The word "understandable" is frequently used in Western Europe and the United States to describe the desire for revenge by ethnic Albanians against ethnic Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) in Kosovo.
On June 21st in Prizren, the sector of Kosovo in which German troops are deployed, a series of events took place which defied understanding.
On that morning, Trifun Stamenkovic and Maria Filipovic set out on separate journeys to do their shopping in the town centre. Trifun left his home at 10 a.m. and returned an hour later. He told his story to representatives of the US-based Human Rights Watch organisation.
"I couldn't find my wife. When I came inside [my house] I saw the broken windows and everything broken. I was in the doorway and I went back outside and saw a German patrol, two jeeps. I told them my wife was missing, that she wasn't in the house. When I entered the house with them I saw only my wife's knees. Her knees were bloody. I didn't see the rest of her body; the Germans took me outside. They saw her dead; they didn't let me in to see her."
Trifun Stamenkovic is 85. His murdered wife Marica was 77. The German soldiers did not allow him to see her body because she had suffered appalling wounds.
Half and hour later, Maria Filipovic returned to her home in the same street to find her husband Panta (63) dying of stab wounds. Her neighbours, members of the small Albanian Catholic community, told her the killings had been committed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Both victims had their throats cut. German soldiers told Human Rights Watch that Marica Stamenkovic's throat had been severed almost to the point of decapitation.
In the shorthand of the undeclared war the grey shades of reality were thrown into sharp black-and-white relief. The "good guys" were the KLA on the ground and the NATO forces 15,000 feet above them. The "bad guys" were known, in a term which pushed simplistic definitions to the verge of racism, as "the Serbs".
Perhaps this demonising of an entire nationality may have helped some to view the events of that dreadful morning in Prizren, and the murder, two days later, of 14 farm workers, who had been promised but not given Kfor protection, as "understandable". If so, then we had better think again about applying such dangerous labels in future.
Serbs such as the Arkan gang, and undoubtedly a number of Kosovo Serbs as well, took part in some of the most brutal crimes seen since the end of the second World War. A small number of Roma were accomplices.
Mercenaries from "civilised" west European countries, including Denmark and Finland, are now beginning to admit their involvement in some of the more appalling instances of mass murder.
Things have now changed. We are faced, in the short period since the NATO-led forces of Kfor have taken control of Kosovo, with ethnic cleansing in reverse. Reliable estimates show that more than 160,000 Serbs and Roma have left their Kosovo homes.
The Human Rights Watch report published in New York this week lays the blame firmly on the KLA, despite denials from that organisation's leadership.
In a society dominated by the traditions of families and clans, the KLA, known to Albanians as the UCK (Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves) has bizarre and disparate pedigrees.
One "political" grouping is dominated by ultra right-wing clans whose elders served in the volunteer Skander beg division of the Nazi SS. This group fought Tito's communist partisans and, to its everlasting shame, made its contribution to the Holocaust by rounding up members of Kosovo's then tiny, and now non-existent, Jewish community.
On the extreme left, most of the KLA's exiled leaders have emerged from the Stalinist tradition formulated in Albania proper by that country's paranoid dictator, Enver Hoxha. Following internal Yugoslav autonomy in 1974, Mr Hoxha had his agents infiltrate Pristina's University. The philosophy of revolution in Stalin's tradition was fomented from across the border in Tirana and found willing adherents among sections of Kosovo's Albanian population.
Both strands, though opposed in political theory, have certain aims in common. Almost all want Kosovo to be separated from Yugoslavia and become part of a "Greater Albania". Some want to annex parts of western Macedonia and eastern Montenegro where there are ethnic Albanian minorities.
A large group, Human Rights Watch believes, is motivated by the will to purge Kosovo of Gypsies and Serbs and create an ethnically "pure" Albanian region. All appear prepared to put their ideological differences aside until their territorial ambitions have been fulfilled.
The NATO forces at Kfor's core now find themselves in a situation in which many of those who once appeared to be their armed allies have become involved in an evil spree of racist murder, harassment, arson, destruction, looting and terror. Human rights watch has detected a slowness on the part of Kfor officers to come to terms with this. Many have shrugged the situation off as "inevitable". One told a representative of Human Rights Watch that his unit did not even try to keep track of abductions because they were so frequent.
Even less excusably, an attempt by another Human Rights Watch researcher to report an incident of harassment in the village of Ljubizda on June 30th to the German Kfor contingent "required multiple visits to local posts and then to contingent headquarters in Prizren, where a CMIC (civilian-military implementation cell) officer appeared uninterested in the details of the case".
Human Rights Watch, in its report published this week, issues the following exhortation: "Finally, it is incumbent on the special representative of the United Nations secretary General and head of UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo), Bernard Kouchner, KFOR Commander Sir Mike Jackson and the representatives of the United States and other leading NATO governments not only to condemn attacks on Serbs and Roma in Kosovo, but to make the treatment of minorities an urgent priority of the international com munity in Kosovo.
In addition to more effective security arrangements, this means a willingness to condemn whoever is responsible for abuses and to press the leadership of the KLA and other Kosovo Albanian leaders to take action to prevent them." There can be no place for the word "understandable" in this context.
