THE NEW BALKAN CRISIS and Clinton's New World Order
Sir Alfred Sherman Chairman, The Lord Byron Foundation

...of President Clinton's adolescent heavy petting, Serbian citizens in Kosovo, Serbs and Albanians alike, suffer violence occasioned by American ambitions in the Balkans. Welcome to the New World Order heralded by George Bush; or, more aptly, to the new disorder, resulting from the imbalance of power after the demise of the USSR, devoid of checks and balances.

U.S. policy makers are abusing their power monopoly to redraw the map of the Balkans, ignoring the area's intricacies. Having persuaded the Jihadist fanatic Izetbegovic in 1992 to renege on the Lisbon agreement for multifaith coexistence in Bosnia, they have created a Frankenstein. Izetbegovic aspires to create an Islamistan and spread the sword of Islam as his ancestors did, when Bosnia was the cutting edge of their drive into Christian Europe. His natural allies are the Iranians, who sent him arms, mujahedeen and secret police, with American connivance. Now Washington is concerned that the Iranians have stayed, and are converting Bosnia into a base for operations in Europe. What did they expect?

Conversely, the clero-fascist regime in Zagreb has designs on Bosnia, which Croat nationalism has always designated as an integral part of Greater Croatia. The Croats are clients of the Fourth Reich, America's main ally in Europe. So America is torn between Izetbegovic's demand for a Moslem-dominated Bosnian Federation - including a Christian Croat minority of second class citizens - and the Croat aspiration to annex all, or at least part of Bosnia. This disparity will eventually be fought out with arms between Izetbegovic and Tudjman, with Germany on the Croats' side and the U.S. torn both ways.

American involvement in Albania enmeshes it in new contradictions. Western agencies trained the KLA, Albanian 'freedom fighters" of Kosovo, who were primed to invade it from its camps across the border in Albania. The game plan was the familiar one. The Albanians would shoot a few Serb policemen and civilians. The Serbs would react - possibly over-react which would provide a pretext for intervention by the Americans and their tame clients, the European Union, headed by Germany. The more Albanian civilian casualties, the better. So far it has worked according to plan, producing great scenes of misery for the western media to catalogue, producing justification for intervention.

But in the heat of Serbophobic interventionism the U.S. government faces serious contradictions. The prospect of a Greater Albania alarms the Greeks and Macedonians, Bulgars, Italians, all of whom have Albanian problems of their own, and all Serbs, regardless of politics. More than that, whereas Western intervention in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia was rationalised - however illogically - by the sophistry of the conversion of internal administrative boundaries into international ones, even that fig leaf is absent in the case of Kosovo.

If the US, EU and NATO can use F-16s to carve away territory that has been part of Serbia since before World War I, where will it stop? Who can be safe from the enthusiasm of Ms Albright and her co-conspirators?

The matter is exacerbated by the nature of Albania, the most backward and most violent nation in Europe, with the least stable polity. Until the Albanian revolt in Kosovo in 1981 Albanians in Yugoslavia were much better off in every way than those in Albania. Even after 1981 they remained better off, until the civil war was begun by the KLA. Since then, the Berisha government was overthrown and mob rule established, causing a large exodus. The same process is on the point of being repeated. Should the Serbs - and, for that matter, the Albanians of Kosovo - be subjected to this?

Is this the new world order to be built on American and NATO bayonets? And if they succeed in detaching Kosovo from Serbia, what next? The former Sanjak of Novi Pazar would be divided between Bosnia and Albania. Next in line is Vojvodina, with its two-thirds Serbs, on which Germany's Hungarian proteges are now casting their eyes, not for the first time. Then would come Sudetenland and South Slovakia, Transylvania and the Ukraine; the legacy of Versailles would be wiped out.

These development are not sought by the people of the U.S. or Britain; but they are being pursued by some U. S. policy makers who find themselves in charge. The lesson of Vietnam, that military power cannot impose unviable policies, has been unlearned. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the bipolarity that went with it, was an occasion for greater responsibility and caution on America's part in world affairs. Sadly, the American reaction was to exercise less. That a nation gripped by the implications of Clinton's idiosyncrasies should dispose of sufficient military and diplomatic power to plunge the Balkans into war and redraw 85 year-old international boundaries, gives continued cause for alarm. The Soviet Union is well dead, and it will be some time before Russia can be relied on the play a positive role in world affairs. In the meantime, some ways of mitigating the irresponsible, aggressive and hegmonistic behaviour of the USA, NATO and German-dominated European Union must be found.

If autonomous political forces in the US are strong enough to call their President to account for mendacity, they should be strong enough to call into question his policies in the Balkans. His opportunistic quest for immediate sexual gratification is matched by opportunistic forays into Europe. They threaten to destabilise large areas of Europe, to involve America in aporia where it can neither advance, stay still or retreat without precipitating civil and ethnic conflict.

Early in the next century, Russia is liable to find its feet and shake off the worst effects of a century of socialism, and then take cognizance of Germany's American-aided Drang nach Osten. Its reaction could easily be the prelude to serious conflict.

Only America itself is capable of nipping this in the bud; only its people can call its government to account and force it to refrain from its current globalist obsessions. It is for them to make their voices heard while there is still time.