On a pleasant May morning six years ago, Mother Teodora, 72, welcomed her visitor to the Gracanica monastery in the middle of Kosovo. A hundred miles away in Bosnia a war was raging. But at this medieval shrine of Serbian Orthodox Christianity, pastoral tranquillity reigned.

She wiped the dirt of an onion field from her hands to pour a shot of homemade plum brandy. Then she spoke of the Albanians who decades earlier had taken root in her Serbian heartland and now made up 90 percent of the population.

"Illiterate, stupid," Mother Teodora said with scorn. "They provoke at any possible moment.

"They do not understand the significance of Kosovo to us. This whole territory can be leveled, hills and all, but we will never give up Kosovo."

Her words are notable today for their air of inevitability. Even if a shot had never been fired in neighboring Bosnia, policies were already in motion in Belgrade and Washington that made an armed conflict in Kosovo a near certainty.

With Albanian birthrates threatening to eventually make Serbs a minority throughout Yugoslavia, President Slobodan Milosevic was bent on a campaign of forcible expulsion. And with Presidents Bush and Clinton having pledged to protect the Kosovar Albanians from harm, U.S. opposition to Milosevic was guaranteed.

But it took the lessons that both sides learned in Bosnia, and then misapplied, to accelerate this standoff into its current spiraling chaos. And if the huge exodus of Albanian refugees continues, Kosovo will be even more difficult to mend than postwar Bosnia, which, for all its difficulties and divisions, came with built-in remedies that Kosovo lacks.

Census takers have known for years what frightened Milosevic most about Kosovo. Since the latter decades of Marshal Tito's Communist regime, Kosovo outbred the rest of Yugoslavia, and ethnic Albanians were the reason. Not only were Kosovo's 1.8 million Albanians 90 percent of the provincial population, but they were also nearly a fifth of Serbia's. Had Kosovo's 900,000 ethnic Albanian voters not boycotted the 1992 elections, after saying they no longer wished to be a part of Yugoslavia or its politics, they could have unseated Milosevic before he tormented them further.

Last summer, Yugoslav Minister of Family Affairs Rada Trajkovic warned of the ethnic Albanian "demographic bomb." Albanian women, she said, were "childbearing machines" who couldn't keep track of their children's names.

The Milosevic solution to this problem was anything but sophisticated, having been brutally field-tested in Croatia and Bosnia from early 1991 to late 1995. In those breakaway nations, his Serbian subalterns Milan Martic and Radovan Karadzic used the Yugoslav army and their own militias to wipe resident populations of Croats and Muslims from large sections of the map.

NATO's counterstrike

NATO leaders threatened retaliation from the beginning but didn't deliver an appreciable counterstrike until August 1995, when they bombed a few ammunition dumps and anti-aircraft sites. By then the war had turned against the Serbs on both fronts anyway, and more than 2 million people had been driven from their homes -- 300,000 in Sarajevo alone -- while another 100,000 were buried.

Even at that, NATO was responding ostensibly to a death-toll fluctuation -- the killing of 38 Sarajevans by a single mortar shell in August 1995. Only another such blip in the violence -- a shell that killed 68 Sarajevans in February 1994 -- had pushed the alliance so close to action before.

Milosevic took note of this obvious loophole: Killing civilians and burning their villages would go mostly unopposed as long as the daily death toll didn't become excessive.

For the most part, his Kosovo policy worked within these limits until the NATO airstrikes beginning 11 days ago persuaded him to abandon restraint altogether.

Witness the evidence during the past few years:

Last summer's Serbian offensive in Kosovo forced 100,000 people from their homes. Since then, a series of small massacres -- small by the Bosnian standards of Srebrenica -- took the lives of 36 Albanians, then 45, then 24. And for all the accelerated exodus of the past few days, estimates were that, at one time or another, as many a 460,000 Kosovar Albanians had been forced from their homes by previous fighting.

The difference was that those outgoing tides often receded as far as the next hill or forest, only to seep back at the first return of calm.

Milosevic's assumption that he could keep getting away with this gradual campaign of "ethnic cleansing" proved to be a miscalculation. That's because NATO had drawn its own, opposite conclusion from the lessons of Bosnia.

Opposite conclusions

While Milosevic saw the August 1995 airstrikes in Bosnia as evidence of NATO's long, slow fuse, NATO officials saw them as the turning point toward more decisive retaliation. They also overrated the military effectiveness of the strikes, crediting them with driving the Bosnian Serbs to the bargaining table, when most of the credit actually belonged to an offensive by the rejuvenated forces of the Muslim-Croat federation.

Warren Zimmermann, the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1992, articulated in an interview almost a year after the war NATO's new belief: that a little force could go a long way against the Serbs.

"In the Bosnian war, force should have been used first rather than last," Zimmermann said, "and it wouldn't have taken that much force to have changed the verdict very dramatically. I think air power would have done it, as it did do it in 1995."

So, Milosevic and NATO emerged from their Bosnia experiences on a collision course. He was convinced he could still play by the old rules and loopholes, while NATO's new stance might best be compared to that of a basketball referee intent on whistling a "makeup call": After two blown calls in Croatia and Bosnia, the alliance was poised to punish any violation in Kosovo.

That has left the world to ponder NATO's heavy reaction to a seemingly minor casualty total -- " 'only' 2,000," as critics have pointed out -- in a province within the borders of Serbia, no less.

Having gotten into this mess, Milosevic is determined to make the most of it. With speed necessary as NATO widens its targets, his army seems to have concluded that making the Albanians flee will empty the province faster than executing them.

The further this strategy advances, the more difficult it will be to undo.

For all the displacements of population in Bosnia, the country turned out to be like a Rubik's cube, with interchangeable pockets of ethnicity. While thousands of grieving and dispossessed will always yearn for their former homes and villages, in effect the Dayton peace treaty sanctioned a huge series of home-swappings. The cube that began as a jumble of colors on each side ended with each side as a solid bloc.

Kosovo's refugees, however, are not moving into vacated Serbian territory. They are leaving Serbia altogether. Milosevic's army is showing how well it understands this difference by stripping the departing thousands of their passports, indentity papers and car license tags, and by destroying local archives and land records. People forced from their country at the point of a gun can now be kept from returning at the point of a bureaucrat's pen, denying them at the border crossing.

But as previous acts in this Balkan war have shown, the race does not always go to the swiftest. Milosevic knows this, too, having watched the early Serbian gains of 1991-1992 erode badly over time.

In Kosovo the deck is again stacked against Milosevic in terms of military capability. He is betting that his more powerful NATO opponents, in their yearning for a quick and relatively painless victory, will have neither the stomach nor the stamina to outlast him.

Pub Date: 4/04/99