EU Stance on Kosovo Could Backfire With Serbia, Say Analysts
Serbia’s new soon-to-be-adopted constitution remains fixated on Kosovo “as an integral part” of its territory, showing high political tension and a deep public malaise in the country, say experts.
The international community’s goal of finalizing an independence timetable for Kosovo ahead of Serbia’s parliamentary elections in December could backfire by tempting hardline nationalist leaders in Belgrade to stoke up ethnic tensions in the ever-volatile Balkan region, according to security analysts and European Union (EU) officials.
“Serbia is in no position to make war, but it could stir up trouble across the region if it wants to — in the Republic of Srpska [the ethnic Serbian component of the tri-state Bosnia-Herzegovina federation], in Kosovo and in Macedonia and Montenegro,” Judy Batt, research fellow on Balkan issues at the EU Institute of Security Studies, Paris, told an Oct. 18 conference here on Serbia’s democratic future.
Milan Pajevic agreed. His reformist liberal party, G17 Plus, is a junior member of Serbia’s coalition government and is threatening to withdraw from it over constitutional issues.
“There has been no clear and resolute break with our past. Some of the biggest profiteers and rabble rousers from the [Slobodan] Milosevic era have been absorbed into our current economic and political structures,” said Pajevic, referring to the late Serbian strongman who was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes during the 1991-1995 Balkan conflicts.
Serbia will hold a popular referendum Oct. 28-29 on the new constitution and its controversial reference to Kosovo. As for Serbia’s dialogue with Kosovo leaders in U.N.-sponsored negotiations to orchestrate the province’s independence, Belgrade has refused to yield an inch of ground. “Those talks have gone nowhere since they were launched in February,” Batt said.
The question now remains whether the Kosovo issue will play into Serbia’s parliamentary election in December, for which an exact date is still unknown.
Despite the international community’s mounting frustration with Belgrade’s intransigence, Batt advised against any premature move by the six-nation Contact Group. The group — comprising Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States — is responsible for organizing Kosovo’s political detachment from Serbia.
“The Contact Group wants to end these talks by the end of this year, with recommendations delivered to the U.N.,” said Batt. “This would fall right in the middle of Serbia’s election. I don’t think that would be a good thing. It would be better to delay the release of those recommendations [until after the election].”
Pajevic warned that “what we now have [in the attitude of Serbia’s leadership toward Kosovo] is a direct result of Milosevic’s deranged politics of the 1990s.”
“It will be very bad if that leadership exploits [the loss of] Kosovo to distort our relationship with the European Union.”
Whether Serbia uses its December election to rise above its past is, indeed, an open question. The country’s prospects for closer ties to the European Union have been frozen by the latter since May, due to Belgrade’s failure to deliver the last of its war criminals to the ICTY, such as the notorious former warlord Ratko Mladic.
“The status quo of Kosovo is intolerable for everyone — including Serbia — but we want the Serbian people to look to their European future rather than dwelling on their past,” said Heather Grabbe, an adviser to Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner for enlargement policy. “But this means dealing with the ICTY and [the forthcoming loss of] Kosovo.”
All three speakers said defense reform would help Serbia achieve the democratic legitimacy and transparency it lacks today.
“Serbia does not have a proper rule of law or democratic control of its military. Why is it Belgrade cannot achieve full cooperation with the ICTY? Because it is linked to these two very real problems,” said Grabbe.
NATO could have had a role there but, like the EU, it excluded Serbia from joining its Partnership for Peace (PfP) program until the country resolves its ICTY problems. In Pajevic’s view, that was a mistake.
“It would be much better to have Serbia as a PfP member. Then it could work hand-in-hand with NATO allies to shape Serbia’s military forces and use them to find Mladic and other war criminals,” he said.
Batt seconded that view, arguing that Serbia’s PfP eligibility “should not have been linked to the ICTY—precisely because PfP addresses security and defense reform issues.”
No comments:
Post a Comment