Kosovo’s Independence Will Stir Up Trouble. Who Will Benefit?

Kosovo’s Independence Will Stir Up Trouble. Who Will Benefit?

From the desk of John Laughland on Wed, 2007-12-12 20:20

Perhaps
the most striking things about the impending declaration of
independence about Kosovo is that is happening at all. Why should the
Kosovo Albanians be striving for independence from Belgrade now, since
there has been peace in the province for eight years (interrupted only
in 2004, when a mob of Albanians killed 25 Serbs) and since the regime
in Serbia, of which the Kosovo Albanians are citizens, has been
democratic and pro-European since 2000?

Why, indeed, did the
Kosovo Albanians spend the whole of the first part of the 1990s in
peace, when the rest of Yugoslavia was in flames? If their desire for
independence had really been so intense as their national propaganda
claims, then surely the time to act would have been when the Yugoslav
federation was collapsing in 1992-1992, or during the Bosnian civil war
of 1992-1995.

For that matter, why did the Albanians inside
Serbia, who are in the majority in the area around the Southern towns
of Presevo and Bujanovac, start their attacks there in 2001, a year
after the fall of Slobodan Milošević’s fall from power, whereas they
had been left in peace during the civil war between Serbs and Albanians
in neighbouring Kosovo in 1998-1999?

None of this seems to make any sense.

One
thing is certain: the Kosovo Albanians would not have threatened to
declare independence if they were not certain that they would receive
diplomatic recognition from the United States and most European states.
The Kosovo leadership (which means the leadership of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, the guerrilla force whose head, Hashim Thaci, is now
the “Prime Minister” of Kosovo) has very close ties to the West. Thaci
famously kissed Madeleine Albright during the Kosovo war of 1999 and
also visited Tony Blair at Number 10; one of his predecessors as Prime
Minister, Ramush Haradinaj, who has since been indicted by The Hague
for war crimes, is known as a major CIA asset.

No doubt the
Kosovo Albanians have some claim to independence, although it is
notable how seldom they refer to the persecution of which they were
supposedly the victims in 1999 under Milošević. This is no doubt
because everyone knows that those claims of genocide bore as much
relation to reality as did the claim made in 2002-2003 that there were
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, the charge of genocide
turned out to be so unsustainable that it was never even included in
the indictment against Milošević.

The loss of Kosovo by Serbia
would be a terrible blow to the values of Christian civilisation, since
that region is itself a symbol of the victory over the European spirit
over the superior military force of Islam, having been the scene of
Serbia’ historic battle against the Turks in 1389. The province
contains some of the jewels of European architecture, the monasteries
of Peć, Dečani and Gračanica. But the truth is that the new battle of
Kosovo was lost a long time ago, when the Serbs, like most Europeans,
stopped having babies while the Albanians, like many other Muslim
peoples, continued having them – and at a vast rate. The demographic
battle having been lost, there is very little the government in
Belgrade can do now to halt the inevitable.

Worse, perhaps, is
the effect which the independence of this small province will have on
the region and the wider world. The anger of Bosnian Serbs is inflamed
by the West’s double-standards. While it demands autonomy and now
secession for the Kosovo Albanians, it is pushing ever greater
centralisation and curtailment of autonomy in neighbouring
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs there have been told they must never hold
a referendum on independence from Bosnia, while the EU-back “High
Representative” is determined to abrogate what remains of the autonomy
of Republika Srpska. Independence for Kosovo will, in all likelihood,
lead to the fragmentation of the artificial and largely bogus state of
Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But the double-standards are not confined
to the Balkans. The narrative in Cyprus is almost identical to that in
Kosovo: a Muslim population there, the Turks, was the subject of
persecution by its Orthodox co-nationals, the Greeks, until they were
protected by military intervention according to international law:
Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and invoked the terms of the 1960 Treaty
of Guarantee (between Britain, Turkey and Greece) which guaranteed the
constitution of Cyprus. Yet Northern Cyprus (the Turkish part) has been
the victim of an embargo and international isolation ever since then,
an international pariah while Kosovo’s leaders are the toast of the
world’s chancelleries.

The same goes for Transnistria.
Transnistria is a small sliver of land along the left bank of the
Dniestr river, North-West of Odessa. When the Romanian province of
Bessarabia was illegally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, according
to the terms of the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,
Transnistria became part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova.
It had never before in history been governed from the Moldovan capital,
Chişinău, and most of its inhabitants speak Russian. The Soviet Union
started to collapse in 1990 precisely when Moscow admitted, after years
of denial, the existence of the secret protocol to the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and this led to the secession of the Baltic
states and, eventually, the dissolution of the USSR itself.
Transnistria naturally said that its incorporation into Moldova was as
illegal as Moldova’s incorporation into the Soviet Union and demanded
independence. Although it has indeed been de facto independent since
1992, the West has consistently told it that it will not allow it to
secede from Moldova. Ditto for Nagorno-Karabakh (formally part of
Azerbaijan, populated now exclusively by Armenians), South Ossetia
(part of Georgia but culturally linked to North Ossetia, which is
inside Russia) and Abkazia (also part of Georgia but de facto
independent since 1992).

Encouraging independence for Kosovo
will only re-ignite the conflict which has been basically frozen there
since 1999, as well as the similarly frozen conflicts in the Balkans,
in Moldova and the Caucasus. What is the point of this when the other
option is to let sleeping dogs lie? Does someone have an interest in
causing trouble?

The only common denominator in all these
various conflicts, indeed, is attitudes to Russia. Russia supports
Serbia on Kosovo and Bosnia; it is broadly supportive of Transnistria
and the other non-recognised states on the territory of the former
Soviet Union (although it has done little concrete to help them). Any
trouble in these area is trouble for Moscow in its own backyard, which
President Putin told me in September is the last thing he wants. Maybe
that is why the West is determined to provoke it.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2764

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