybody’s basic ethnic, religious, and other human rights.

There is ample evidence that people from different ethnic groups live side by side and cooperate on a daily basis. Yet this evidence can be found only at local levels, far away from the top political levels that Western diplomats find so important and fascinating. It is because of this focus that the West confuses local politicians’ occasional radical ramblings for their peoples’ nationalist positions.

Moving on from history, let’s view this issue from future perspectives. If the West, through its own inconsistency and incompetency, lets Kosovo and Bosnia split up – if that actually happens – it will create grounds for long-term instability that would come to haunt everyone in the near future.

Abandoning the Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Muslims would create fertile grounds for all sorts of future radicalization, be it along ethnic, national, religious or criminal lines.

Sooner or later, this abandonment would escalate into something bigger and again find its way into becoming part of America’s and Europe’s internal issues. But by then, it would be much harder and costlier to fix the damage – if fixing were possible at all.

The respected diplomat seems to have forgotten why America engaged in Bosnia with air strikes in 1995. That decision had nothing to do with the morality of such an act, following the Srebrenica massacre. It was because Bosnia had by then become a major part of the US presidential campaign.

To end, let’s view this issue from the perspective of “karma”. All of us, as persons, institutions or countries, face certain situations for very specific reasons; in order to learn certain lessons. The peculiar thing is that the same sort of situation has a tendency to repeat itself – until we finally learn the particular lesson.

This is why those people whose parents had problems with alcohol often end up either becoming one themselves or married to an alcoholic and then their kids inherit the same problem. The same goes with violence.

Unfortunately, we are all witnesses to the fact that neither people in the West nor in the Balkans have learned their specific and joint lessons. Until they do, the same situation will repeat itself over and over again.

For all those reasons, I urge mom and dad not to kill the baby. The plea is not only for the baby’s sake but for its parents’ sake as well. Instead of abandoning it and dooming it to a slow and agonizing death, the parents should first consider facing their own past shortcomings. Then, they can ask for a doctor’s second opinion – and try some alternative treatments.