Negotiating for peace in Kosovo

Article published Aug 20, 2007



Negotiating for peace in Kosovo

August 20, 2007

Dan Burton - In coming weeks, an international confrontation is likely
to occur among the United States, the European Union, and Russia over
an issue most Americans have long since forgotten: Kosovo, where a few
hundred Americans remain deployed as part of a NATO force protecting a
shaky interim peace that ended the 1999 U.S.-led intervention.


For most Americans this obscure Serbian province, with its
mainly Albanian Muslim population and its hundreds of Serbian Christian
churches and monasteries, may be a little-remembered footnote to the
breakup of Yugoslavia. However, now is the time for clear thinking
about next steps if Kosovo is to avoid revisiting its history as a
hotbed of regional instability and violence.


The international mission in Kosovo for the last eight years
has not met its original goals regarding establishment of an open,
multiethnic and multireligious society. True, there has been no return
to large-scale fighting. But remaining Christian Serbs are confined to
NATO-protected enclaves for fear of endemic Muslim Albanian violence. A
quarter of a million expellees — some two-thirds of the Serbs, Roma,
Croats, and all the Jews — still cannot return safely to their homes.
More than 150 Christian holy sites have been burned, blown up or
desecrated. Organized crime is rampant, with allegations of corruption
reaching into the upper levels of the U.N.-supervised local
administration and unemployment outside these criminal elements remains
more than 50 percent.


Even Albanian officials have expressed concern at the growth
of radical Wahhabist influence, and the reality of a dangerously
segregated society, as hundreds of Saudi-financed mosques have sprung
up to replace the destroyed churches.


Although the situation on the ground in Kosovo has been a case
study in U.N. mismanagement, there is no question of Kosovo's legal
status as part of Serbia. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which
ended the 1999 war, reaffirmed Serbia's territorial integrity and
sovereignty while calling for substantial autonomy and self-government
for Kosovo within Serbia.


But against this clear standard for Kosovo's future, the U.S.
State Department has insisted the only possible solution for Kosovo is
not autonomy, but independence — even though Serbia refuses to give up
15 percent of its territory. Even worse, during his recent trip to
Albania, President Bush suggested that if a Russian veto blocks any new
Security Council Resolution to separate Kosovo from Serbia, the U.S.
might take the lead in recognizing a unilateral declaration of Kosovo
independence with no legitimate claim of authority at all. Within
Europe itself there are growing misgivings and decisions about this
course.


This is a terrible idea. To start with, our policy is in
contravention of international laws and will create a dangerous
precedent. Also, there is no reason to suppose an independent Kosovo
would be a viable state, either economically or politically. Terrorist
and organized crime influences, already rampant in Kosovo, would be
granted a consolidated haven for their operations. Independence would
likely be followed by renewed anti-Serb attacks, at least against the
smaller enclaves, if not against Northern Mitrovica, where most of the
remaining Serbs enjoy relative security. Unrest in neighboring
Albanian-dominated areas of southern Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia,
even Greece, could be reignited.


Perhaps most damaging, an imposed separation of Kosovo from
Serbia would send a message to other trouble-spots, not just in the
Balkans, that state borders are up for grabs.


The American relationship with Serbia would suffer badly if we
insist on inflicting on a democratic country of 10 million people an
offense they cannot accept and never will forget. An imposed separation
of Kosovo, the cradle of Serbia's national and spiritual life, would
alienate Serbs of all political stripes and could very well result in
the implosion of Serbian democracy, with incalculable negative
consequences. In short, an imposed independence of Kosovo could set the
region back another decade.


As an original cosponsor of a House resolution calling for the
U.S. to support a mutually agreed solution for the future status of
Kosovo and reject an imposed solution, I believe we can no longer
proceed on a policy that is trapped in assumptions formed years ago.
Instead of an imposed preconceived outcome, any viable solution for
Kosovo must result from give-and-take negotiations between Serbia and
the Kosovo Albanians, balancing Serbia's legitimate concern for its
sovereignty and the Albanians' legitimate right of self-governance.


It must be consistent with accepted international principles,
including guarantees of both the territorial integrity of states as
well as of human rights and self-determination. The U.S., the U.N., the
European Union, Russia, or any other interested actor must not impose a
solution on either of the parties, or bow to threats of violence if one
of the parties' demands is not met.


As with any genuine negotiation, the eventual outcome cannot
be foreseen with certainty. However, it is certain that unless we hit
the reset button and reevaluate the situation, Kosovo may once again
become a trouble-spot requiring American and NATO attention at a time
we can least afford it. As Kosovo re-emerges from years of obscurity,
we neednow to take another serious look at America's options and
long-term interests. As I stated before, the solution must come from
negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo Albanians.


Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, is ranking member of the U.S.
House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western
Hemisphere and serves on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia
and the Pacific.


http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070820/COMMENTARY/108200019/1012&template=printart

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Russia’s Response to Kosovo Independence

Pyotr ISKENDEROV

Russia’s Response to Kosovo
Independence

The first Balkan visit of the “Three”, a group of
international middlemen ended quite like it could have been predicted.
Aleksandr Botzan-Kharchenko, a special envoy of the Russian foreign minister
for the Balkans, Frank Vizner, a special envoy of the White House for the
problems of the Kosovo settlement, and Wolfgang Ischinger, a German diplomat
representing the EU, were accorded the highest-level reception in Belgrade and
Prisitina. They had talks with the leaders pf Serbia and Kosovo, presidents
Boris Tadic and Fatmirko Seidiu, prime ministers Voislav Kostunica and Agim
Ceku. Much was said about the difficulty and responsibility of the diplomatic
mission. But again no concrete results were reported

The gap between the positions of Belgrade and the Albanian
separatists in Kosovo did not become narrower. The other way about, the
unwillingness of the Albanians to agree to any concessions or compromise became
even clearer. As Mssrs. Seidu and Ceku quite arrogantly stated, neither the
issue of independence of the province nor its – even hypothetical - breakdown
into the Serbian and Albanian parts that Herr Ischinger made a slip of as a
version, could be on the agenda on negotiations with authorities in Belgrade.
And Veton Surroi, the leader of the “Ora” faction of the Kosovo Assembly and,
incidentally, a member of the Kosovo delegation at the planned negotiations,
went as far as say that the 120 days the world community has given Pristina to
continue negotiations could be put to better use to attend to more important
things, like preparing the province for getting its independence, working out its
Constitution and adopting other laws, approving Kosovo’s state symbols, its
flag and anthem. Given that their supporters in the West have for more than
eight years been hammering into the heads of the Albanian separatists the idea
that Kosovo should no longer be a part of Serbia, it would have been hard to
imagine that the results of the visits would be different. In the end, to
intention to unilaterally proclaim the province independent has changed nothing
in the situation. Are there not enough other self-proclaimed entities? What
really counts is the response of the international community to the hint Herr
Ischinger dropped and the nature of the conclusion to be made on it basis in
the world’s capitals, including Moscow.

The course of the development of the situation is such that
by the year-end Kosovo can be acknowledged independent by not just a single
country (as was the case with Turkey acknowledging the Turkish Republic of
North Cyprus) or a little more than twenty nations (the case of Taiwan), but by
rather several dozens of the world’s biggest states, including the United
States, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. This would
radically change the very essence of the problem of the non-acknowledged
states, opening new vistas for different versions and scenarios. And the
current supporters of the idea of Kosovo’s independence could find themselves
in a situation whereby simultaneously with the clearly pro-Western state,
Eurasia can witness emergence of other full-fledged subjects that would never
feel sympathetic about either the United States, NATO or the European Union.

It is not accidental that the western diplomats who refer to
Kosovo as “the unique case” that has nothing to do with either the
Transdniester Republic, Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Nagorno Karabakh, are trying
to avoid detailed subject-matter discussions of the “uniqueness” of the Kosovo
situation. The author of this article has had enough reasons to conclude this,
talking both officially and in private with officials at the EU and NATO
headquarters, as well as with people at the UN Mission for Kosovo’s temporary
administration. As a rule, Western officials tend to reduce the problem to
declarations of the complexity of the historical roots of the Kosovo problem
and the impossibility for Serbs and Albanians to live side by side in a state
they share.

The conventionality of such formulations is seen with the
naked eye. The deep historical roots are typical of all the ethnic problems of
the Balkan states including Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania Should
they be solved by way of separation of certain territories, the Balkans would
turn into an image of Germany of the days of the feudal suzerainty. After all
is said and done, relations between Greeks and Albanians on the eve of World
War I were much worse than those of Serbs and Kosovars, however the official
Tirana that suggests that Serbia discard Kosovo does not look prepared to give
out its territory to the adjacent Greece. And in terms of fierceness, the ethnic
civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was never like any conflict in the former
Yugoslavia. Nevertheless the West did not acknowledge the right of independence
of any of the self-proclaimed formations in that land, be it the Croatian
Republic of Herzeg-Bosna, or West Bosnia (Tzazin Kraina) or the Republic of
Serbia.

But whenever a western vis-a-vis hears anything about the
doubts of the “unique character” of the Kosovo conflict we express in this
article as well as information about the anti-Abkhazian and anti-Ossetian
ethnic mopping-up operations the regular Georgian army was involved in in the
1990s, they immediately get bored and do their best to quit the conversation.
Only a few recall the role of the UN civil administration in Kosovo. According
to some officials at the NATO headquarters in Brussels (who insisted on hiding
behind the screen of anonymity as people unauthorized to comment on the future
status of the province), “the uniqueness” of the Kosovo case boils down to the
fact that unlike the situation with the post-Soviet space, the UN mission is
there. But then similar missions were in their time enacted in Namibia and East
Timor, and both territories later turned from the UN mandate territories into
sovereign states.

The transformation of the status of Namibia and East Timor
as the UN wards was very real. But not all the truth was told. The
international representation there was introduced in the conditions of the
factual occupation by the neighbouring countries, correspondingly South Africa
and Indonesia. The Kosovo case is totally different. The UN mission was
installed in a sovereign state, the Union Republic of Yugoslavia (URY).
Yugoslavia exists no longer, but it its place at the United Nations
automatically became Serbia’s. In other words the goal of the international
presence was not putting an end to occupation but rendering assistance to the
normalisation of the situation in the province, which according to Resolution
1244 dated June 10, 1999 of the UN Security Council was recognized as a part of
the URY. Therefore, the UN mandate does not give anyone the right to change
Kosovo’s international legal status.

As soon as the West acknowledges Kosovo’s independence
proclaimed by the Albanian separatists, the problem would automatically move
onto a principally new plane. The destiny of all the self-proclaimed states in
the contemporary world will be an issue on the international agenda. Should the United States and the EU decide to unilaterally
acknowledge Pristina, they would deprive themselves of the right to have a say
in the settlement of the conflicts in the Transdniester Republic, Abkhazia and
South Ossetia as unbiased middlemen. That would give Russia the aces
unbeatable by either Xavier Solana, or Condoleezza Rice, or Gordon Brown who
are so fond of delivering lectures on objectivity and legality to Russia

It is clear that the Albanian leaders in Kosovo think
nothing of such complicated geopolitical scenarios. They are in a rush to
legalise the black criminal “hole” in the middle of the Balkans, laundering
their profits from drug trafficking, prostitution and trade in “live
commodity”, gaining as well a direct access to the IMF and World Bank funds.
But it appears that the West has so far failed to calculate the strategic
aftermath of its present-day alliance with persons like Seidiu and Ceku. The
United States, NATO and EU are gradually stepping into a trap, the keys to
which will be Russia’s. It was not Moscow that launched the mechanism of
reviewing the principles of the present-day world order. But it can and should
speak its mind in the new situation. Not only Serbs are awaiting it. Other
nations that are tired of the impunity and hypocrisy of the Western Pharisees
are also in that number.

If for the sake of its Albanian wards the West is ready to
endanger all the world order, why should Moscow not summon courage to protect
the nations that do not think they can do without Russia? While Veton Surroi
and his same-minded Albanian associates instead of negotiating are openly
sneering at the international middlemen, composing the anthem and sewing the
flag of the independent Kosovo, it is time for the Russian diplomacy to come up
with its response, the acknowledgement of independence of key Russia’s allies
in the post-Soviet space.

http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=910

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