CIVIL
RESISTANCE IN KOSOVO
By Howard Clark
September, 2000 London: Pluto Press, 2000. 266 pp.
Notes and index. 19.95 USD, ISBN 0 7453 1569 0 (paper).
Reviewed
by Besnik Pula (pulab@georgetown.edu),
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
The full text of
the book can be found
here,
Finally,
a book on the nonviolent resistance movement in Kosova. And Howard Clark is
one of the most informed observers out there, a peace activist that has been
continually involved in Kosovar politics since the early rise of the
intellectual dissident movement known as the "Kosova Alternative" in
the early 1990s, and the later creation of a shadow government, to the
Rambouillet negotiations in 1999. In contrast to Tim Judah's recent book on
Kosova, which primarily chronicles the rise and growth of the Kosova
Liberation Army (KLA), Clark's narrative focuses on the late 1980s and 1990s
and specifically at the development of nonviolent resistance. His disregard
for the KLA in the book is an advantage rather than a weakness because it
would have obfuscated the discussion, while beyond any doubt the Kosovar
nonviolent movement is a subject worthy of attention on its own. In his book,
Clark is concerned with both providing a historical account of the development
of the nonviolent movement in Kosova and with developing methods and
strategies of nonviolent resistance (what he terms civil resistance) by using
Kosova as a case. As an historical account, Clark's book is well-researched
and very detailed, and it definitely amounts to one of the best
English-language surveys on the emergence of the nonviolent movement in Kosova.
In the latter goal, Clark is rather tenuous: in his theoretical treatment of
the Kosovar Albanian movement he fails to address certain conceptual problems,
his agenda is not always clear, and at times he delves into Ghandian
philosophy without always elaborating the practical implications he seeks to
discern.
Clark's
first two chapters contain a discussion of the conflict's history. No novelty
should be expected as Clark's narrative is derived from existing Western
sources, but it offers a useful background to those unfamiliar with the
region's history. Only in the book's third chapter does Clark begin to enter
into the heart of the matter. The chapter provides an historical overview of
the late 1980s and early 1990s rich in factual information, much of which one
will not find in other recent books on the conflict in Kosova or the Yugoslav
breakup. While today they seem distant and in many ways insignificant in light
of the carnage of 1999, the miners' strikes of 1988 and the mass
demonstrations of 1989-90 were precursors to the mass movement that soon after
engulfed virtually all Kosovar Albanians in a struggle to rid the province of
Serbian control. The emergence of the "Kosovar Alternative", with
the springing up of the first pro-democracy, pro-human rights groups and the
diligent efforts to eradicate the centuries old practice of the blood feud are
discussed in detail, and so are the internal squabbles between different
factions in the early stages of the movement and the transformative shifts in
identity once nonviolence was introduced. In this regard, Clark correctly
notes the movement's multifaceted character, underscoring the fact that it was
not only a movement for self-determination but also a movement that, at least
in the initial phases, harbored broader goals of development and social
reform.
Serbia's
repressive policies that increased the defensive aspect of the movement are
discussed in detail in chapter four, while a discussion of the organization of
the so-called "parallel society" takes up the following chapter. The
latter chapter describes not only the functioning of the parallel government,
but also the local infrastructure that made the parallel society work: the
schools, the university, and health care and welfare networks. In contrast to
many other Western observers who described the work of the parallel structures
with awe, Clark provides a more evenhanded evaluation. He concludes that the
parallel system produced mixed results: while it was a powerful tool in
opposing the violent Serbian takeover of the province's institutions and in
generating international sympathies for the Albanian cause, it had limited
abilities in providing the previously state-sponsored public services it
sought to replace. In the proceeding years, education levels plummeted taking
the quality of education down with them, the university was ill-equipped to
provide students with any meaningful training, while poverty increased in
spite of the efforts to alleviate the shocks of massive unemployment and
impoverishment.
An
important question that the book tries to address is the failure of nonviolent
resistance. Looking at the internal dynamics, Clark gives accounts of the
monopolization of political power by the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK),
the party that became the core of the movement, while Ibrahim Rugova's
increasingly self-congratulating style of leadership stifled most other
initiatives for changes in tactics. The post-Dayton period is crucial in this
regard, given the increasing feelings of desperation and hopelessness among
Kosovar Albanians and the growing pressures on Rugova to adopt a more active
approach in nonviolent resistance. While not explicitly endorsing the views of
Rugova's critics, Clark does concur with them in arguing that sustaining the
nonviolent resistance required a more proactive policy.
In
his view, the type of nonviolent resistance practiced by the Kosovar Albanians
had saturated its ability to undermine Serbian authority and garner
international support for its cause, while it had limited its maneuvering
space due to its exclusive reliance on international intervention as a means
for resolving the conflict. Clark also notes the LDK's increasing rigidity and
aloofness the party itself became an essentially undemocratic organization,
and Rugova's preoccupation with developing the bearing of a head of state
increasingly overrode the demands of waging an active struggle. Clark even
suggests that the LDK should have been more flexible in its goal of
independence in order to propose intermediate solutions that could have been
more acceptable to Serbs. However, while I do concur with him that the two
sides' intractable positions exacerbated the conflict, the cost of opting for
autonomy rather than independence without any negotiations in place was too
high it would have had a disastrous effect on the Kosovar movement and sown
insurmountable divisions within the community, as Clark himself acknowledges.
And it would have seriously undermined the LDK's claim that Serbia had taken
from the Kosovars what was legitimately theirs prior to 1989 their right to a
sovereign government (hence the Albanians' branding of Serbia's takeover as an
"occupation"). Furthermore, it was more likely Milosevic's
unflinching resolve to maintain its repressive apparatus in Kosova and the
regime's unwillingness to negotiate the issue on more equitable terms that
made it impossible for the LDK to publicly endorse solutions other than
independence. But the regime's behavior does not exonerate the Serbian
opposition, which frequently claims that if the Kosovar Albanians had helped
its struggle the Milosevic regime would have collapsed earlier it too failed
to provide any serious incentives to the Albanians to join their efforts while
its treatment of Kosova as an exclusively Serbian national issue made it
indistinguishable from the regime from the Albanian point-of-view. Clark does
not make this point strongly enough, saying that the LDK should have given
more serious thought to the possibility of participating in Serbian elections.
But then again, such an act would have carried the same risks as those
associated with altering the goal of independence.
At
any rate, the heated period after the emergence of the KLA in 1997 and the
Serbian police's massacres in the years that followed spelled the definite end
of nonviolent resistance, and Clark's narrative covers the main events of this
period exceptionally well. He also speaks about the NATO intervention, which
he considers a candid illustration of the West's utter failure to meaningfully
address the problem before the situation got out of hand. His judgment in this
case is strongly grounded in his principles based on the rejection of
violence, but he also gives a strongly worded indictment of NATO for not
dealing with "the criminals in its own ranks" (p. 185). While he is
not totally opposed to military intervention to defend unprotected civilians,
he considers the magnitude of NATO's intervention uncalled for and
contemptible. But his criticisms of the military intervention are rather
perfunctory. He speaks a lot about what the West could have done in 1995, 1996
and 1997 to begin instituting a peace process, but gives few alternatives for
what could have been done in the frantic period of early 1999.
In
his final chapter, Clark attempts to summarize the "lessons learned"
for nonviolent resistance from the Kosovar case, and this is where his broader
agenda as a peace activist is most evident. While he does acknowledge that,
ultimately, nonviolence did pay off for the Kosovar Albanians, it mainly did
so by gaining the international support necessary to conduct violent conflict
that successfully prompted Western military intervention. It failed, however,
in other respects, having been unable to implant ideas of democracy and ethnic
tolerance and prevent an overall corrosion of values, goals which Clark
considers to be crucial components of nonviolent struggle. His underlying
belief, grounded in both Gandhian thought and in the insights of advocates of
nonviolent action, is that nonviolent resistance demands a dynamism in both
methods and goals, something that was consistently absent in Kosova. There is,
however, an underlying conceptual problem in his attempt to compare the
Kosovar movement with nonviolent movements under socialist regimes. The
problem is that while dissident movements and mass-based anti-regime groups
struggled for regime change, the Kosovar Albanian movement was an essentially
secessionist movement that sought to dismember the state. This brings up
another key question: can nonviolence succeed in a struggle for secession?
Clark does not provide a clear answer to this question, although he does
acknowledge the problem of conducting nonviolent resistance against an
opponent willing to resort to genocidal methods and "ethnic
cleansing" as a means to end the conflict.
Clark's
book fills a gap in documenting a considerably neglected period of Kosova's
very recent history. The recent focus on the violence and the war has
overshadowed a more optimistic period when the bleakness of socialist rule
gave way to grassroots empowerment in a struggle that combined both a drive
for democracy and local autonomous rule. Clark covers the many aspects of the
Kosovar Albanian movement and provides an understanding on its origins and the
factors that contributed to its decline and its failure to prevent violence.
While some readers might be put off by Clark's peace activist agenda or may
bicker with his analysis, he covers the period in lucid detail and provides a
well-developed historical account. His lack of native-language sources are
well compensated by interviews with important actors (the Kosovar analyst Shkëlzen
Maliqi is an important source cited throughout) and by Clark's own firsthand
experiences in Kosova. Nonetheless, for anyone interested in getting a more in
depth look of the Kosovar conflict of the 1990s, this book is a definite read.
(c)
2001 Balkan Academic News. This review may be distributed and reproduced
electronically, if credit is given to Balkan Academic News and the author. For
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Balkan Academic News.