The problem with international news coverage of conflicts is that they are presented in hugely misleading black and white. At times, yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains and yesterday’s bad guys become today’s victims.
Only the people of Bosnia have maintained their status as victims, because quite clearly they never sought anything more than to live their life as an ethnically diverse and peaceable state. Meanwhile, the Croats, who were victims when the Serbs drove west became the villains when they attacked their Bosnian neighbors. The Serbs were long the bad guys, but when they came under attack from victorious Albanians, they became the good guys.
Now the Albanians are being cast as not-so-good guys, if not out-and-out villains, because some of their number are attacking the Macedonians. The international community is backing the Macedonians against the Albanian insurgents on their territory which, according to the simple-minded world media, makes the Macedonians victims, worthy of our sympathy.
Unfortunately this is hokum. Ethnic Albanians living in Macedonia are being targeted by thugs who appear to have some sort of official backing. On May 1, a crowd attacked a mosque in Bitola. Earlier, dozens Albanian homes and businesses had been stoned and burned. Later, the Albanian Embassy in Skopje came under small arms fire. To be fair, some arrests were made by police in Bitola but local Albanians protest that the police did not act with sufficient speed nor determination to stop the crowds rioting. Feelings are running higher and higher in Macedonia. This is probably what the Albanian insurgents want. They seek to polarize the community and fan the flames of ethnic division and hatred.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has meanwhile told Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski, in Washington, that he condemns what he called “the dastardly and cowardly acts “ of the insurgents. What he failed signally to say was that the Macedonian Constitution must be amended to end the discrimination that exists against citizens of Albanian extraction. The Americans also support Macedonia’s refusal to talk to the rebels, on the grounds that this would be to legitimize their existence.
Unfortunately, unless constitutional reform is pushed through rapidly and attacks on local Albanians halted, refusing to deal with the rebels will not work. The majority of Macedonian Albanians caught up in the crossfire just want to live honest decent lives. They do not want their homes destroyed by indiscriminate government shelling. They do not want their sons lured away to fight for the insurgents.
But American endorsement of the Macedonian government’s position, because the media has cast Skopje as “the good guys”, is a dangerous blank check. It allows one side in a historic confrontation to behave in a way that will very likely exacerbate the problems, by forcing a polarization of the ethnic Albanian and Macedonian communities. No one can approve of the Albanian aggression in Macedonia. But by the same token, Macedonian discrimination against Albanians cannot be endorsed by the international community
