PEACE IN KOSOVO? Not yet & not likely.

The precarious situation in the town of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, now partitioned between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, demonstrates the fragility of the international community's policy to establish a multiethnic government in Kosovo. Here, as in Bosnia in 1995, NATO made war to undo ethnic cleansing and partition. This admirable ambition has since met endless difficulties and frustrations in both places, imposing doubt as to its realism. Yet what is the alternative, even in purely expedient terms?

NATO placed Mitrovica under French zonal command, assuming that the substantial Serbian population would trust the French to protect them from the revenge of Albanians, earlier driven away by Serbian forces and marauders. The French unwisely allowed the Serbs to partition the town. This left looted Albanian apartments and some isolated Albanian residents in Serb-controlled northern Mitrovica, and a few Serbs in the southern part of the town, dominated by the returning Albanians. Since then, NATO forces have struggled to separate the Albanians, demanding their property in the north, and bands of Serbs, teleguided from Belgrade, blockading their part of Mitrovica with the aim of creating a de facto cantonization and eventual partition of all Kosovo.

Serb expansionism and "greater Albania" ambitions collide in this struggle. Albanian activists are harassing the Kosovo Serbs in order to drive them into Serbia. Albanian radicals have reportedly infiltrated Serbia itself in an effort to control Albanian-populated towns inside the country. Yugoslav military forces are massing just across the frontier from the American-controlled zone of Kosovo, a potentially explosive situation.

The Western powers have had small successes in disarming hatred and installing multiethnic institutions. Sarajevo is one such success, but Sarajevo was a liberal and cosmopolitan city before Yugoslavia's destruction began. The prewar situation has merely been restored. The hope that Sarajevo would provide the model for the rest of the Moslem- Croat Federation of Bosnia, not to speak of the Republika Srpska, has been mostly disappointed.

The UN's special representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, concedes that Kosovo's Serb and Albanian populations probably "will indeed prefer to live separately for a period." He argues, however, that "history shows that divided cities and divided communities reunite eventually." This, I think, has only limited truth in describing events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would seem a basic principle, or simple realism, to say that it is legitimate for people with a common cultural heritage to want to live in their own state. The problem is feasibility.

If it can be accomplished peacefully, fine. The reality is that Woodrow Wilson's idealistic notion of national self-determination for all has come about in Central and Eastern Europe mainly through war, persecution, population transfers, redrawn borders, and with immense human suffering.

Successful multiethnic nations have, in modern times, mostly been the creations of settlers and immigrants, at the expense of indigenous peoples (the United States, Canada, Australia). Multicultural immigration in the two most successful immigrant nations, France and the United States, has depended on the existence of powerful and culturally assimilative national ideologies.

The international community's decision to establish multiethnic societies in Kosovo and Bosnia is extremely ambitious, more so than most were willing to admit (or even understood) when the policy was established. In the short term, the international community has no alternative to pressing on to establish liberal, ethnically neutral political institutions in those societies, counting such successes as come, and resisting the continuing effort of the Milosevic government to exploit ethnic division in both places.

Whether this will provide a permanent solution, successfully uniting warring communities, is another matter. One would like to think so, but it would be unwise to count on success. The patience, persistence, and armed presence of the international community will, for the foreseeable future, remain indispensable.

(c) 2000, Los Angeles Times Syndicate.