By: Tim Judah
In the second week of February at the regular Monday morning editorial conference of the Economist, decisions were being taken on what should be in the next issue. The Europe editor said that he planned to run a piece on the first anniversary of Kosovo’s independence. A fellow editor interjected: “We’ll that was a disaster wasn’t itš” In many circles this is a common refrain and a common perception. It is also, of course, quite wrong.
One year on is a good moment to take stock of the situation in the region; to consider the fears that preceded Kosovo’s declaration of independence on 17 February 2008, what has happened since and how nature of regional stability has changed. It is also a good moment to discuss the nature of the political landscape today, ie., which problems remain – and what is new, above all in the wake of the world financial crisis.
On the eve of Kosovo’s independence a diplomat in Pristina who had been very involved in crafting the plan of Martti Ahtisaari, the now Nobel peace laureate, for the territory looked gloomy. He was unhappy, not because Kosovo was about to declare independence but because it had not happened as he and his colleagues had planned. Serbia had not agreed to the Ahtisaari package and backed by the then resurgent Russia had indeed indeed actively opposed it. This, was not supposed to have happened. It meant, he said, that we had not got to “final status” or the end of the book, but rather we were simply closing one chapter on the story of Kosovo’s status and opening another. “We had hoped we would be finishing the book by now,” he said.
What he said was true and his downbeat assessment was correct but the gloomy predictions of many sceptics about the results of Kosovo’s independence have since proved unfounded. Let’s consider what they were:
Firstly that there would be an exodus of the remaining Serbian population and that we would once again see columns of tearful refugees stuffed into cars and on tractors.
Secondly that there would be a new upsurge of violence in Kosovo which also might spill over into the rest of the region, especially the Presevo Valley and Macedonia.
Thirdly that Serbia would fall into the hands of radical nationalists and finally that Kosovo would open the Pandora’s box of secessionists across the world, starting with the Republika Srpska.
Let’s look at those one by one. Firstly, there was of course, no Serbian exodus. This was due to several factors none the least being the desire of both Serbian and Albanian leaders to avoid one and to avoid giving cause for one. A Serbian exodus would have been a disaster for all, quite apart from the people actually fleeing. It would have dogged the birth of the new state and hung over it as a kind of “original sin” – however caused, just as the 1948 exodus of Palestinians from the nascent State of Israel has been. In that sense, in terms of the media, political and historical impact of such an exodus it would have been far, far greater than that of the flight of Serbs in 1999.
But, in terms of a balance sheet, there was a price to pay for this success of course. Barring a huge upsurge of violence there was no real fear of an exodus from the north of Kosovo, above the Ibar river. The real fear concerned those Serbs in the enclaves numbering perhaps 60,000. The price has been, and is, the fact that Pristina’s authority does not run in these areas.
The north lies completely beyond the remit of the authorities in Pristina, despite the symbolic presence of Serbian police in the uniforms of the Kosovo Police Service and officials from the EU’s police and justice mission EULEX, on the border.
Secondly; violence. Yes, there have been violent incidents, but far fewer than most expected. There was, in the wake of the declaration of independence the burning down, with the approval of the government, or parts of it, of the then Serbian premier Vojislav Kostunica, of the northern border posts and the tragic death of one Ukrainian soldier in a riot in Mitrovica. In recent months there have been bombs in Mitrovica too but no casualties. By contrast it is striking how at the edge of Gracanica, 10kms from Pristina, Serbian and Albanian businesses of all kinds now sit cheek by jowl next to one another in a way that has not been seen since 1999. There has of course also been no “spill over” violence in either Presevo or Macedonia.
Thirdly: The fear that Serbia would fall into the hands of extreme nationalists. This was another legitimate fear but one which did not happen. On February 3rd Boris Tadic beat Tomislav Nikolic the then leader of the Serbian Radical Party by only three per cent in the presidential election. In the wake of Kosovo’s declaration of independence some 200,000 people came or were bussed into the centre of Belgrade to hear Serbian leaders reject independence and Metropolitan Amfilohije saying: “Kosovo and Metohija are the apple of our eye, the heart of our hearts, our holy city of JerusalemƩn this worldly life nor in God’s eternal one, any more than we can renounce our own soul and our own destiny” After that demonstration, and most likely with the connivance of elements of the security services, the US embassy was attacked and one of the attackers died in the fire.
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Then what happened? On May 11th Serbia elected a strongly pro-European government and most extraordinarily the Radical Party, which for so long had teetered on the brink of power had imploded by autumn, splitting into two and thus neutralising itself as a nationalist threat. Vojislav Kostunica is now a marginalised figure while Mr Nikolic is now a welcome guest amongst the diplomats as he seeks to reposition his party, the Serbian People’s Party, (SNS) in the same way that Mr Sanader did with the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in the wake of the death of its founder Franjo Tudjman. One of Serbia’s problems is that now the (old) Radicals are vastly over represented in parliament compared to their support in public.
And look at the figures too. A poll published last week taken by Strategic Marketing, a reliable Belgrade pollster found that 61.27% of Serbs thought that Kosovo was lost, 22% thought it was not while 16.23% had no opinion. In other words two of thirds at least have no illusions.
Does that mean that Kosovo has disappeared from the Serbian government’s public discourse? No, but the reasons for talking about it may be different from before.
Let’s consider its actions. It opposed the deployment of EULEX. It mounted a successful campaign to have the General Assembly refer the issue of Kosovo’s independence to the International Court of Justice. It has banned exports from Kosovo bearing the stamp “Republic of Kosovo” and it has retained political control over Serbs in Kosovo.
The ICJ campaign was an undoubted success for Vuk Jeremic, the Serbian foreign minister. In effect it has closed off the possibility of many more states beyond the 55 that now recognise Kosovo from doing so. In this way Kosovo remains in a kind of unusual limbo. It is recognised by many, but not all of the most important states in the world. It has no prospect of joining the UN for the foreseeable future, but a strong possibility of joining other organisations such as the IMF and World Bank. The ICJ move has also helped cement the division between those EU states that have recognised Kosovo and the five “refuseniks”. Kosovo’s government, lacking the experience and assets of Serbia’s has been unable to mount a successful counter-offensive nor take effective counter measures on the trade issue, which it could, bearing in the mind the huge imbalance in Serbia’s favour of the balance of trade.
What is Serbia, or specifically Mr Jeremic and President Tadic, playing at here? The answer is, as I say, to watch what they do, not what they say. Kosovo, in the wake of independence was not sealed off, the borders were not closed and rhetoric aside, moves have been made to damp down possible flash points. The appointment to do just that of Oliver Ivanovic as deputy head of Serbia’s Kosovo ministry is a case in point, in that his friendship and contacts with many Kosovo Albanian leaders has proved an asset and effective means of communication.
Serbia’s government publicly opposed EULEX. It then played hardball and won certain concessions important to it and for presentation purposes to its public. Now, neither side is happy but then neither lost much either. EULEX is deployed across all of Kosovo which many thought that would never happen. In the north, and on the borders, its presence may be symbolic, but that, for now, is better than nothing.
Mr Jeremic’s Kosovo campaign can be put down then to two perhaps not very surprising things. The first is that, being a politician, the issue serves him well. His popularity has grown thanks to the question and he is often talked about as a future prime minister. But, the campaign also serves to neutralise any possible opposition in Serbia accusing the Democratic Party of being unpatriotic and treacherous etc. In the longer term the aim may well be, or indeed actually is, in the minds of some high placed Democratic Party officials at least a way to position the party in such a way that it’s nationalist credentials cannot be questioned if it proposes a formal partition of Kosovo in a few years, not excluding an exchange of territories for parts of Presevo. When it comes to the strategic rail and road links which pass through Presevo and have always been cited as a reason why this could not happen, there would appear to be no reason why diversions could not be built to bypass this problem. How realistic this is remains to be seen, how desirable too – but it certainly is an idea circulating at the top levels of the Serbian government.
The question of partition and division brings us onto the fourth issue on our list. The famous “Pandora’s box”. Did Kosovo’s declaration of independence make the break up of existing states more likely? Undeniably the issue of Kosovo has been used, up to a point, in the discourse of Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of the Republika Srpska and of course Kosovo was cited when Russia recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But, we have to be realistic here. Bosnia and it internal relations would hardly be easier if Kosovo did not exist. Indeed, the interesting thing is how Mr Dodik used Kosovo only briefly as a precedent before moving on. Above all though we need to consider the fact that Mr Dodik is interested in being a big fish in a small pond and that means remaining being exactly where he is now, retaining power for the RS but not destroying Bosnia entirely. It is not in his strategic interest to destroy Bosnia and not in Serbia’s either. The prospect of an embittered and hence potentially radical Muslim statelet around Sarajevo is not a prospect which the current Serbian leadership finds appealing.
As for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s it is instructive that apart from Russia only one or two other states have recognised them, such as Nicaragua and that Russia failed utterly in persuading even the states within its sphere of influence to follow it in recognising them. So it seems that difficult though Kosovo’s birth was it was clear that a good many countries recognised the legitimacy of its claim to independence and self-determination in the post-Yugoslav context, whatever the legal technicalities. Many of course did not, but such a difference between the cases suggests that new states will emerge on their own merits, not because of what happened in Kosovo or South Ossetia.
One year after Kosovo declared independence it is clear that the balance sheet is far more positive than negative. Independence has not led to new instability and indeed more likely staved that off. Having said that it is clear it has not solved all the residual post-Yugoslav problems of its inheritance either. In the short term though many are details rather than big picture questions – ie., what will happen to customs revenue from the north. In the medium term, we are likely to have more of the same, ie., a de facto divided Kosovo, which has been the case of course for the last decade, with manageable outbursts of violence and in the longer term, in theory, increasing clout from the EU about coming to a final, “final settlement” in exchange for membership. But even that is questionable. After all, even states we think of as finished and final are open to question. Is the United Kingdom a final or an evolving state? How will it look in ten years? Will it still exist in ten years or will Scotland have seceded?
Now we are into the realm of hypotheticals of course, but it seems to me that in fact the Balkans are moving in a direction which is somewhat novel. Despite the difficulties inherent in European integration this is a process which would seem to me to be irreversible, if not a long road strewn with difficulties. What we will see is a consolidation of generally weak states within their existing borders, but equally the ever clearer emergence of overlapping spheres. For example the Albanian sphere in terms of academia, business, media, culture and transport. The Serbian sphere covering the regions where Serbs live and of course smaller Croatian and Bosniak spheres. These are naturally developments and are plain already and they are not mutually exclusive. An Albanian from Tuzi can work happily in Podgorica, watch Kosovo or Albanian television and do business with colleagues from anywhere in the former Yugoslav states.
Finally: The next year promises all sorts of challenges but for the first time in two decades these very challenges are not unique to the Balkans. They are all the fallout for the world financial crisis. For example how Serbia will deal with unemployment when its hitherto largest exporter, US Steel starts sacking now idle workers, or how Kosovo copes as remittances from a cash strapped diaspora fall off and no more or less easy to deal with or different than how Ukraine deals with unemployed steel workers in the east or Armenia deals with a decline in remittances. There is one key difference in the western Balkans which can help inoculate it from social unrest and worse, and that is that the experience of the 1990s was so bad for most people that whatever the financial crisis throws at them now it will not be worse than that. In other words, they have a far higher threshold of pain and thus greater resilience than the average European, certainly from the west and central Europe and for the most part from the rest of it too.
Kosovo plus one then: Perhaps seven out of ten. Problems upcoming will be mainly due to fallout from the world financial crisis. Meanwhile a new Balkan political and economic geography is beginning to emerge within the confines of existing borders. The existing setup in Kosovo, ie., Kosovo pretends it is sovereign all of its territory and Serbia pretends Kosovo is independent cannot last forever, but there is no reason to suppose it cannot last for the many years to come, nor that some form of deal for the north can eventually be struck which will fail to satisfy both sides but be just enough to unlock the current frozen situation.
Speech held Feb.21 at the 4th Albanian Institute for International Studies Security Conference titled “Desecuritization and Resecuritization of Western Balkan Inter/Intrastate relations.”
