New republic; new divides
Free Kosovo
Belgrade is burning and Serbs are on the rampage – in the Serbian capital, in the slice of northern Kosovo they control, and in the half of Bosnia they govern.
The US embassy and other western targets in Belgrade are being attacked by mobs. United Nations police in Kosovo have been using tear gas to try to stem the rioters. Next door in Bosnia, the Serbian half of the country is threatening to secede, a move that could kickstart a war.
It might be 2008, but there’s a distinct whiff of 1991 when the Yugoslav wars started with similar events in Belgrade, in Kosovo, and in Bosnia. The similarities may be real. But they are also superficial. The fundamental difference between now and then is that there is no Slobodan Milosevic, no evil genius to mastermind the bloody chaos. Rather, a bunch of very aggrieved Serbian nationalist leaders who lack the dead dictator’s talent, cunning, control, and ruthlessness.
The reason for the return of mayhem is Kosovo. Nine years after NATO drove Serb forces out of their southern province, inhabited mainly by ethnic Albanians, and after two years of futile negotiations between Serbs and Albanians over what is to become of the province, the Kosovo leadership declared independence on Sunday 17 February to become the world’s 193rd state.
Such declarations are not worth the paper they are written on unless they attract international support. But the move was closely coordinated with Washington and Brussels and, within a week, the new Republic of Kosovo was recognised by more than 20 states – most importantly the USA, the big EU countries, Germany, France, Britain, and Italy, and a host of others with many more to follow.
But Serbia will never recognise an independent Kosovo. Its biggest backer, Russia, is also furious, warning of new wars, destabilisation, and a domino trick of dozens of other secessionist movements following suit worldwide, not least in Moscow’s own post-Soviet backyard. The Russians and many others argue that the Kosovar Albanian action turns international law upside down since an international border has been redrawn without the agreement of one of the parties and without UN blessing. They have a point.
The west and the Kosovars argue that Kosovan independence is inevitable, the last act in the bloody collapse of former Yugoslavia and its refashioning into seven new states. They have a point, too.
And the independence is tenuous and incomplete. Kosovo is no longer a part of Serbia – as it had been since the Ottoman empire collapsed in the southern Balkans in 1912. But nor is it fully sovereign. The US and the EU were the midwives attending the birth of Europe’s newest country. Brussels now takes on the role of foster parent, attempting to raise its infant ward to adult statehood.
It is a tall order, the EU’s toughest ever. The independence declaration launches the EU on its most ambitious exercise in state-building. The EU policy and actions are hugely contentious and divisive – politically, legally, practically, and morally.
Just when it is striving to concoct common foreign policies, Europe is split between those who support a separate Kosovo state, those who oppose it, and those sitting on the fence. The policy has triggered a crisis in relations between Brussels and Serbia. Moscow, Serbia’s main backer, is also exploiting the international equivocation over Kosovo to try to undermine EU unity.
For the past nine years since the Nato air campaign against Serbia, Kosovo has been a UN protectorate. But over the next four months it is to morph into an EU protectorate, with 2,000 European police, judges, lawyers, diplomats, analysts, and administrators replacing the lacklustre UN mission. A French general, Yves De Kermabon, will head the so-called EULEX operation aimed at basing Kosovo on the rule of law. The NATO-dominated KFOR peacekeeping force will effectively be a European military operation. Meanwhile, a Dutch diplomat, Pieter Feith, will oversee the European protectorate, replacing the UN’s Joachim Ruecker.
The EU is already the biggest international donor to Kosovo, having spent some 2 billion euros on Kosovo. It plans to spend 330 million more by 2010, making Kosovo the biggest per capita beneficiary of EU largesse.
But along with these commitments, there are already suspicions that the EU is biting off more than it can chew, particularly in the north. The northern half of the town of Mitrovica and the surrounding region above the River Ibar is controlled by some 60,000 Serbs, roughly half of the remaining Serbian minority in a state of around two million. Belgrade directs the local Serb leaders, pays the salaries, provides the health, education, and welfare services and is bent on a de facto partition of Kosovo. This northern area also abuts the Serbian border. The Europeans will struggle to assert control here.
Practical and operational difficulties aside, there remain big questions about the legal basis both for redrawing international borders to create a new state and for the European mandate in Kosovo. The US and the Europeans wanted a UN mandate but the Russians made sure that was not available. The West argues that Serbian behaviour—the erection of a police state in Kosovo in the 1980s, mass repression of the Albanian majority, and Belgrade’s war that drove hundreds of thousands of Kosovars from their homes and left thousands dead—invalidated the Serbian claim on retaining Kosovo.
The Serbs and the Russians counter that the UN Security Council which ended the 1999 war and authorised the UN takeover—Resolution 1244—affirmed ultimate Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. Indeed, knowledgable European officials say that the Finnish envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, who negotiated the war’s end with Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, specifically promised Belgrade continued sovereignty, which was one reason that Milosevic agreed to the peace terms.
The Europeans, by contrast, insist that Resolution 1244 enables both the European mission and Kosovo independence. A confidential four-page analysis by legal experts at Britain’s foreign office reasons that the EU mission is legitimate unless the UN rules otherwise and that the UN resolution does not preclude the act of secession.
The new state is to be established on the basis of the independence terms drafted by Ahtisaari over 18 months of the failed negotiations he mediated between the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians. The Europeans are to oversee implementation of the Ahtisaari plan which provides for far-reaching decentralisation and autonomy for the Serbian minority in Kosovo.
However, the benefits for the Serb minority will only be enjoyed if the Serbs take part in the governance and institutions of an independent Kosovo. Sadly, this seems an unlikely prospect, at least in the short-term, since Belgrade is ordering Kosovo Serbs to boycott and block the new state and to pursue the informal partition.
Ian Traynor is the Europe Editor of The Guardian
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