Balkanized: the wonder is not that Serbia attacked kosovo, but that it waited so long.

The wonder is not that Serbia attacked Kosovo, but that it waited so long.

Mr. Almond teaches modern history at Oriel College, Oxford.

"IT began in Kosovo. There it will end." Even before the eruption of violence in Serbia's southern province in February, it was commonly assumed that the simmering discontent between the 90 per cent Albanian majority and the Serb minority that controls the region would mark the final disintegration of Yugoslavia. It was in Kosovo in 1987 that Slobodan Milosevic came to prominence as the first Yugoslav Communist to adopt nationalistic rhetoric as the way out of the dead end of the old system. Two years later, Milosevic, using his power as Serbia's Communist Party boss, abolished Kosovo's autonomy. From there it was downhill all the way for internal peace in Yugoslavia, as Slovenes, Croats, and then Bosnians declared independence in order to escape a similar fate.

And yet, during the bitter years of war in Bosnia, Kosovo was the one Balkan volcano that did not erupt, even when U.S. warplanes shattered the myth of Serb invincibility in the run-up to the Dayton Accords in 1995. Despite their massive majority, and although they had declared independence in 1992, Kosovo's two million Albanians seemed more Gandhian than the Mahatma in their dogged attachment to political inertia as a means of gaining independence. As Milosevic's dream of greater Serbia fell apart, the Kosovo Albanians seemed never to lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity.

What they apparently did not understand is that the West helps those who help themselves. Lip service to the virtues of peaceful protest was combined with Western indifference to the Albanians' cause so long as they ignored the lesson of recent history from Palestine to Northern Ireland: The peace process grows out of the barrel of a gun. Finally, the Kosovo Albanians seem to be catching on.

In 1996, a Maoist-style guerrilla operation calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army emerged. Pursuing a classic strategy, the KLA has carried out attacks on Serb officials and civilians, hoping to provoke a backlash by the Serb authorities.

For nearly two years there was no response. Then, this February, Serbian paramilitary police launched a search-and-destroy operation in the Drenica region with the usual level of civilian casualties.

Given Milosevic's past role in inciting ethnic conflict in order to shore up his power base, Westerners instantly assumed he must be behind the current crisis. However, there is strong evidence that Milosevic did not want this cauldron to boil over. Whatever crimes he has been justly accused of in the past, he has an acute sense of his own self-interest, and the last thing he wants is to provoke firm Western action.

Ever since the mass protest movement against him in Serbia itself last spring, Milosevic has been maneuvering to keep afloat. He got himself elected president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia last summer. That seemed a neat switch in order to allow a fellow Serb Socialist, Milan Milutinovic, to take up his previous post as president of Serbia, but the plan began to go awry when an unexpected rival appeared on the scene.

Until last summer, Milo Djukanovic, the prime minister of Montenegro -- the tiny republic that makes up the other half of the Federal Republic -- had been a loyal client of Milosevic's. Suddenly, Djukanovic jumped ship and became Milosevic's most vociferous critic. Just as that Pasionaria of ethnic cleansing, Mrs. Plavsic, became the West's favorite Bosnian politician, so Mr. Djukanovic reinvented himself as market reformer instead of the arch-black marketeer he had been during the sanctions of 1991 - 95.

Milosevic recognized that Washington had abandoned its old policy of trying to find genuinely democratic politicians to support in ex-Yugoslavia and instead was willing to put its weight behind renegade apparatchiks like Djukanovic. In those circumstances, Milosevic, who was himself used to being treated as America's favorite ex-Communist in the region, did not want to do anything which might precipitate a crisis and in turn lead to international intervention.

So all last fall, the heavily armed Serbian paramilitary police treated the KLA with kid gloves. For the first time, the body count went against the Serb forces, who had ruled with such brutality since 1989. Yet they did not hit back. During the election season in Serbia and little Montenegro, the normally ham-fisted Serb police rolled with the KLA's punches.

However, letting his boys take casualties without revenge was a high-risk strategy for Milosevic. More than the poorly armed and ill-trained army, Milosevic relies on the Serbian police as his praetorian guard. Their loyalty was stretched thin by his passivity in the face of KLA attacks.

And this situation was skillfully exploited by Milosevic's chief rival within Serbia, Vojislav Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party. Seselj was an active ethnic cleanser in 1992, and in the intervening years he has no more become a Western-style democrat than Djukanovic has. During and since the campaign leading up to last fall's elections (in which he wound up losing to Milutinovic for president of Serbia), Seselj has been fostering links with the Serbian police and presenting himself as the defender of their right to strike back at "terrorism." By mid-February, Milosevic must have realized that his hold on the police was being weakened by his softball tactics. The savage Drenica crackdown allowed the police to let off steam, and do what they do worst. It was also a reminder to Kosovo Albanians that although the KLA is able to launch hit-and-run attacks, civilians are less mobile. (At that, the Serb forces succeeded in knocking out one KLA group.)

And so the stalemate is likely to continue. Milosevic senses rivals in Belgrade circling, trying to trip him up. The Kosovo Albanians know that their densely populated region could become a killing field if the Serbs let go with all their firepower. The Serbs know that if they slaughtered the despised Albanians, the West would probably launch airstrikes to punish them, a high price for a renewed ethnic cleansing. The only people who are sitting pretty are the shadowy KLA. For many Albanians -- and readers of The New York Review of Books transported back to their days of solidarity with the FNLM guerrillas of El Salvador and even the Vietcong -- they are the heroes. But the human cost of their hit-and-run attacks could yet be high for their compatriots.

Meanwhile, as if in a ghostly replay of the West's disastrous reaction to the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, Special Envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard and his European Union counterparts recite the self-contradictory mantra that they want democracy and human rights for the Kosovo Albanians but they also want to keep the region inside Rump Yugoslavia. Only force keeps Kosovo inside Yugoslavia now. The KLA is testing how far counter-force will move the West toward pushing Belgrade to let it go. It seems that Kosovo is in for a few more atrocities before its fate becomes clearer. Let the peace process begin.