ANCIENT ETHNIC HATRED HARDENING IN BALKANS : ONCE-MODERATE ALBANIANS BECOME SERBS' BITTER FOES.

Byline: Ken Layne

IT is nearly a month into this latest Balkan war, and the jabbering heads of CNN and Fox News are demanding more self-determination for the Balkan tribes, with well-meaning senators claiming things will be just fine if we let these people live side by side under stable governments.

Right.

While it's tough to question the good intentions behind the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, this conflict - like Iraq and countless wars before it - has been presented for U.S. audiences in the most simplistic possible fashion. The Serbs are bad. The ethnic Albanians are oppressed. Stop the Serbs, and Kosovo can go back to its peaceful happy ways.

Such shallow explanations are to be expected when most Americans couldn't find Kosovo on a map until the airstrikes began. But the Balkans, as excruciatingly clear from history, is not a land of simple answers. And for the Kosovar Albanians who grew weary of Serb harassment and turned to the raggedy neo-Maoist Kosovo Liberation Army for justice, this battle is not just about Kosovo.

It's about an ancient dream of Greater Albania, which would subsume not only the doomed nation of Albania and the province of Kosovo, but also would also eat up chunks of Montenegro, northern Greece and Macedonia. With economically devastated and politically bankrupt Tirana as the default capital, this huge new presence in the Balkans would certainly lead to new wars or alliances with already-nervous neighbor states.

Greece and Turkey, age-old enemies who have barely avoided war over the island of Cyprus, are the biggest concerns in this grim new world order.

But do regular ethnic Albanians really want Greater Albania, considering the horrible human cost being seen today in the refugee camps?

Living in the south Balkans taught me that many Albanians used to be moderates, but the bloody chaos of Milosevic's Yugoslavia has forever hardened their hearts.

One such man was a friend of mine who had once been a young hero of Slavic-Albanian relations.

When I knew him in 1996, Shpend was a tall, gangly Albanian close to 35 years old. But as the singer and songwriter of the Macedonian new-wave band called Telex, he did what no Albanian had previously done: sell records to non-Albanians without changing the language of the songs.

He regularly played for crowds of 10,000 in ex-Yugoslavia, and his band's videos still showed up on Yugoslav and Macedonian television.

Yugoslavia's best rock band sought out Shpend because of a beautiful ballad he recorded in the 1980s. Shpend's sister awoke him one day. ``Get up, now,'' she said. ``Someone is here to see you.'' Shpend stumbled into the living room to see the country's best guitarist sitting on the couch.

``It would be like Keith Richards showing up at your apartment in California,'' Shpend said. ``I was in shock.''

The guitarist had searched all of Skopje, asking for the writer of Telex's songs. ``I want to do a song in Albanian,'' the rock star said. ``I want you to write it.'' The song was a huge hit in the old Yugoslavia, and it was Shpend's proudest moment to see a stadium full of rock fans in Belgrade singing along as his song was performed by the Big Rock Band. In Albanian.

We were sitting in a Slavic-owned downtown cafe one summer night - I, drinking vodka tonics, and Shpend, slurping coffee - when he told me this story. It seemed to speak for a time when ethnicity mattered less.

``You're more hopeful than you let on,'' I said. Skopje was already a divided city. Shpend was only on this side of town because I liked the cafe.

He looked thoughtful for a moment and then grinned. ``I'm hopeful, why not? This is my hope. See that building?'' He pointed to an ugly modern tower behind us, the Macedonian parliament building. ``I want to see the two-headed eagle of Albania hanging from that building.''

The gruesome atrocities in Kosovo today are, to most ethnic Albanians with ties to the land, seen as a necessary evil. Even those suffering most, huddled against foreign borders and grieving for the relatives they've lost to Serb gunmen, speak strongly of someday going home.

When the Serbs are gone forever.

Whether it works or not, whether the war spills over to Greece and Turkey, whether hundreds of thousands die, none of this will block the dream of making Greater Albania appear on the world's maps.

As nothing will end the Serbian ideal of Kosovo as holy ground.

``We love Yugoslavia, and as you can see, the Serbian people are paying with their lives for that love,'' a man named Milan wrote me last week. His letter was in response to a column I wrote about the NATO airstrikes - in which I took the hardly controversial view that Slobodan Milosevic is a vicious swine who should have been taken down a decade ago.

``You are a neo-Nazi Anglo-American idiot,'' he diplomatically added, saying NATO was criminally attacking Yugoslavia ``for refusing to sign away Serbian Kosovo to Albanian killers and rapists.''

All attempts to redraw the Balkans' borders along ethnic lines are fundamentally doomed, because such efforts are blind to the endless lust for tribal expansion. Extremist Albanians - increasingly common in the wake of Serb atrocities - will not rest until Greater Albania consumes Kosovo, Macedonia and chunks of northern Greece and southern Montenegro and Croatia.

Nationalist Serbs not only want to keep their talons on Kosovo, but they're also still sore over losing Bosnia and Macedonia. In both lands, Milosevic has more than a few sympathizers.

In the West, we see ethnic hatred and violent nationalism as socially unacceptable. Of course we have blood on our hands from the past - all nations do - but at least it can be said that favoring the extinction of a tribe is no longer a stance one can take without severe penalties.

Not so in the Balkans. There is one difference between the ethnic hatred of today's southeastern Europe and that of 600 years ago, when the Muslims and Serbs had their historic battle on the fields of Kosovo: The weapons used in 1999 are infinitely more efficient.

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Photo

PHOTO (Color) An ethnic Albanian child from Kosovo draws a Kosovo Liberation Army emblem in a tent set up by UNICEF for children at a refugee camp in Tirana, Albania.

Enric Marti/Associated Press