Europe's forgotten frontier
It’s time the West woke up to the strategic importance of the Balkans, says Katya Adler
BBC
- Katya Adler
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When I was starting out in news in my 20s, I reported on the brutal breakup of former Yugoslavia. It was the first time I faced men with balaclavas and guns. Neighbour turned on neighbour. The horrors and terrible atrocities experienced by so many never left me.
With its glittering coastline, Croatia is now a popular tourist destination, visited by around 20 million people each year. But look closely and you’ll see homes still peppered with bullet holes.
Kosovo in 1998–9 was the first war I covered mid-conflict. Some 20,000 women and girls are estimated to have been raped by Serb soldiers and police. It was a tool of war used to demoralise the Kosovar Albanians they were fighting. Fearful of being shunned in a conservative society, the women suffer in silence to this day. Only three have ever spoken publicly about what happened.
But much has changed in the Balkans – and not only in former Yugoslavia. In my new BBC2 documentary The Balkans: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier, I visit Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Romania, Kosovo and Serbia. They are countries rich in natural beauty: wild rivers, bear-filled virgin forests and magnificent beaches. But they are also often underestimated players in this continent’s present-day security.
It’s not only the media that tends to overlook the Balkans. Back in the 1990s, Western powers helped forge peace after the Balkan Wars and after the end of communism in Romania and Albania. Since then, however, they’ve largely taken their eye off the ball, leaving the door open to other global powers – China, Russia and the Islamic world – all competing to gain power and valuable influence in the region.
Beijing has invested so much in the Balkans (reportedly half its total investment in Europe, though that’s hard to verify), that the region is dubbed “China’s gateway to Europe”, giving the Chinese a valuable foothold here. The majority of projects linked to Chinese loans and investments are in infrastructure, mining and energy.
Serbia, meanwhile, along with ethnic Serbs across the region, has strong ties to Russia. They see themselves as part of the “Slavic Brotherhood”. Serbia has steadfastly refused to impose sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Islamic world invested heavily in Kosovo after its war with Serbia. Some of the new imams there began to preach an extreme version of Islam, with some becoming radicalised and volunteering to fight with the Islamic State group – something Kosovo says it has worked hard to stamp out.
China, Russia and the Islamic World all want power in the Balkans
So, has the West been caught napping?
Huge US aircraft carriers regularly dock in Croatian ports – as if to say: this region is ours. But the US and its allies are no longer the dominant global force they were in the 90s. We now live in a world where a number of countries vie for influence.
Many Balkan countries, still waiting to join the EU and defence alliance Nato, feel they have been neglected or treated like second-class citizens. That’s left them open to other spheres of influence – or vulnerable, depending on your point of view.
The West is now waking up, some say belatedly, to what can be seen as a cold war, a silent struggle, in its own backyard. Nato is building what is set to be its largest European military base in Romania, which is strategically placed next to Ukraine and along the Black Sea from Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine woke us up to the fact that Europe is not a settled, peaceful continent. But too many of us remain unfocused on south-eastern Europe and the tensions there, barely beneath the surface.
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Since reporting on the Balkan Wars, I’ve carried the faces of the people I met – the mothers, fathers and children – with me. Returning 30 years later, it’s clear this is a forgotten European frontier – and its future has never been more uncertain or important to us all.
Authors
Katya Adler
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