Kosovo: A system enforcing imperial power will be resisted

Kosovo: A system enforcing imperial power will be resisted
By Seumas Milne


THE GUARDIAN, LONDON


Sunday, Mar 02, 2008, Page 9

`Haven't the Kurds or Chechens suffered? The difference boils down to power and who is supporting whom, not justice.'

It might have been expected that the catastrophe of Iraq and the bloody failure of Afghanistan would have at least dampened the enthusiasm among Western politicians for invading other people's countries in the name of democracy and human rights. But the signs are instead of a determined drive to rehabilitate the idea of liberal interventionism so comprehensively discredited in the killing fields of Fallujah and Samarra.
First there was the appointment of the committed interventionist Bernard Kouchner as French foreign minister. Then, late last year, the supposedly reluctant warrior British Prime Minister Gordon Brown used his speech at the lord mayor of London's banquet to reassert the West's right to intervene across state borders.
This month the UK foreign secretary David Miliband argued that "mistakes" in Iraq and Afghanistan should not weaken the moral impulse to intervene around the world in support of democracy, "economic freedoms" and humanitarianism, whether peacefully or by force. Meanwhile in the US, both contenders for the Democratic party nomination have signed up longstanding liberal interventionists as foreign policy advisers: the academic Samantha Power in the case of Barack Obama; and the 1990s administration veterans Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright in Hillary Clinton's.
The interventionists, it seems, are back in business. And now Kosovo's declaration of independence has given them a banner to rally the disillusioned to a cause that gripped the imagination of many Western liberals in the 1990s.
John Williams, the UK foreign office spin doctor who drafted the infamous Iraq War dossier in 2002, wrote last week that the Kosovo War had convinced him to follow Tony Blair over Iraq -- and it would be a "tragedy" if Iraq made future Kosovos impossible. The Independent on Sunday newspaper in London, went further, calling Kosovo's new status a "triumph of liberal interventionism."
But it's hard to see much triumph in the grim saga of Kosovo. NATO's 1999 bombing campaign, unleashed without UN support and widely regarded as a violation of international law, was supposed to halt repression and ethnic cleansing, but triggered a massive increase in both; secured a Serbian withdrawal only through Russian pressure; and led to mass reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma, including nearly the entire Serb population of Pristina. After nine years of NATO occupation under a nominal UN administration, crime-ridden Kosovo is more ethnically divided than ever, boasts 50 percent unemployment and hosts a US military base described by the EU's human rights envoy as a "smaller version of Guantanamo."
Its independence -- declared in defiance of the UN security council and damned by Russia, China and EU states such as Spain as illegal -- is a fraud and will remain so as an EU protectorate controlled by NATO troops. By encouraging a unilateral breakaway from Serbia, without negotiation and outside the UN framework, the US, Britain and France have given the green light to secessionist movements from Abkhazia to Kurdistan.
The claim that Kosovo sets no precedent because it suffered under Serbian rule is absurd. Haven't the Kurds or Chechens suffered? The difference boils down to power and who is supporting whom, not justice. Of course the Kosovans have the right to self-determination, but they certainly won't get it as a NATO colony, nor at the expense of other nationalities in the Balkans, where the impact of Kosovo's declaration on Bosnia and Macedonia could be conflagrationary.
The significance of the breakaway has meanwhile not been lost on the Muslim world, which has long been urged to see US support for Muslim Kosovo and Bosnia as proof of US good intentions, but has been notably slow to recognize the breakaway province. As Yasser az-Za'atra wrote in the Jordanian daily al-Dustour this week: "Besieging Russia is the main reason that led Bush to support Kosovo's independence. The rise of Russia and China provides a balance to the US and is undoubtedly in the Muslims' interest. It is not in the Muslims' interest to secede -- not in Kosovo, nor in Chechnya, nor even in China."
Far from helping to rehabilitate liberal interventionism, the Kosovo experience highlights the fatal flaws at its heart. By supporting one side in a civil war, bypassing the UN and acting as judge and jury in their own case, the Western powers have exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, bequeathed a legacy of impoverished occupation and failed to resolve the underlying conflict. They also laid the ground for the lawless devastation of Iraq: the bitter fruit of the Kosovo War. At the height of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, Blair set out five tests for intervention as part of his "doctrine of international community," a catechism for liberal interventionists and much admired by the Washington neoconservatives who followed them. Arguably, only one of the five was met in Iraq.
What's more, both the US and Britain not only committed military aggression on the basis of falsehoods, they have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a humanitarian crisis that dwarfs anything that happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Between them, they have also been responsible for torture, kidnapping and mass detentions without trial. The latest allegations of beatings, killings and mutilations of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers at Camp Abu Naji near Amara in 2004 are only the most extreme of a series that include the unpunished beating to death of Baha Mousa in custody in Basra.
But there is of course not the slightest prospect of any humanitarian intervention against the occupiers of Iraq for the obvious reason that they are the most powerful states in the world who act in the certain knowledge that they will never be subject to any such violent sanction for their own violations of humanitarian and international law.
But it is exactly that widely understood reality that undermines the chances of a genuine multilateral basis for humanitarian intervention.
As the ability of the US to dictate to the UN weakens, it's not surprising that pressure to revive unilateral liberal interventionism has grown. But any rules-based system of international relations has to apply to the powerful as well as the weak, allies as well as enemies, or it isn't a system of rules at all -- it's a system of imperial power enforcement which will never be accepted.

Kosovo: A Crying Shame

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1979305/posts


Kosovo: A Crying Shame

The Jewish Defense League ^ | 26 February 2008 | Shelley Rubin

Posted on 03/02/2008 2:18:35 PM

Once again the United States has sold out the good people and rewarded the bad. I am speaking of the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state by our government.
As a bit of background information, the Jewish Defense League was the only activist Jewish organization to support the Serbian people and their right to their ancestral homeland during the war that dissolved Yugoslavia during the 1990s. While we did not approve of alleged war crimes by some Serbians, we understood they felt they were entitled to settle the score with their Nazi-loving Croatian and Bosnian neighbors. . . . During World War II, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and the other Axis Powers, an act that resulted in a coup d’etat. A new government was installed and promptly withdrew the country’s support for the Axis. This enraged Hitler so much that he sent his soldiers into Yugoslavia and took over the country in a matter of days. The Nazis dissolved the government and replaced it with a puppet state led by Milan Nedic. Under his leadership, several Nazi concentration camps were established, such as Banjica and Sajmiste.
Next door in Croatia, the Nazi-lovers there were massacring Serbs, Jews and Roma (formerly called Gypsies). In the 1970s, the Jewish Defense League discovered a Croatian Nazi war criminal, Andrija Artukovic, living the good life in the Surfside Colony near Long Beach, California, and was in large part responsible for the revocation of his American naturalization status. JDL Chairman Irv Rubin personally escorted the father of L.A. radio personality Bill Handel to the federal courthouse so that he could testify against Artukovic. Before intervention by my late husband, witnesses were being harassed by Artukovic supporters and family members. The case took several years to complete because of pressure by Croatians living in the United States and members of the Catholic Church. In his role as minister of the interior in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, Artukovic supervised the genocide hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma. After he was stripped of his American citizenship, Artukovic was returned to Yugoslavia where he was sentenced to death for his war crimes. Because Artukovic was in ill-health, the court there said he was too infirm to be executed, and the Nazi murderer died in a prison hospital. Croatians were infamous for their worship of the Nazis and their brutality to their fellow man, like hang their neighbors on meathooks in kosher butcher shops.
And as far as Bosnians are concerned, they are mostly Muslims. During World War II, a proud fighting unit was the 20,000 member Bosnian Muslim 13th Waffen-SS Division Hanzar. Hanzar means “to slit the throat” in Arabic, and that’s what these animals did to 300,000 Serbs and 60,000 Bosnian Jews. They also killed thousands of Americans in Italy, where they fought against the 5th U.S. Army division for six months. None of those animals faced war crimes tribunals for their actions. By the way, their spiritual leader was Hitler’s bootlicker, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, better known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Back to Kosovo. Kosovo is made up of 92% ethnic Albanians, whose religion is predominantly Islam. There are over two million people living in Kosovo, but no Jews live there. They used to. Sixty or so years ago, their neighbors made sure they wouldn’t return. And what happened to all the Serbians who used to live there? According to history professor Carl Savich, ethnic cleansing has been perpetrated on the Serbian people throughout the history of the region, first by the Ottoman Turks, then the Albanians, the Nazis, the Communists, and now by the Western nations that have accepted the Kosovans claim that the land is theirs. In reality, taking Kosovo away from the Serbs is the Albanian dream of linking Albania with Kosovo (are Bosnia and Herzegovina next?) in order to create a Greater Albania.
And what about the Serbs? The Serbs share a tragic past with the Jewish people. They have lived in peace and friendship with the Jews. They have died alongside us. What is wrong with the world? Despite historical proof, the world puts the screws to the Serbs just as it does to us. It’s a crying shame.

2008 John Robinson

Kosovo: Latest Euro-American colony

http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=227&page=16

ORGANISER (INDIA)

March 09, 2008

Kosovo: Latest Euro-American colony
By Sandhya Jain

The poverty was confined to Kosovars. Its rich industrial resources
were forcibly privatised and sold to giant Western multinationals.
Halliburton, favourite corporate of the Bush Administration, took over the
strategic oil and transportation lines of the entire region along with the
security of Camp Bondsteel, the largest American military base in Europe.

The faux independence of resource-rich Muslim Kosovo symbolises the
resurgence of old nineteenth century Western imperialism. The strategy is
reminiscent of the 'coloured' revolutions in former Soviet Republics, and
some actors are the same. There are salutary lessons for all non-Western
nations from this latest assault on international law.

Kosovo has become a Euro-American protectorate (read colony). As
Australia exploits the oilfields of East Timor, carved out of Indonesia in
1999, so the wealth of Kosovo shall be enjoyed by Euro-American
multinationals. The trouble began in the early 1990s when the fall of the
Soviet Union triggered a Euro-American drive to dismember Yugoslavia. In
1991, while the bombing of Iraq grabbed world attention, America sponsored
separatist movements in the Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Slovenia and
Bosnia; imposed crippling economic sanctions on Yugoslavia, and pushed NATO
forces into the region.

US also started arming the right-wing UCK movement in Kosovo, though
the latter was not a Yugoslav republic, but part of the Serbian Republic and
civilisational fountainhead of Serbia. It has a large Albanian Muslim
population, a relic of Ottoman rule. Washington's 'free press' played ball
with the Clinton Administration, carrying grisly tales of Serbian genocide
against Albanians in Kosovo. American officials claimed 100,000 to 500,000
Albanians were butchered by Serbia. There were reports of mass graves,
reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

As angry Serbia resisted Western pressures, American aggression began.
After 78 days of intensive bombings, including the use of thousands of
radioactive depleted-uranium bombs, and immeasurable damage to civilian and
industrial targets, a besieged Yugoslavia crumbled. On June 3, 1999, NATO
occupied Kosovo. President Slobodan Milosevic was captured and tried for
crimes against humanity at The Hague, where he died in March 2006,
supposedly of a heart attack.

Serbians question the verdict, with some justice. As the forensic
teams of 17 NATO countries set up by the Hague Tribunal on War Crimes
arrived, American lies were soon exposed. The officials could unearth only
2,108 bodies in Kosovo-these belonged to all nationalities, and most were
victims of NATO bombing; some fell to the war between UCK and Serbian
authorities. Much like Saddam Hussein's phantom weapons of mass destruction,
the teams could not find even one mass grave, much less evidence of
"genocide." The report of the chief prosecutor for the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, was played
down by a complicit American media.

I may mention as an aside that it was precisely the absence of dead
bodies, especially butchered bodies, that discredited the colonial doctrine
of the Aryan Invasion of India and massacre of ethnic 'dasyus', who were
metamorphosed into south Indian Dravidians.

Anyway, Kosovo's Western invaders were unabashed and placed her under
a UN Mission in 1999, under Security Council Resolution 1244. In reality,
power vested with the Mission of the European Union (EU). NATO was security
guarantor, and under its watch, there was a hideous ethnic cleansing of
Serbs and Romas (gypsies); over 250,000 Serbs, Romas and other groups fled.
Even Albanian Muslims had to flee, as nine years of NATO rule led to 60 per
cent unemployment and degraded the region into a cesspool of the
international drug and prostitution trade.

The poverty was confined to Kosovars. Its rich industrial resources
were forcibly privatised and sold to giant Western multinationals.
Halliburton, favourite corporate of the Bush Administration, took over the
strategic oil and transportation lines of the entire region along with the
security of Camp Bondsteel, the largest American military base in Europe.

So how did this twenty-first century colonial enterprise succeed? The
UN helped. In June 2005, the then Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed
former Finnish President Marti Ahtisaari as special envoy to negotiate
Kosovo's final status. Like many Euro-American politicians, he too had
multiple identities and loyalties.

Ahtisaari was simultaneously the Chairman Emeritus of the
International Crisis Group (ICG), a private body promoted by
multi-billionaire George Soros, who via Karl Popper's Open Society Institute
played a stellar role in the coloured revolutions in the former Soviet
Baltic Republics. The ICG peddles NATO intervention and open markets for the
US and EU; in other words, it steals the sovereign wealth of weak nations
for Western corporates. The ICG connection with American politics is evident
from the presence on its Board of two key officials complicit in bombing
Kosovo-Gen. Wesley Clark and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Coming from this background, Ahtisaari gave a predictably slanted
Comprehensive Proposal for Kosovo Status Settlement to the new UN Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon in March 2007. It proposed an International Civilian
Representative (read viceroy) to be appointed by the US-EU to oversee
Kosovo, with the power to overrule any actions or annul any laws by local
authorities. The ICR would control Customs, Taxation, Treasury and Banking.
Then, the EU would set up a European Security and Defence Policy Mission
(ESDP) and NATO an International Military Presence. These will control
foreign policy, security, police, judiciary, all courts and prisons. If this
is independence, what is slavery?

Russia has rightly pointed out that UN Security Council Resolution
1244 kept Kosovo firmly in Serbia. Kosovo's guided independence reinforces
the humiliation of the Islamic world by Western Christian nations and takes
Europe back (this time aided by US muscle) to treacherous terrain in the
Balkans. The stage is being set for a fresh international denouement.

“Independent” Kosovo: Anatomy of a Western protectorate

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/koso-m01.shtml

WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE (USA)

“Independent” Kosovo: Anatomy of a Western protectorate
By Paul Mitchell

1 March 2008

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to
dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to
assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to
which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect
to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes
which impel them to the separation.”

With these words, the Second Continental Congress issued the United States
Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. It declared the cause impelling
the American people towards separation to be the attempt by the King of
Great Britain to seek “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny.”

On February 17, 2008, in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, the province’s
Assembly also declared independence. Their document could not be more
different from the world-changing rallying cry of the US declaration with
its proclamation “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In a document servile to the Western powers, their institutions and
representatives—and written in language meant as an appeal to faceless
bureaucrats in the US State Department and European Commission—Kosovo’s
leaders accept without question its status as a protectorate governed by a
foreign overlord. In much the same way as neighbouring Bosnia has been ruled
for the last 10 years, all the major decisions about the country’s economy,
public spending, social programmes, security and trade will remain in the
hands of a NATO/United Nations/European Union occupation administration.

In one sentence, we are told that Kosovo is now an “independent and
sovereign state” that “reflects the will of our people”; in the next, that
this is in “full accordance with the recommendations of UN Special Envoy
Martti Ahtisaari and his Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status
Settlement.” Former Finnish president Ahtisaari submitted his plan for
“supervised” independence in March 2007 but met opposition from Serbia and
Russia, which rightly saw it as a contravention of international law.
Although Ahtisaari’s proposal was withdrawn, it still drove the timetable
for independence and now forms the backbone of the declaration.

In the declaration, which runs to just 27 paragraphs, his name appears eight
times, including:

* We accept fully the obligations for Kosovo contained in the Ahtisaari
Plan, and welcome the framework it proposes to guide Kosovo in the years
ahead.

* The Constitution shall incorporate all relevant principles of the
Ahtisaari Plan.

* We invite and welcome an international civilian presence to supervise our
implementation of the Ahtisaari Plan, and a European Union-led rule of law
mission.

* We also invite and welcome the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to
retain the leadership role of the international military presence in Kosovo
and to implement responsibilities assigned to it under UN Security Council
resolution 1244 (1999) and the Ahtisaari Plan, until such time as Kosovo
institutions are capable of assuming these responsibilities

* Kosovo shall have its international borders as set forth in Annex VIII of
the Ahtisaari Plan,

And just in case, the last paragraph repeats, “We hereby affirm, clearly,
specifically, and irrevocably, that Kosovo shall be legally bound to comply
with the provisions contained in this Declaration, including, especially,
the obligations for it under the Ahtisaari Plan.”

From the start, Ahtisaari’s plan insists its 15 articles and 12 annexes
“will take precedence over all other legal provisions in Kosovo” and details
how a “future international presence” will enforce them. Many of its
provisions have already been brought in under the UNMIK regime, and the
document merely sets them down formally.

The plans tells the Kosovan people that their newly “independent” country
will have “an open market economy with free competition” and will “establish
with the European Commission, and in close cooperation with the
International Monetary Fund, a fiscal surveillance mechanism.”

Recent reports show how the Kosovan economy is already dominated by
international capital. By the end of 2006, there were six banks, two of
which were under full foreign ownership and which controlled more than 70
percent of total bank assets. It was a similar story in the insurance
sector, where six out of nine companies are mainly in foreign ownership and
manage 70 percent of insurance assets.

Ahtisaari’s plan also demanded further privatisation of publicly owned
enterprises (POEs) and socially owned enterprises (SOEs) by the Kosovo Trust
Agency (KTA). The international members of the Board of Directors have the
power to suspend decisions of the KTA, and the two largest international
donors to the KTA have the right to attend meetings as observers.

Already, the KTA has sold off hundreds of POEs and SOEs whose origins lie in
the Tito regime.

By June 2007, the KTA had transferred 510 SOEs to new companies (NewCos) and
sold them off to investors in a competitive bidding process. Many workers
have been sacked or forced to accept minimal compensation, and the whole
process has been mired in accusations of corruption.

The Ahtisaari plan also prescribed the structure of Kosovo institutions,
most of which will have to have members of the “international community”
sitting in them. The government will consist of 12 ministers and the
Assembly of 120 members apportioned by ethnicity in a situation where many
in the minority population have been driven out or live behind barricades
and razor wire. There will be a 21-member Commission to draft a constitution
and a Constitutional Court composed of nine judges, three of whom will be
appointed by the president of the European Court of Human Rights. The Kosovo
Judicial Council will have 13 members, 2 of whom will be from the
“international community” and oversee the appointment of judges. A new
Kosovo Security Force (KSF) will be established consisting of no more than
2,500 lightly armed active members and 800 reserve members whose main job
will be restricted to crisis response, explosive ordnance disposal, and
civil protection. Kosovo will also establish a Civil Aviation Authority
(CAA) to regulate civil aviation activities.

Acting as Kosovo overlord will be an International Civilian Representative
(ICR), “double-hatted” as the EU Special Representative (EUSR), who will be
appointed by an International Steering Group (ISG) comprising France,
Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union,
European Commission, NATO and Russia. The ISG will have sole power to decide
when the ICR’s work is done. Two days before Kosovo declared independence,
Pieter Feith, a former political advisor to NATO in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was
appointed ICR/EUSR and Fletcher Burton, former US consul general in Leipzig,
Germany, was appointed his deputy.

The ICR has powers to enforce the Ahtisaari plan, including the authority to
overturn laws adopted by Kosovo authorities and ratify the appointment of
public officials and remove them. In addition, the ICR will appoint directly
certain state officials including the auditor-general, the director-general
of the Customs Service, the director of tax administration, the director of
the Treasury, and the managing director of the Central Banking Authority of
Kosovo. The Assembly may not formally approve the Constitution until the ICR
has certified it.

The Ahtisaari plan also called for a European Security and Defence Policy
Mission now created as the Eulex mission to “monitor, mentor and advise on
all areas related to the rule of law” and a NATO-led International Military
Presence (IMP), which will absorb the 16,000 NATO troops currently in
Kosovo. The IMP has the power to “use all necessary force where required and
without further sanction, interference or permission.” The IMP will provide
protection to the Serb minority and religious monuments, oversee the
formation of the KSF and dissolution of the Kosovo Protection Corps, largely
a fire-fighting force composed of former members of the Kosovo Liberation
Army. The IMP will be able to take over CAA functions and re-establish
military control over the airspace if necessary.

The plan also dictates the structure and powers of municipalities,
educational institutes and the police force. It also demands Kosovo pay its
share of the external debt, and if an agreement cannot be reached, the ISG
will nominate an international arbitrator whose “debt allocation shall be
irrevocable.”

Politicians and officials from Kosovo and the West have declared that all
this is necessary to ensure a peaceful transition to independence and
provide a stable environment for investment and membership of the European
Union. However, the new ICR/EUSR Feith told the Dutch newspaper NRC
Handelsblad, “Expectations are high.... People expect that their quality of
life and economic circumstances will improve rapidly” and warned, “Neither
the EU nor the Americans will be able to fulfil their high expectations.”

Kosovan economist Ibrahim Rexhepi adds, “We must get rid of the illusion
that independence will bring tonnes of dollars into our streets.... The
economic crisis is likely to continue. To restart the metallurgy, food
industry and energy (sectors) takes time and a lot of investment.”

Even to dignify Kosovo with the term country, let alone one that is
independent, makes a mockery of the term. Kosovo has a population of about 2
million people and covers an area of 10,887 square kilometres, or 4,203
square miles. It has one of the most underdeveloped economies in Europe,
with a per capita income estimated at US$2,328 in 2004.

The US state of Connecticut would make a more viable country. It is bigger,
is not landlocked and has a population of 3.4 million. Its per capita income
was US$47,819 in 2005, more than 20 times that of Kosovo.

Kosovo is almost entirely dependent on production outside its borders. It
exports less per capita than any other country in Europe—just €77 million.
Although analysts have made much of an increase in private sector activity,
non-housing private investment stood at just €284 million in 2006, and it is
dependent on scrap-metal recovery and geared to satisfying the consumer
needs of the international officials and Kosovan elite.

After nine years of UNMIK occupation, little has improved for the vast
majority of Kosovo’s population, and in many respects it has worsened.
Nearly 80 percent of the population have experienced a decline in living
standards since 2003. More than half of Kosovo’s inhabitants are unemployed,
and real wages are stagnant. Those that have work receive an average €220
(about US$320) per month. More than a third of the population live on less
than €1.50 per day. Attempts to raise pensions and wages have been blocked.
Those that are better off rely on remittances from relatives working abroad.
Poverty is so widespread and all-encompassing that, somewhat ironically, the
province has the lowest levels of inequality in Europe. But the gap between
the richest and poorest is growing.

Little wonder that there was a record low turnout in last year’s
elections—43 percent, down from 80 percent in elections soon after the
Kosovo war—indicating a staggering decrease in support for the political
parties installed after 1999.

Back in 1999, after the Western powers backed by various liberals and
radicals had thrown their support behind demands for self-determination for
Kosovo and the NATO bombing of Serbia, the World Socialist Web Site warned
in “After the Slaughter: Political Lessons of the Balkan War,” “The bombing
of Yugoslavia has exposed the real relations that exist between imperialism
and small nations.”

The statement continued, “The great indictments of imperialism written in
the first years of the twentieth century—those of Hobson, Lenin, Luxemburg
and Hilferding—read like contemporary documents. Economically, small nations
are at the mercy of the lending agencies and financial institutions of the
major imperialist powers. In the realm of politics, any attempt to assert
their independent interests brings with it the threat of devastating
military retaliation. With increasing frequency small states are being
stripped of their national sovereignty, compelled to accept foreign military
occupation, and submit to forms of rule that are, when all is said and done,
of an essentially colonialist character.”

Nearly a decade later, this prognosis has proven correct. Not only has
Kosovo’s creation been carried out in violation of any concept of national
sovereignty for Serbia, but in no sense can what has been created be
considered a sovereign entity in its own right. Rather, Kosovo is being used
as a pawn in the Great Power rivalries between the US, Europe and Russia,
with terrible consequences for all the peoples of the Balkans, irrespective
of their ethnicity.

Kosovo A country without an economy?

http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1431

INTERNATIONAL VIEWPOINT (UK)

February 2008

Kosovo A country without an economy?

Adam Novak

Media coverage of Kosovo's recent Unilateral Declaration of Independence has
focused on the risk of conflict with Serbia, and the broader geopolitical
risks for unresolved separatist struggles in Bosnia and the former Soviet
Union.

Many in the international peace movement blame the western powers for the
violent break-up of former Yugoslavia. But Kosovo's independence reveals
another dimension of the west's criminal responsibility in the destruction
and re-colonisation of Eastern Europe since 1989. The newly independent
state of Kosovo has no economy to speak of, and its poor and undereducated
population are dependent on remittances from family abroad, smuggling, and
foreign aid.

Newly-independent Kosovo is Europe's poorest country. Its per capita GDP is
$1,300), which is about the same as Ghana or Burkina Faso, and only one
tenth of the level in the poorest countries in the European Union, Bulgaria
and Romania. Kosovo's subsistence economy remained virtually unchanged
throughout the eight years of UN rule, and the standard of living of its two
million people is still lower than before the Serbian government imposed
central control of the province in 1989.

How is such crushing poverty possible in the heart of Europe?

Kosovo was always the poorest part of former Yugoslavia, with a GDP of about
10% of that of Slovenia, the richest part of the federation. But Tito's
Yugoslav system ensured investments in infrastructure and industry, mass
education, and the creation of autonomous institutions, all for the first
time in Kosovo's modern history. In the late 1980s, Serbian nationalist
leader Slobodan Milosevic allowed Kosovo's small Serbian minority to seize
these resources and political power, provoking a massive movement of
non-violent resistance among the Albanian-speaking majority. Albanians were
expelled from industrial and civil service jobs, and most families survived
on a mixture of small-scale agriculture and remittances from family members
working abroad - mostly in Germany, Switzerland and the USA.

The NATO war against Serbia in 1999 destroyed most of the industry and
infrastructure, either through bombing, or by looting as the Albanian
population took their revenge on the Yugoslav regime which had humiliated
them. A United Nations administration was rapidly put in place, and ran
Kosovo as a protectorate of the western powers until the declaration of
independence in mid-February this year.

This UN administration completely failed to develop economic activities that
would lift the population out of poverty. So much western food "aid" was
dumped into Kosovo that most of the local farmers went bankrupt, and were
forced to kill their livestock or abandon their fields. A free trade regime
was imposed, and the Yugoslav Dinar replaced as legal currency by the German
Mark, (Kosovo therefore became a de facto part of the Eurozone on 1 January
2002). As a result, Kosovo joined the other EU protectorate, Bosnia, as a
marginal but easy-to-penetrate market for west European companies, while
local companies found themselves unable to compete, and separated from their
former markets in the rest of former Yugoslavia.

One of the paradoxes of Kosovo's de facto separation from Serbia in 1999 is
that - since free trade always benefits the strongest at the expense of the
weakest - Serbian companies have been able to capture a large part of the
Kosovo market, even providing the basic foodstuffs which Kosovo used to
export to Serbia. Serbia is now Kosovo's largest trading partner, while
Kosovo has failed to penetrate either Serbia or any of the other ex-Yugoslav
markets. Kosovo has a disastrous balance of payments; in 2007, Kosovo
imported 1.5 billion euros worth of goods, but exported only about 150
million euros worth.

While it did little to help the small farmers and workshops that dominate
the Kosovo economy, the UN administration expended considerable effort on
the introduction of a textbook-style neoliberal legal system, ensuring that
Kosovo's natural resources (coal, lead, zinc, nickel, farmland) and the
handful of remaining industrial and food-processing companies can be easily
acquired by western investors, that civil infrastructure can only be built
by public-private partnerships, and that private investors will be able to
take over the most profitable part of public services like health and
education.

The electricity sector illustrates the economic dilemma facing Kosovo. The
territory has persistent power cuts and 'brown-outs.' The electric company
produces 800 megawatts of electricity each day, about 80 percent of what is
needed. It can't afford to buy more from neighbouring countries, because,
during the years of conflict and UN administration, almost everybody stopped
paying, and many homes and business are connected to the power grid
illegally. Western advisors have proposed privatising the electricity
supplier, so that private companies will be responsible for enforcing
payment - and for cutting off poor people's heat and light. Foreign
companies are expected to build a modern coal-fired power station in
exchange to unlimited access to the estimated 15 billion tons of brown coal
lying in the earth beneath Kosovo. The EU will help create a regional energy
market to swap surpluses (Kosovo could import from Balkan countries with
hydroelectric power at high season, and export back to them when water
levels are lower).

It would be better for Kosovo to build up a state utility, ensuring that
non-renewable resources are used in the national interest, (The ground is
also though to contain 20 billion tons of lead and zinc and 15 billion tons
of nickel). Only a public utility could ensure that the painful move towards
enforcement of energy bill collection is socially responsible. In private
hands, the energy company may provoke a massive non-payment campaign, as
followed utility privatisations in South Africa and Bolivia. Investors are
therefore trying to get the government to guarantee payment for minimum
supply to local households, and to allow the privatised utility to double
production, but sell all of the extra capacity abroad, effectively ignoring
the needs of the people who the coal belongs to.

Having destroyed all forms of Yugoslav state or social ownership, the UN has
created a Kosovo state administration that lives from import duties, a sales
tax, and subsidies from the European Union. Independence will allow a merger
between the UN and national administrations, but with former UN employees
(ie most educated Kosovars who can speak English) used to much higher wages
than in the national administration, their integration is likely to increase
the corruption of the civil service, as they try desperately to maintain
their western lifestyle.

Regional warlords, bosses of the UCK militia which confronted the Serbs
during the NATO war, are responsible for the implementation of state
functions in most of the territory outside the capital, Prishtina. They also
control the most lucrative export industries, which are all illegal. Kosovo
is part of the main transit route for drugs entering the European Union, and
is a major element in the trafficking of women into the European sex
industry - some studies suggest that 30% of trafficked women worldwide are
controlled by Balkan gangs. Kosovo (and the neighbouring post-Yugoslav state
of Montenegro) are also the main centres of smuggling of tax-free cigarettes
into the EU. As many Kosovars observe cynically, all these areas of activity
depend on cooperation between Kosovar and Serbian gangs, and show that, at
the top, there is a willingness to forget the war and work together.

The central government will try to weaken the warlords by incorporating some
militias into a Kosovo army, which has already been promised to the US and
NATO for any missions abroad. This mercenary role (which harks back to the
Albanian role within the Ottoman empire) offers the west, particularly the
USA, a motivated and dependable force of pro-western Moslems, for potential
use in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in a future move against Iran.

Meanwhile, the population continues to get by as best it can, in an economy
dominated by small-scale trading, subsistence agriculture, smuggling and
crime. The largest employer is the public sector, the private sector
consists mainly of shops and most businesses employ only two or three people
at minimum wage. Remittances from emigrant workers make up about 40% of GDP.
One third of Kosovo's two million residents are under the age of 14, and the
birth rate is the highest in Europe. This means that landholdings are
getting smaller and smaller, and since the terrain is too hilly for
mechanisation, productivity is too low to compete with imported - Serbian
and EU food products.

The Serbian minority in Kosovo (about 10% of the total population) is the
worst off, because it has lost its former privileges, and lacks contacts to
Kosovo's new bosses. Many young Serbs have already emigrated to Serbia
proper, and the remaining population would probably do the same, if they
could find a buyer for their farmland.

In economic terms, the NATO-Serbia war and UN protectorate over Kosovo has
meant a decade of stagnation. In 1989, the GDP per capita in richest part of
Yugoslavia, Slovenia, was 10 time higher than in Kosovo. Today Slovenia is
part of the EU, with a GDP per capita 16 times higher than Kosovo, and five
times higher than Serbia.

Few voices have been raised against this outrageous failure of the west. And
yet, Kosovo has a small, but well educated and westernised middle class,
based in the civil administration set up by the UN mission, and the army of
private contractors and "Non-Governmental Organisations" which the west used
to reorganize the society and provide a social base for its continued
presence. Profoundly opportunistic, these middle class layers would prefer
to work for the foreign donors, who pay better and are less violent, but, as
independence approached, many have attached themselves to one or the other
of the warlord factions. Unlike the rest of former Yugoslavia, very few of
these NGO activists have tried to organize or represent the disadvantaged
majority in society, let alone resist the twin predators of neoliberalism
and mafia.

This westernized middle class has had a central role in articulating and
transmitting the dominant ideology in today's Kosovo, a mixture of
neo-liberal obsession with private enterprise, coupled with a xenophobic and
clannish ultra-nationalism that justifies aggression against Kosovo's
national minorities, and legitimizes the various illegal traffics. By
expelling Albanians from the civil service and socially-owned enterprises,
Serbia's "communist" regime definitively severed Albanian attachment to the
social benefits of the Yugoslav system, and accelerated a return to pre-WWII
self-reliance and clan-based solidarity.

Kosovo nationalism also includes a massive sense of entitlement, with most
people believing that the European Union should provide massive and
indefinite financial support to Kosovo, to make up for its failure to
protect Kosovars in the past.

While the EU can be expected to bankroll the Kosovo state in the foreseeable
future, this will be conditional on the economy remaining open to western
investment in land, industry and services, and on a partial reduction in
smuggling and criminal activities. The EU will also subsidise infrastructure
projects (there is still no decent road link between landlocked Kosovo and
the Albanian port of Durres), but it will be difficult for Kosovo firms to
win more than a minor share of these contracts. Outside mining and
electricity production, the only other potential investments are likely to
be in the footware and textile sectors - Turkish and Greek companies are
already investing in neighbouring Albania, and the Kosovo government can be
expected to set its minimum wage so low as to attract some of this business.
East European governments are already engaged in a 'race to the bottom,'
with successive rounds of cuts to tax and business regulations to attract
investors. Though it is hard to see how Kosovo can compete with neighbouring
Macedonia, which offers a 10% flat tax and VAT rate, with generous tax
holidays, excellent road and rail links to Europe, and lower levels of
corruption and extortion.

While the EU will insist that Kosovo opens its economy to western
investment, it will continue to prevent legal migration of Kosovars into the
EU labour market, creating an explosive social situation for the government
of the newly-independent country.

In any case, the economic benefits of integration into the European space
will be less than those provided to Kosovo during the Yugoslav period,
before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) took charge of Belgrade's
economic policy in the mid 80s.

Adam Novak is the former representative of the Canadian NGO Alternatives in
Eastern Europe.