SERBIA: Kosovo Sails Away

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Mar 16 2007 (IPS) - After more than a year of UN sponsored negotiations, a decision on the southern Serbian province Kosovo is now imminent.

“It is my intention to finalise the proposal for submission to the UN Security Council in the course of this month,” United Nations mediator Martti Ahtisaari told journalists in Vienna over the weekend.

“I would have very much preferred that this process would lead to a negotiated solution,” Ahtisaari said, indicating that no side was entirely happy with his proposal.

Under his plan, the province would remain under international supervision, and 16,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops would remain in Kosovo to ensure peace and stability. The 100,000-strong Serb minority would get self-rule and protection.

The plan does not provide for the immediate independence that two million Kosovo Albanians seek, but it provides for practical separation from Serbia – which opposes the carving out of a new entity from its territory.

Kosovo has been administered by the UN since 1999, when an 11-week NATO bombing campaign ended the killing and expulsion of ethnic Albanians by Serb forces after a bloody two-year conflict.

Most Serbs think of Kosovo as the cradle of their mediaeval state and the centre of their Orthodox Christian faith. The seat of the Patriarchate, the head of the church, is kept in Kosovo until today. But historic changes over centuries have meant that Kosovo is now dominated by two million Muslim ethnic Albanians.

The international community, including the European Union (EU), the United States and NATO, has largely supported the efforts of Ahtisaari. Olli Rehn, EU enlargement commissioner, said in a statement Saturday that Ahtisaari’s proposal was a “realistic compromise, given the parties’ irreconcilable positions on Kosovo’s status.”

But top Serbian officials see in this move a bitter loss. Both the Prime Minister and President tried to put a brave face after the final round of negotiations.

Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica told reporters that “the proposal does not meet the standards to be presented to the Security Council,” while President Boris Tadic found Serbia’s parting with the province “unbearable”.

According to the Prime Minister, “new negotiations are needed; they should continue, but real ones, not these so-called negotiations.”

In those new negotiations, Serbia would offer what it calls “broad autonomy” to Kosovo Albanians. This concept looks a lot like the autonomy the province enjoyed until the 1990s.

That autonomy was ended by Slobodan Milosevic, who introduced direct rule from Belgrade. That rule led to repression against ethnic Albanians, which, in turn, provoked their armed rebellion in the late 1990s. The spiral of violence led to expulsion of 800,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo by Serb security forces and consequently the March-June 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia.

Top Serbian officials, as well as pro-government media, insist that Russia might veto the decision on Kosovo in the Security Council. Broad space is given to statements of Russian officials, mostly from Duma (the parliament), who are sympathetic to Serbia.

But Russia has never acted on Serbia’s behalf in the Security Council. At best, it refrained from voting when the crippling sanctions were introduced against Belgrade in 1992. They lasted until Milosevic fell from power in 2000.

Analysts say the combination of demands for new negotiations and insistence on Russia’s “help” are yet another effort by Serbia to stall for time and not face the imminent separation of Kosovo.

“Belgrade’s negotiators were not skilful, even when they had the right arguments,” the first post-Milosevic foreign minister Goran Svilanovic told IPS. “They acted too late, were too opposing to everything coming from the other side.”

“There is no reason for the Security Council not to adopt the resolution,” analyst Bosko Jaksic wrote in the daily Politika. “Serbia should face reality and be the first to recognise the independent Kosovo. It would be in its best interest to face the imminent rather than pretend it does not see.”

For Prof. Ljubisa Rajic, Kosovo and the issues surrounding it are much simpler.

“Kosovo has not been with Serbia for years now. There are realistic questions one should pose to the public that claims it could not live without it,” Rajic told IPS.

“Would Serbia re-build Kosovo ruined infrastructure, would anyone move to Kosovo if promised a nice job? Would Serbia agree to bilingual administration if a quarter of its population is ethnic Albanian? Would it have the largest group of MPs from Kosovo in its parliament? If the real answer to any question is ‘yes’, then Kosovo could remain in Serbia. And we know this is not the case for so many years now.”