Why can't the Serbs fight for their land in Kosovo?

pravdareport.com

Why can't the Serbs fight for their land in Kosovo? - The Balkan crisis

Lyuba Lulko

5-6 minutes

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Why are the Serbs not fighting for their land in Kosovo and Metohija, where Serbian statehood and Serbian Orthodoxy were born? The answer is about their state of mind.

The battle on the Kosovo field near Pristina in 1389 means as much for the Serbs as the battle on the Kulikovo field in 1380 (now the Tula region) means for the Russian. It was a battle for independence between joint forces of the Serbs and the Bosnians led by Prince Lazar, and the army of Turkish Sultan Murad I. The battle ended in victory for the Turks, but they were too exhausted to continue conquering Serbia; the Turkish sultan was killed.

Afterwards, in the heyday of Serbian statehood in the 18th-19th centuries, Kosovo and Metohija's largest cities, such as Pec, Pristina and Prizren, were significant political, economic and religious centers, around which Orthodox monasteries were founded. Today, they have remained in Serb-populated cities of the region. For example, the official residence of the Serbian archbishops and patriarchs is located in the monastery of the Pec Patriarchate.

In a nutshell, those lands that are currently occupied by the Albanians are Serbian sanctuaries, which had been lost as a result of the defeat of Serbian statehood in 1999. It is no coincidence that Russia's support in the non-recognition of Kosovo's independence is extremely important for the Serbs. It is worthy of note that Kosovo has not been recognized either within the UN or the EU (five countries of the European Union did not recognize the independence of Kosovo).

Therefore, if the Kosovars give a reason to return those lands by force, one should use the chance. The chance was given on May 28, when the Kosovo Police (ROSU) conducted an operation in the north of Kosovo and Metohija, which resulted in the arrest of 19 police officers and nine citizens, among them a Russian citizen, a member of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), Mikhail Krasnoshchekov. One of the affected individuals, Radenko Milovanovic from Zubin Potok, told reporters that the ROSU fired upon them, ambushed houses and chased women and children.

A meeting of the National Security Council was held in Belgrade. Serbian President Alexander Vucic ordered to bring the forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the army to full combat readiness; troops were pulled up to the border. Noteworthy, these territories in the north of Kosovo have their own police on the budget of Belgrade, and the Belgrade budget supports the local authorities too.

Milorad Dodik, chairman of the Presidium of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), told RTRS that the special operation came as a serious blow to the "fragile peace" in Kosovo and Metohija in an attempt to provoke another exodus of the Serbs. According to Dodik, the international community must show a reaction to the crisis.

Political analyst Dragomir Anzelkovic told RTS that a real war in Kosovo was unlikely, but a conflict of "certain intensity" was possible. Military intervention may happen if they start killing the Serbs and establish control in the north, he explained. "In this case, the Serbian army will enter the north of Kosovo," said Anzelkovic. Anzelkovic added that the Serbian authorities maintain contacts with centers of power in the West that block mass actions of the Kosovars against the Serbian side.

Alexander Vucic announced on May 28 that the international community condemned the excessive use of force. According to him, representatives of major powers noted that the police raid had nothing to do with the struggle against crime.

Vucic, of course, is not the president who will fight for his land, but Russia could support him.

Mikhail Alexandrov, Doctor of Political Sciences at the Moscow State University for Foreign Relations, believes that the Serbs have always been oriented towards the West from the psychological point of view. "Back in the times of Tito (Josip Broz Tito - the leader of Yugoslavia in 1945-1980) they were not part of the Warsaw Pact. They would boast of independence and the fact that they could go to the West to earn money, buy a new Mercedes and enjoy freedom that the Warsaw Pact did not have."

"They had eventually fallen a victim to NATO's aggression, and Yugoslavia was dismembered. If Slobodan Milosevic had used ground troops in Kosovo, NATO would not have carried out a large-scale ground operation. At least, Kosovo could have been divided into two, and Russia could have deployed its troops there. The Serbs could have easily deployed their troops in Kosovo," Mikhail Alexandrov said in an interview with Pravda.Ru.

He continued in an interview with the Pravda.Ru correspondent that, like, "Serbia actually surrendered Montenegro without a fight, now Kosovo will be lost, then Vojvodina (inhabited by Albanians).

 

Book Review: International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Book Review: International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia by Ivor Sokolić

8-10 minutes

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In International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia, Ivor Sokolić focuses on the contradictions that can arise between the 'truths' provided by international courts' judgments and national war narratives, focusing on the understudied case of Croatia. This is an in-depth analysis that will be a must-read for transitional justice scholars and practitioners both in the Balkans and beyond, recommends Ebru Demir. 

International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia. Ivor Sokolić. Palgrave. 2019.

Find this book: 

Can an international court challenge a society's 'narrative of independence'? What happens when 'truths' provided through international courts' judgments are in contradiction with national war narratives? And, under such circumstances, what are the chances of human rights norms taking root in these societies? Ivor Sokolić's International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia tackles these questions by focusing on Croatia, an understudied case compared with two other countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia) involved in the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

The methodology undertaken and the data gathered play a central role in the book and shape the key arguments. Sokolić uses fieldwork research with 'ordinary' individuals and qualitative comparative analysis together in order to collect data, which is a novel approach (8). For the study, data was gathered from two focus groups: members of war veterans' associations and pensioners; and (middle and high school) teachers (15). Sokolić explains the choice of the focus groups by underlining the fact that war veterans' associations and pensioners are an influential and large part of Croatian civil society and they provide a good illustration of the highly politicised war narrative (16-17). In the same way, the teachers were targeted since they are important actors in teaching (and reproducing) national narratives to the next generations (16). Both focus groups therefore enable Sokolić to gain insight into the national war narratives prominent in Croatia today. Considerable use of the interview extracts from these focus groups also makes the book engaging for readers.

The book is centred around three key points. First, Sokolić underlines across the chapters that the decisions of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) run counter to the Croatian national meta-narrative. According to this narrative, 'Croatia led an exclusively defensive war (Homeland War/Domovinski Rat) within its own borders' (184). Unlike the 'well-organised' and 'preplanned' Serbian aggression, Croatians fought a purely defensive war, which prevents Croatia from being accused of having committed war crimes. This narrative polarises the positions of Serbia and Croatia in the war: whilst Serbia is considered to have been prepared for conflict far in advance, Croatia is portrayed as a country which was 'caught up in' a brutal war. The alleged unwillingness and unpreparedness of Croatia and the defensive nature of the war are used to excuse and relativise Croatian actions during the conflict (59).

Image Credit: ICTY Building (UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia CC BY 2.0)

As the book illustrates, ICTY trials and judgments substantially challenge this national narrative. ICTY ascertained that Croatian armed forces carried out joint criminal enterprise with the leadership of Herzeg-Bosnia (184), and Croatian generals were found guilty of crimes against humanity and violations of laws or customs of war during Operation Storm. Yet, these judgments have had no effect on the Croatian official narrative. Operation Storm, which is considered to be a war of independence for Croatia, was 'exculpated' by a 'Declaration on Operation Storm' adopted by the Croatian Parliament in 2000. This Declaration underlined the legitimate and liberating nature of the Croatian defence as opposed to the aggressive and conquering Serbian attacks.

Sokolić underlines how commemoration of the past endorses the 'defensive' nature of the war. To justify and excuse the alleged war crimes of Croatian convicts during Operation Storm, the Croatian narrative employs, for instance, an image of a Serbian baka (grandmother) with a rifle (66). This image is a significant part of the national narrative which supports the argument that every single Serbian (from child to elder) was armed and violent during the war. Such memorialisation justifies (and then excuses) the crimes which 'a few Croatians' might have committed as a result of blurring the distinction between combatants and civilians. Thus, under this narrative, these crimes by no means add up to war crimes; in such a context, the ICTY's decisions largely fail to impact Croatian society.

The second issue with which the book deals is the position of Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Croatian official war narrative. Sokolić uses empirical findings to show how the involvement of Croatia in the Bosnian conflict is simply ignored or denied by the interviewees (189). On the contrary, in the prevailing narrative, Croatia is seen as Bosnia and Herzegovina's saviour. In 2006, another 'Declaration on Operation Storm' by the Parliament described Croatia as the saviour of Bosnia and Herzegovina by preventing another Srebrenica in Bihać by allying with the Bosnian forces (187). Whereas Croatia differentiates itself from Serbia by claiming the aggressive and conquering nature of the Serbian attacks, Bosnia and Herzegovina is also considered different from Croatia by being 'inferior', 'chaotic' and 'savage' (191). By linking this narrative with the concept of Orientalism, Sokolić provides readers with an interesting and gripping discussion on 'orientalism within the Balkans itself'.

Thirdly, the book gives insight into the role of 'emotion' in the transitional justice process of Croatia. Sokolić argues that the Croatian case illustrates 'how pressure from below can hamper the spread of human rights norms, especially when combined with dominant and emotional everyday narratives' (23, emphasis added). There is similar literature exploring where and how exactly justice is 'hijacked' in the domestic sphere (Subotic 2009; see also Clark 2014 and Nettelfield 2010). The book makes a contribution to this scholarship by placing a specific emphasis on 'expressivist moments' in the trials. The use of the suicide of Slobodan Praljak at the ICTY as an example to support this point is felicitous. Praljak's suicide supports the Croatian national war narrative by showing (once again) that the ICTY is an incompetent and incapable court (192, 194). The public, media and elites use such a key expressivist moment to weaken the ICTY's credibility and to strengthen Croatia's victimhood narrative before such a court. Emotions impact and shape attitudes towards law (206), and under these circumstances, the trickle-down effects of international human rights norms do not occur in Croatia (208). As a result, the official war narrative once again prevails over the ICTY's judgments.

Overall, International Courts and Mass Atrocity provides an in-depth analysis of the transitional justice process in Croatia. Sokolić not only works through the fault lines of the ICTY regarding the case of Croatia, but also sheds light on an issue that the international criminal justice system as a whole often neglects: namely, the strength of the local in creating and maintaining war narratives. The book is therefore a must-read for transitional justice scholars and practitioners both in the Balkans and beyond.

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Note: This article is provided by our sister site, LSE Review of Books. It gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics.

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About the author

Ebru Demir
Ebru Demir is a third-year PhD student and Associate Tutor at University of Sussex, Law School. Her research areas are transitional justice; transformative justice; women, peace and security; and peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

nationalinterest.org

It's Time for a New Approach to the Balkans

by Frank Wisner Amb. Cameron Munter Marko Prelec

6-8 minutes

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Watch the Western Balkans!

As their recent Berlin Summit shows, the leaders of France and Germany realize they must focus on real solutions to the problems of the Western Balkans.

The vision of “Europe whole, free and at peace” has an unfinished corner we now call the Western Balkans, formerly known as Yugoslavia before that country disintegrated into war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The countries there—Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Northern Macedonia, and Montenegro—are quiet now, but it is a deceptive calm. The region is in trouble, which could easily spread to the rest of Europe and affect the interests and security of the United States.

The hardest problems are the relationship between Serbia and its former province, now an independent republic, of Kosovo; and the conflicts within Bosnia-Herzegovina over that state’s identity and survival. Both have roots that go back to the war, both raise fundamental questions of identity and are deeply emotional.

These problems are like broken bones that have been set hastily and healed wrongly: they affect everything and will keep causing trouble—trouble that has, once again, reached crisis dimensions. On top of these issues, the whole region suffers from endemic corruption, low state capacity, and governance by patronage and clientelism rather than by law.

Also, Russian influence in the Western Balkans has grown in recent years. While its ability to play a decisive role in the region is limited, Russia can be unhelpful and disruptive.

What to do?

Europe and the United States have tried to fix the Western Balkans and it has not worked. A new approach is needed, one that acknowledges the seriousness of the problem and accepts it will take a long time and significant resources to solve it.

Past attempts have erred in one of two ways: ignoring the real problems and trying to do too much too quickly.

For many years Europe and the United States encouraged local leaders to shift their attention from the hardest problems, which brought them into bitter conflict with one another, to the technical and apolitical work of integration with the European Union (EU) and NATO. The hope was that in this way otherwise intractable conflicts would soften and become soluble. It is now clear this approach will not work.

Yet every attempt to create a “Big Bang,” whether in reframing Bosnia’s constitution or bridging the gaps between Belgrade and Pristina, has failed. Any plausible solution will involve painful compromises. It is irresistibly tempting for spoilers to attack these as treasonous sell-outs.

These problems cannot be solved overnight. They will not go away as the Balkan countries inch their way to EU accession. They demand steady, patient attention over many years, by many people, led by local actors with support from Europe and the United States.

The quest for solutions has to continue, but quietly, preferably away from the glare of publicity, and without unrealistic expectations of rapid wins. External actors can help with Track 2 diplomacy, out of the public eye and off the front pages. Understandably, progress may take a long time and incremental gains may be lost in occasional setbacks.

While the search for answers to the Balkans’ big questions and progress toward EU and NATO membership takes place, Europe should help the region knit itself back together and rebuild connections to its wider neighborhood. It is a sad irony that it is harder today to travel from one part of what used to be Yugoslavia to another, than it is to go from Warsaw to Paris. The free movement of people, ideas, money, goods, services, and bytes within the Balkans and between the region and Europe will do much to build trust and create a demand for good government.

Integration into the western political, economic and security architecture is still a worthy, even essential goal, but it is many years off. Yet, integration will not in itself solve the region’s political problems. NATO and the EU can only admit well-ordered states at peace with themselves and their neighbors. The two remaining Balkan conflicts prevent exactly this: they make it impossible for stable, well-run states to form. No one wants a partner for whom the rule of law is a joke and whose neighbors are bitter enemies.

The urgency of the Western Balkans is underscored by a recent breakthrough. There used to be a third challenge: Greece’s refusal to accept its neighbor Macedonia’s name. The two countries just resolved it, with a new compromise name of “Northern Macedonia.” This was the easiest of the big Balkan problems. Yet it took them almost thirty years, at a staggering cost. Northern Macedonia lost about fifteen years of progress toward NATO and EU membership as the quality of its governance slid from best to worst in the region.

Northern Macedonia is now on the hard but hopeful road back. There is no time to spare for Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia and the rest of the region. The moment is ripe for Europe’s leadership, in cooperation with the United States, to refocus on the Western Balkans and give the region and its issues the attention it deserves and our interests in a stable and prosperous Europe and Western Alliance call for.

And so, it’s not enough for us to rely on existing mechanisms to address these challenges in the Western Balkans. European leaders are right to engage, and the United States must be ready to support these efforts.

Frank G. Wisner was a career foreign service officer who served eight presidents. He was a four-time ambassador, and also under secretary of defense for policy and under secretary of state for international security affairs. He is now an international affairs advisor at Squire Patton Boggs, an international law firm.

Cameron Munter is CEO and President of the EastWest Institute in New York. A career American diplomat for three decades, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Serbia (2007–2009).  

Marko Prelec is a specialist on southern and eastern Europe and an expert on the states of former Yugoslavia. He is currently Professor of Practice and Director of Applied Policy Projects, School of Public Policy, at the Central European University.

Image: Reuters

 

            nationalinterest.org

Standing Up For Realism

by Editorial

8-10 minutes

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The United States, Henry Kissinger once noted, may be "the only country in which the term 'realist' can be used as a pejorative epithet." Here we go again. The Center for the National Interest, which was founded by Richard M. Nixon in 1994, is being criticized for its embrace of realist principles, including outreach to Russia based on a combination of diplomatic and military strength. The last media frenzy that occurred surrounded the Center's sponsorship of a foreign policy speech by Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. Now that the Mueller investigation has given the Center a clean bill of health, the critics are working overtime to invent new charges in the hope that something sticks.

Realism, long associated with authoritarian European statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck and Klemens von Metternich, has been consistently portrayed as antithetical to American democratic traditions. During the Cold War, statesmen such as Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski were depicted as amoral or even harboring, in the case of the latter, loyalties to Poland rather than America. But in one form or another, no matter what the detractors may claim, realism is at the very heart of American foreign policy. It is what helped America to emerge as the dominant power after World War II and during the Cold War.

The realist approach served as a bipartisan foundation for Washington's approach to the world, providing a common framework for identifying threats and defending American interests abroad. Everyone from Harry Truman and Dean Acheson to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to George H.W. Bush and James Baker espoused a strategic realism that played a decisive role in ending the Cold War on American terms. Even Ronald Reagan, who talked about battling an evil empire, ended up signing sweeping arms control treaties with the Kremlin and consigning the Cold War to the dustbin of history. These statesmen helped to establish a stable balance of international power that safeguarded Western prosperity and freedom while allowing for the peaceful internal transformation of the Soviet bloc.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, realism fell into disrepute. Headier doctrines that amounted to old wine in new bottles now found favor. The United States found itself alone at the top of the international pyramid and became convinced that its security could be based on transforming non-Western nations in America's image. The two major strands of American foreign policy that dominated during the post-Cold War period—neo-conservatism and liberal internationalism—may have disputed the appropriate mix of force and diplomatic persuasion, but they were united in pursuing a missionary foreign policy. They advocated what George Kennan once referred to as "the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of people whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced."

This approach has failed. It has led to debilitating wars in the Middle East that have sapped America's treasury. It has helped turn competitors into enemies. Regions that once enjoyed the strategic benefits of a balance of power have been thrown into disorder and disarray. The world order that prevailed in 1989 is now in shambles.

Enter the Center for the National Interest. It has consistently warned against the perils of a crusading foreign policy. Nixon's marching orders were that the Center should not be another pedestrian Washington think-tank that regurgitated conventional wisdom, but one that challenged orthodoxies, whenever and wherever it could. Otherwise, its contribution to any foreign policy debates would be null and void right from the very beginning. In that spirit, the Center has consistently challenged liberal international and neocon thinking to advocate a foreign policy based on a prudent combination of diplomacy, economic and military strength to defend American national interests.

Who got it right? The answer seems self-evident. But at the very moment that realist doctrines should be ascendant, a media backlash is taking place that is directly targeting the Center, principally for its pursuit of a dialogue with Russia. The idea seems to be that it is illegitimate, even unpatriotic, to advocate anything that defies foreign policy conventional wisdom.

To be sure, previous foreign policy debates, whether over Vietnam or the second Iraq War, have been marked by fierce vitriol. But those debates took place within a commonly agreed framework of seeking to advance American interests. Today, the debates have curdled into vitriol and character assassination, pure and simple. None of this will deter the Center from pursuing its mission. In fact, they only make it even more imperative.

The Center has always been a leading voice in Track II dialogue with a variety of countries—including, yes, Russia—in the belief that outreach is in the national interest. The Center has sought to attract the best and the brightest for its dialogues, ranging from everyone from Zalmay Khalilzad, who is now the American representative to Afghanistan, to Graham Allison, until recently the head of the Belfer Center at Harvard University. The notion that talking to countries such as Russia is inherently suspect flies in the face of reality. During the Cold War it helped to avoid a nuclear confrontation. Today, a new détente may be a pipedream, but a modicum of mutual understanding remains imperative.

This is why the head of the center, Dimitri K. Simes, is serving as a co-host of the television show aired on Channel 1 in Russia called "The Great Game." In informing the board of the center about the show, chairman Charles Boyd explained that "although a different method than we've used before, this project strikes me as what our Center was established to do. … It well may be one of the most effective channels to present U.S. perspectives in Russia at this point, especially since U.S. media have less reach inside Russia, and there seems to be little diplomatic or unofficial dialogue underway."

The show features contrasting stands. One viewpoint is articulated by Russian Duma committee chairman Vyacheslav Nikonov and with Simes explaining an American viewpoint, and that explanation included saying on a number of occasions that there was serious and real interference in American elections, including in face to face appearance with foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. He also warned Russia to be careful about confronting America in Venezuela and "The Great Game" was the only television outlet in Russia to broadcast an interview with prominent opposition politician Juan Guaido. What's more, Simes called on the Russian government to display new flexibility in dealing with Ukraine and its new president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The bottom line is that the show provides a valuable opportunity for prominent Americans who have served in government or are think tank experts or journalists to address tens of millions of Russians and the country's elite in real-time with no fear of censorship. It also provides an open source channel to learn what makes Russian political elites tick. By the logic of the critics, Nixon should never have traveled to Moscow and engaged in the so-called Kitchen Debate with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959.

According to former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb, who is a member of the board of the Center and who served in the Carter administration as Assistant Secretary of State, "Simes plays a key role in the ongoing debate about what our Russia policy should be. His knowledge of what's going on inside the Kremlin is ferocious. He goes there regularly, talks to people, and I've found over the years what he comes back with tends to be borne out by Russian behavior. And that's the best test of whether or not he's a reliable commentator."

Whether they are doing so consciously or not, our critics, more often than not, are doing something worse than Russia could ever accomplish with its interference in American elections. They are sowing doubt about what constitutes legitimate debate and patriotism in America. In purporting to defend democracy, they are undermining it. They might want to recall Abraham Lincoln's admonition that "If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." For our part, we pledge to redouble our efforts to defend them.

Image: Reuters.