Kosovo: The Fuse on the Balkan Powder Keg

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Stratfor

Kosovo:
The Fuse on the Balkan Powder Keg

November 16, 2007 21 55 GMT

Summary

Kosovo's expected Dec. 10 declaration of independence from Serbia is already
inspiring minor violent incidents throughout the Balkans. If tensions erupt
over the issue, the fighting is almost certain to spread beyond Kosovo and
Serbia.



Analysis



Kosovo is set to hold parliamentary and local elections Nov. 17 amid tensions
surrounding talks on the region's status and the boycott of the elections
called by the Serbs. Leading up to Kosovo's expected Dec. 10 declaration of
independence from Serbia, small sparks of violence are surfacing not only in Kosovo
and Serbia, but also in other Balkan states -- illustrating that if this powder
keg blows, the explosion will not be limited to Kosovo and Serbia.



Though the international community is completely
split on the issue of Kosovar independence -- and has been since the
region's 1999 provisional break from Serbia -- the small secessionist
government has said it will not wait any longer. Serbs consider Kosovo the
birthplace of their national identity and view Kosovar Albanians as little more
than a recent infestation, though the province's population is now more than 90
percent Albanian and less than 5 percent Serbian. The Kosovars want nothing
less than independence, and the Serbs want to give them anything but.

Kosovo had expected the West
to continue supporting what it called the inevitability
of Kosovar independence. However, that inevitability is now lost in the shuffle
of a larger
political battle between global power players such as Russia, the European
Union and the United States, and Serbia and Kosovo are left with only
uncertainty.

All sides fear this uncertainty
will turn volatile -- and possibly bloody. If an explosion of violence does
occur, it will not be contained within Serbia and Kosovo's borders; it could
destabilize the entire Balkan region. Minor incidents of violence and
instability have already
been seen in Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.



Serbia and Kosovo



Serbia and Kosovo seem to have avoided violence on the scale of that seen in
the late 1990s, mainly because the Radicals did not come to power during Serbian
elections and because Kosovar independence was continually put on the back
burner this year. This does not mean, however, that such violence can be
avoided altogether, especially as each side gets more fed up with the
situation. Small-scale violence has been seen and is not unexpected. Tensions
are high between Kosovars and Serbs and within each ethnic faction as well.



The Serbs within Kosovo do not make up enough of the population to attempt any
meaningful military operations, but there are other threats. The most obvious
-- but not the most likely -- is that Serbia could do what it did in 1999 when
it wanted to reassert full control over Kosovo: send in the army. But the
military is not in the shape it was in then. Moreover, the Serbs within Serbia
proper are too fractured; some are willing to forgo Kosovo to gain EU
membership, while others are willing to fight to the end for the small
province. That is enough to cause trouble, since only a few radicals are needed
to form paramilitary groups like those seen during the war.



There are also small Serbian terrorist groups that have been operating
periodically in Serbia and Kosovo. The best known is Tsar Lazar's Guard, which
was a joke when it first formed but has been gaining support -- and reportedly
weapons -- as Dec. 10 approaches. Serbs are not the only group reported to have
militants working for their cause; the Albanian National Army militant group
reportedly has been recruiting new members and equipment recently.



Kosovar Albanians also have been stirring unrest inside the recently
independent Montenegro. The small Albanian population in Montenegro on the
Kosovar border has already been stirred up, however; a handful of Albanians
were arrested in Ulcinj, Montenegro, and Kosovar Albanians began flooding over
the border and stormed the police station in protest.



Montenegro understands what it is like to push for independence from Serbia,
but unlike Kosovo the country is still
very divided over whether it is content with its new independence.
Approximately 40 percent still consider themselves ethnically Serbian --
especially since they share the same church and same language -- and are thus
loyal to Belgrade. Some Montenegrin Serbians have already pledged to help fight
if Kosovo gets its independence.



Macedonia



The militants in Kosovo have also been linked to Albanians crossing the border
from Macedonia. Albanians are the ethnic minority within Macedonia but hold the
majority of the northwestern part of the country. The Macedonian-Kosovar border
is mountainous and incredibly porous, leading to large border crossings that the
already weak Macedonian military cannot prevent. These Albanians and Kosovar
Albanians have been seen actively engaging in violence on both sides of the
border, proving that the wounds from the 2001 Macedonia conflict -- in which
the Albanians within the country began attacking Macedonian forces -- are still
fresh.



Internally, Macedonia has been politically unstable because of the main
Albanian party actively pushing against the government as it keeps its eyes on
Kosovo. Macedonia is trying to keep a lid on any large-scale violence because
of its aspirations to join the EU, but hostilities have broken out within
Macedonia's borders. On Nov. 7, Macedonian police killed four Albanians in an
operation called Mountain Storm on Mount Sar Planina. Macedonian police said
the Albanians were planning a major terrorist act that would destabilize both
Kosovo and Macedonia.



Bosnia-Herzegovina



Bosnia-Herzegovina
could be a flashpoint in the struggle over Kosovo. Bosnia-Herzegovina is split
between two autonomous regions -- the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Republika Srpska (the Serb Republic) -- and three ethnic groups: Muslim
Bosniaks, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. In short, the country does not
have a comfortable ethnic, social, historic or political mixture. The U.N.
administrative presence is the only thing keeping relative peace and general
unity in the country.



However, control is being transferred from the United Nations to the European
Union -- something many radical Serbs within the country are not happy with
because it means the loss of Russia's voice in Bosnia's future (Russia is on
the U.N. Security Council and supports the Orthodox Serbs). The Muslims within the
country do not want EU supervision, claiming the Union is not friendly to
Muslims. Republika Srpska has criticized the transfer, since they pledge their
loyalty to their brother Serbs next door and to their more numerous Orthodox
brothers in Russia.



The Muslim Bosniaks and Serbs -- with the Croats in flux -- are keeping the
country from moving toward any political unity or a real constitution. But with
Kosovo in play, the Serbs from Republika Srpska are threatening to declare
their own independence. It is no secret that the majority of Serbs within
Republika Srpska want Serbia proper to annex their region, though many Serbs in
Serbia proper look upon them as radicals or country bumpkins. Serbs in
Republika Srpska could become very problematic if they either split from
Bosnia-Herzegovina or decide to flood across the border to fight with their
fellow Serbs. NATO -- which commands the European forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina
-- is rumored to have a contingency plan to sweep into Republika Srpska if
either of these events happens, taking the government buildings and media
outlets and blocking the main roads into Serbia.



The Threat of Greater -- and Spreading -- Violence



Contagion effects of Balkan violence are well known; they were seen both in the
early 20th century and in the 1990s, and the recent outbursts are following the
same pattern. Since EU and NATO forces are present, there have been no large
wars declared by the states themselves. But if the region does ignite, Western
forces could face many problems. First, those forces are a mere shadow of what
they were during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s -- during which it took four
years to get the region generally under control. European and U.S. forces are
deployed only in the non-Serbian section of Bosnia-Herzegovina and within
Kosovo, not throughout the region. Furthermore, NATO and the United States are
bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and trying to juggle threats larger than
the Balkans -- namely Iran and Russia.



To put it plainly, the West is not paying much attention to the Balkans other
than as a bargaining chip with other global players such as Russia. But with or
without the world watching, the actors in the Balkans are ready to move.

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Kosovo's contested future

Kosovo's contested future

Paul
Hockenos

The international community is due to deliver its verdict on the future
status of Kosovo on 10 December 2007. But the interests of the international
actors deciding the disputed territory's fate is part of the problem, says Paul
Hockenos.

16 - 11 - 2007

It can be exasperating to hear people from the Balkans blame “foreign powers”
with hidden agendas and geopolitical ambitions for their troubles, as if they
themselves bear no responsibility for their fortunes. But it would be easier to
refute this counterproductive thinking if it hadn’t so often been the case over
history - and is the case today, particularly when it comes to Kosovo. The
problem of determining the “final status” of a province that is still legally
part of Serbia but whose population is 90% ethnic Albanian was always going to
be difficult. What makes it even harder is that international policy toward the
disputed territory is being driven by the interests of external actors rather
than those of the people of Kosovo, including the Kosovar Serbs. The main obstacle to a settlement is that
these powers - the United Nations, the European Union member-states, the United
States, and Russia - are themselves deeply divided, for reasons that have
little to do with Kosovo itself.

The current eleventh-hour talks follow a year of United Nations-sponsored
negotiations headed by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, which came
exasperatingly close to a reasonable conclusion but ran aground in the UN
Security Council, upon the threat of a Russian veto. The ongoing diplomacy, led
by a “troika” of Russian, United States, and European Union envoys, is likely
to get no further. Yet, a bitter irony not lost on the province’s increasingly
resentful people: there is a general consensus in the international community
that independence for the Kosovar Albanians is both inevitable and, ultimately,
the best option (among many unappealing options) for everyone involved - even for
Serbia. But the trick is how to get there; and on this almost no one agrees.



The road's end



The United Nations, after eight years of running Kosovo as a protectorate,
urgently wants to pack up and leave, regardless of Kosovo’s status. The UN
mission in Kosovo (Unmik) derives its authority from the Security Council,
which stipulated that an interim UN mission administer a broadly autonomous
Kosovo, and that the territory remain part of Serbia. Future talks would
determine a “final status” for Kosovo thus relieving the UN of its watch. The
UN was never meant to stay in Kosovo forever, point out UN officials, the way
it got stuck in Cyprus for thirty-odd years.

Since June 1999, the UN has run one of the most expensive, worst
administered missions of the many around the world. A telling illustration of
the UN’s ineptitude is the main power-station, that despite millions of euros
in international investment still leaves Pristina shivering through the winter.
Much of the Serb minority lives in depressing enclaves or in the area around
the northern part of the city of Mitrovica, which borders southern Serbia. Only
half the people of working age in Kosovo have jobs. The greatest single debacle
was the international mission’s inability to protect the Serbs in March 2004
when rioting Albanians attacked Serbs and sacked Orthodox churches. In February
2007, two Albanian student demonstrators were shot dead by UN police as they
marched in protest against the Ahtisaari plan. It is no wonder the UN is eager
to transfer authority to the European Union as soon as possible.

Kosovo's plight

Ahtisaari’s task was to negotiate the terms of the new status and the
transition. Would the Europeans be mentoring a newly independent state into the
EU, replacing the UN as overlord, or some combination of the two? The Ahtisaari
report proposed “supervised independence” for Kosovo, namely a phased-in
statehood overseen by an international civilian body with military
capabilities. The plan envisioned a multi-ethnic, broadly decentralised Kosovo
in which the minority Serbs had far-ranging rights and autonomy. In fact, so
extensive was the autonomy for minorities that politicians in neighbouring
countries (and even as far away as Spain and Belgium) worried out loud that
their minority populations might insist upon the same.

Paul Hockenos is a
journalist and author who has written about south-eastern Europe since 1989. He
is based in Berlin where he works for the European Stability
Initiative. He is the author of Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars
(Cornell University Press, 2003The plan received praise, not least from
Washington where the George W Bush administration has consistently championed
Kosovar statehood. But the United States’ position has less to do with noble
principles of self-determination than it has with extracting the US from a
remote, hopeless conflict. The US’s main priority is to free up resources for
deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. European troops may now form the bulk of
the the Nato contingent, but Washington is impatient with the pace of progress
and is eager to wash its hands of the Balkans; the creation of a Kosovo state
will, it calculates, facilitate this. Furthermore, the American president sees
Kosovo (to Europeans’ embarrassment) through the prism of the “war on terror”,
and has said that a free Kosovo would be a positive example of a peaceful,
democratic Muslim state.



Most of the European Union’s twenty-seven members applauded the Ahtisaari plan
as well - for reasons of calculated Realpolitik. After all, there is no EU
support for statehood for countless other small peoples who also suffer
discrimination or worse - among them the Kurds, Basques, Ossetians, Chechens,
Abkhaz, and Tibetans. But in the western Balkans, the factor that trumps all
others is stability: Kosovo’s fate is critical to the entire region. After the
bloodshed in Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s, which the then
fifteen-strong European Community failed to stem, the European Union invested
enormous energies and funds in pacifying the Balkans and bringing the region
under its wing. Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovenia have joined the EU, and Croatia
will follow. But this energy flagged with the defeat of the constitutional treaty
in 2005 and “enlargement fatigue.” The EU’s commitment wavered and this was
felt by the pro-European forces in the western Balkans.

Today, the stakes are again high. Kosovo is the linchpin that connects
ethnic Albanian communities in four problem-states: Serbia, Montenegro,
Macedonia, and Albania. Any kind of civic unrest or armed conflict in Kosovo
would surely drag these countries in, upending a decade of painstaking,
expensive progress. There is the real fear that Greece, Bulgaria, and Bosnia
would also become implicated, as would all of Serbia’s neighbours, including
Croatia, Hungary, and Romania; the multiple tremors could easily damage fragile
arrangements with ethnic minorities and cause the EU to split again over a
response. This is why Brussels just recently pushed through relaxed visa
requirements for the western Balkan states to enter the European Union,
something that should have been done years ago. Now it could be too little, too
late.



The Ahtisaari plan - and, implicitly, the idea of non-negotiated independence
for Kosovo - has forceful opponents too. Russia is first among them. The
Ahtisaari-led negotiations proceeded under the assumption that in the end
Russia would be on board. Although Moscow had firmly opposed the idea of
non-negotiated independence in the past and had taken the side of the Serbs
repeatedly over the 1990s, the negotiators claimed that there were clear
signals from Moscow indicating that Russia would consent to the process and
even to an independent Kosovo.

The turning-point, argue some, was the Bush administration’s decision in
early 2006 to station an anti-missile defence system in Poland and the Czech
Republic, territory that had been part of the Soviet bloc and still considered
sensitive by Russia for security reasons. President Putin may have been willing
to “trade” cancellation of the missile programme for Kosovar statehood - though
the possibility was never explored by Washington.

It is also possible, however, that for reasons of state (and not out of any
solidarity with its eastern Orthodox brothers in Serbia) Russia was never going
to accept an independent Kosovar state. The principle of territorial integrity
is not just etched into the UN charter; it is critical to sprawling,
multinational Russia. The Kremlin is well aware of the precedent that
recognising a breakaway region would set for far-flung and disenchanted
national groups (such as the Chechens) in its own sovereign territory. “The
principle of the territorial integrity of states, member states of the United
Nations, is one of the foundations of international law”, stated Russia’s UN
ambassador in summer 2007, explaining Moscow’s opposition to the Ahtisaari
plan. “There is a very strong political motivation not to reward aggressive
separatist inclinations.” This naked self-interest explains Moscow’s motives
much better than speculation about Russian designs in the Balkans, pan-Slavic
brotherhood, or geo-strategic jockeying in the “new cold war”.

The deep uneasiness of a handful of EU states - among them Spain, Romania,
Cyprus, Greece, and Slovakia - to awarding statehood to “breakaway minorities”
also has little to do with Kosovo and everything with their own minorities.
These states could, like the Russians, tolerate an independent Kosovo if it had
the blessing of both parties, the Serbs and the Albanians, as did the
Czech-Slovak and Serb-Montenegrin “negotiated” divorces. The positions of the
holdout EU countries become vitally important should (as in one current option)
the EU opt to circumvent the Security Council and recognise Kosovo’s
independence together with the United States. Since the deployment of an EU
mission to Kosovo requires a full consensus, a veto by even one state could
throw everything back to square one.

Serbia's secret

The government in Belgrade claims that the Ahtisaari plan was a
straightforward attempt to rob them of Kosovo. The vehement reaction defied
Ahtisaari’s assumption that the Serbs would passively accept his proposal if
enough compensatory “sweeteners” in the form of EU development funds and other
incentives were dangled in front of them. But once Belgrade’s nationalists saw
that Russia wasn’t going along, they retreated to a hardline position. Serbia’s
leadership turned the future of Kosovo into a symbolically loaded cause, a
test-case of national loyalty, in a way that made being “soft” on the issue
impossible for any political party.

But how important is Kosovo to the Serbs in reality? There is a dark joke
inside Serbia that if a Kosovo under Serbian rule would mean (on
equal-opportunity grounds) Albanians being granted one-fifth of places in the
national parliament, on hospital boards, in the judiciary, the education
system, then the Serbs would turn and run in the other direction. The imbalance
in birthrates is a horror-scenario for Serb nationalists. In fact, many Serb
citizens (and off-the-record, even politicians) acknowledge that Serbia would
benefit enormously from cutting loose Kosovo and concentrating on its own
problems. But saying this aloud in Serbia is treasonous.

Among openDemocracy's articles on Kosovo and and the future of Serbia:



Vesna Goldsworthy, "Au revoir, Montenegro?" (23 May 2006)



Peter Lippman, "Kosovo:
approaching independence or chaos" (30 October 2006)



Eric Gordy, "Serbia's
elections: less of the same" (23 January 2007)



TK Vogel, "Kosovo:
a break in the ice" (2 February 2007)



Marko Attila Hoare, "Kosovo:
the Balkans' last independent state" (12 February 2007)



Vicken Cheterian, "Serbia
after Kosovo" (18 April 2007)



Neven Andjelic, "Serbia
and Eurovision: whose victory?" (25 May 2007The
Kosovars' fate

What of the people - or peoples - of Kosovo themselves? The
Belgrade leadership has treated the 200,000 Serbs who live in Kosovo as pawns
in a cynical geopolitical gambit: instructing them to impede diplomacy, boycott
elections, and believe that one day Kosovo will return to some kind of pre-1999
situation. But despite its absolutist position for home consumption, Belgrade
has long been angling to partition Kosovo, ensuring that the north remains
under its control.



This would most probably entail transferring all Kosovar Serbs in central and
southern Kosovo to refugee camps north of the Ibar River - to join the 600,000
other refugees in Serbia, the by-product of Slobodan Milosevic’s territorial
wars. Belgrade’s policies reveal that its real interest is what it has been for
nearly a century: the territory of Kosovo, not the people who live there.

For their own part, the Kosovar Albanians want independence - and will take
to arms to get it. Kosovo was joined to Serbia in 1912, in the aftermath of the
first Balkan war. Since then the ethnic Albanians have experienced one form or
another of discrimination at the hands of different Serb regimes: monarchist,
socialist, and nominally democratic. Now they have an opportunity to remove the
sovereign hand that made this possible, and they are not going to miss it.



So even in the absence of international agreement on Kosovo’s future, the
Albanians will probably declare independence in the near future. The question
is just what kind of statehood they will get. If their declared polity is
internationally contested, deprived of a United Nations seat, with its border
to the north blocked by Serbia, then Kosovo could be worse off than it is now.



Will post-independence Kosovo look more like Taiwan, northern Cyprus, or Gaza?
The Kosovar Albanians’ biggest illusion is that the United States will put
everything right for them. They believe Washington is really acting in their
interests and not purely in its own. In the end, they could find themselves
quite alone, carping that the great powers have left them in the lurch once
again.

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