How do you keep the peace in the Balkans? People have been asking that question for more than 2,500 years. That's how long the written record is for this part of the world.

Some 2,300 years ago, the teenage Alexander the Great first made his reputation by bringing peace to the Balkans (by killing, bribing and intimidating). The Romans found the Balkans to be a thousand years of headaches. The Turks used Alexander the Great's approach and kept things pretty quiet for 500 years. By 1900, the Turks had lost control of the Balkans, and as the Turks departed, so did anyone willing to keep the peace in this boisterous part of the world. For the first half of the 20th century, the Balkans were a bloody mess, with decade after decade of war and ethnic cleansing. Then, after World War II, the Turks returned. Well, not the Turks themselves, but the same use of terror. And all was quiet, sort of, for the next 40 years. The police state set up in Yugoslavia after World War II wasn't quite as brutal as the Turks, but the body count was high and the terror was very real. So was the peace.

Unfortunately, the post World War II peace was held together by one man, Tito (Josip Broz, the leader of the World War II communist guerillas). The joke was that there was only one Yugoslav, and it was Tito. But the ancient animosities and ethnic divisions remained, just below the surface. This could be seen even before Tito died in 1980. The most glaring example of this could be seen in Kosovo, where the majority Albanian population never tolerated Serb rule very well. Tito was constantly coming up with new schemes to keep the Albanians quiet. In the late 1960s he decided to give Kosovo autonomy. For the next 20 years, life became more and more precarious for Serbs in Kosovo. Tito, had he lived, eventually would have had to do something to deal with that. As it was Kosovo festered until Yugoslavia began coming apart in the 1980s and, by the late 1990s, NATO was trying to replace Tito, the Turks or Alexander the Great. Without much luck.

Ironically, and without admitting it, NATO ended up using Alexander's harsh methods to pacify the Serbs and get them out of Kosovo. Alexander's method, used by many succeeding Balkan rulers, was to hold an entire tribe responsible for the rebellious acts of any of its members. Thus when a relative handful of Serbs fought rebels and abused civilians in Kosovo, NATO launched a ferocious bombing campaign on all of Serbia. It was the attacks on Serb civilians that eventually brought the Serb leadership around. In centuries past, Greeks, Romans or Turks would send troops into a tribal homeland with orders to kill all armed men and destroy crops and housing. Eventually the tribal leadership saw the light and made peace. Not much progress in 2,500 years.

But the ancients also realized something else about the Balkans. The different tribes never got along. Instead of dozens of tribes, today we have only a few ethnic groups - Serbs, Croats, Albanians and Bosnians. The larger "tribes" of today are in turn divided into many factions. Tito, once he had killed a lot of opponents (real and potential) and gotten everyone's attention, proceeded to play off one group against another, granting and withdrawing favors as needed. Always in the background were the troops and the secret police. Once more, the technique worked. But, as in the past, once the master manipulator was gone, the rebellions broke out, with the locals fighting each other as much as the central government. It was at times like this that the troops were turned loose to terrify everyone into submission.

When Yugoslavia began to come apart in 1990, the two parts that had been ruled by Austrians for many centuries, Slovenia and Croatia, quickly broke away. There was hard fighting in Croatia, which had a large Serb minority, but by 1992 most of the fighting was in Bosnia. Here there was a large Moslem minority, for many Slavs had converted to Islam during centuries of Turk occupation and provided loyal soldiers and civil servants. With the Turks gone, the Bosnians were not highly thought of by the Balkan Christians. The fighting in Bosnia was brutal. Not as bad as during World War II, but bad enough.

NATO marched into Bosnia in 1996 after the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians had fought each other to a standstill. As in times past, the biggest troublemakers, the Serbs, were bribed and threatened into going along with the peace deal. The locals proclaimed publicly this was just a ceasefire and the matter would be settled by violence once NATO got weary of occupying the place. And that's exactly what is happening. None of the three groups has shown any interest in integrating and working together. Each faction elects their hardliners to leadership posts.

This left Kosovo, a sacred place to Serbs. But after centuries of ethnic cleansing, it had a majority Albanian population. This situation had been simmering for years. The Albanian hard-liners were armed and fighting the Serbs. Public opinion in the West was very much against more Balkan bloodshed. The Serbs were not willing to allow UN peacekeepers. So NATO came on like Alexander the Great. The Serb troops left, and now the Albanians are persecuting the remaining Serbs and sending raiders into Serbia.

The Balkans are not pacified. NATO is occupying the place, but there is only the appearance of peace - and not even that in many parts of Kosovo. Corruption and criminal activity are rampant throughout the occupied areas. There is no Tito, Turk or Alexander to force a peace. Europeans believe the troops will have to remain for several decades. After that, in a pattern that is several thousand years old, the violence will return.

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