prishtinainsight.com

A tale of two countries: Kosovo and Ukraine

8-10 minutes

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A stark comparison between the social, political and economic development of Ukraine and Kosovo brings to light the EU's asymmetric policies on visa liberalization.

"It is time to vote for the ratification of the agreement. That would release the visa liberalization for the Kosovo people," said the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini in March 2018. Three weeks later, the Kosovo Assembly ratified the agreement Mogherini urged for, but to this day, Kosovars continue to be deprived from moving visa-free in the EU Schengen zone.

The visa liberalization process has been a long one. The process began in early 2012 when the European Commission handed over the visa roadmap to Kosovo officials. Since then, there has been four-yearly reports on Kosovo's progress until the roadmap was completed in 2016 when the European Parliament Committee, Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, LIBE, recommended visa liberalization for Kosovo.

However, the LIBE committee voted against the initiation of negotiations until Kosovo completed two remaining criteria: ratification of the border demarcation agreement with Montenegro and strengthening track record in the fight against organized crime and corruption.

March 21 will mark one year since Kosovo ratified its border demarcation deal with Montenegro, which was achieved despite political controversy and the lack of public support for the agreement. However, the visa restriction remains intact.

In 2016, the EU recommended visa liberalization for both Ukraine and Georgia, countries that do not have full control of their borders and suffer from a fragile rule of law. Despite this, Ukrainians and Georgians are now enjoying the benefits of free movement in the Schengen zone.

After Kosovo ratified the border agreement with Montenegro, the European Commission gave the green light for a second vote on July 18, 2018. In August, the LIBE committee voted in favor of visa liberalization for Kosovo and in September the European Parliament agreed to open talks on the abolition of the visa regime.

However, the seven-year marathonic process has yet to be concluded. The Council of European Union, made up of EU member states' interior ministers, must adopt the change by a qualified majority, a common voting system in the Council.

If we compare the case of Kosovo with that of Ukraine, there is clear evidence that the visa liberalization process is an example of how the EU employs asymmetric policies. To reflect this claim, Ukraine ranks lower than Kosovo in most, if not all international 'indexes,' ranking systems that use expert opinions, reports and surveys to draw conclusions on states' progress in the areas of social, political and economic development.

Illustration for Prishtina Insight: Jeta Dobranja/Trembelat.

The Transparency International Corruption Perception Index ranks Kosovo as 85th and Ukraine as 130th in their 180-country ranking of perceived public sector corruption. Furthermore, the World Press Freedom Index ranks Kosovo 78th, with Ukraine coming in at 101st in their assessment of the countries' media freedom.

Also, the World Bank's Doing Business' report ranks Kosovo significantly higher than Ukraine. Kosovo ranks 44th whereas Ukraine is 71st out of 190 countries in their estimation of countries' progress in access to the labor market.

In terms of GDP per capita, according to the International Monetary Fund, IMF, Kosovo ranks 98th, with 4.5 thousand dollars per capita, and Ukraine 114th, with 3.13, a useful benchmark to compare Ukraine's population of 45 million people and Kosovo's less than two million.

What distinguishes the case of Kosovo from that of Ukraine and Georgia is the presence of the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, EULEX, which operated with executive powers from 2008 to 2018. These powers gave EULEX the right to investigate, prosecute and judge cases independently from the Kosovo authorities, and its employees and decision makers were not accountable to the Kosovo government or its people.

EULEX deployed a combination of civilian and police personnel with the purpose of introducing a rule of law culture, improving negotiations with Serbia and strengthening local institutions. This made Kosovo the largest per capita recipient of EU financial aid in the world, and home to the largest bloc of civilian crisis management personnel.

In 2012, the European Court of Auditors reported that EULEX has not been sufficiently effective in its mission. According to the report, EU member states seconded an insufficient and unqualified staff to EULEX. The Mission was shaken twice: its first scandal broke out in 2014 when the EULEX prosecutor Mariah Bamieh accused one of the judges of taking bribes. Three years later, Malcolm Simmons, the chief judge of EULEX, resigned and unleashed a string of accusations against the organization. In response, EULEX then revealed that Simmons himself was the subject of several investigations into alleged serious wrongdoing.

Long story short, the most expensive mission of the EU has failed to deliver. Ironically, the mission in charge of fighting corruption experienced its own internal corruption scandals. Huge investments, minor progress and corruption damaged the EU's reputation in Kosovo.  

Today, corruption and organized crime remains high in Kosovo. In fact, according to the yearly European Commission report on the EU's enlargement policy, since 2008, there has been an increase in corruption in Kosovo.

The Kosovo judiciary continues to suffer from inefficiency, lack of transparency and political interference, and EULEX's biggest failure is its negligence and incompetence concerning Kosovo's most serious crimes. EULEX is not the one to be blamed for corruption in Kosovo, however, it failed to achieve the primary objectives of its mission, fighting corruption and strengthening the rule of law.

Kosovo has fulfilled all required conditions, including the two outstanding requirements; ratification of the border demarcation agreement with Montenegro and strengthening track record in the fight against organized crime and corruption. It stands better than Ukraine on its perceived corruption levels, press freedom, GDP per capita, and doing business.

Despite this, many countries, even those that are so-called friends of Kosovo, are skeptical of supporting visa liberalization. Some hold the belief that it would produce a wave of Kosovo migrants into the EU.

The fear that Kosovars might 'invade' Europe illegally and produce instability doesn't stand, at least considering the above-mentioned statistics. Even in the worst-case scenario, if all Kosovars migrate to the EU, that is still only four percent of the total population of Ukraine.

Kosovo has many socio-political problems, corrupt politicians, a fragile rule of law and an unstable economy. However, it stands better than Ukraine on almost all fronts according to international data. Kosovars have made many compromises through the years, such as the approval of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in the Hague and the adoption of the border demarcation agreement with Montenegro, things that were extremely hard to pass at the Assembly due to their unpopularity among the Kosovo people.

Visa liberalization is not European integration, although Kosovo politicians try to sell it as such. Visa liberalization is simply free movement and the advantages that come with it. The people of Kosovo are being punished and treated differently than other countries and this must change.

The EU is directly responsible for the lack of progress on the fight against corruption and organized crime in Kosovo because they have invested large sums of money into the areas highlighted as criteria for a visa-free regime, but without the results. Saying that Kosovo needs to fight corruption more in order to enjoy the freedom of movement in the EU is hypocritical, and only works to highlight their own shortcomings.

The opinions expressed in the opinion section are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.

Visar Xhambazi is a research fellow at Prishtina Institute for Political Studies (PIPS). He holds a Master's degree in International Studies from Old Dominion University in Virginia, specializing in US foreign policy and international relations.

Feature illustration for Prishtina Insight: Jete Dobranja/Trembelat.

 

78 Days of Bombing Yugoslavia - (DOCUMENTARY)

 

 

 

https://youtu.be/_ddjyv80kgQ

Hellbent: 78 Days of Bombing Yugoslavia - (DOCUMENTARY)

 

Two decades ago, NATO started its 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. RT America's Alex Mihailovich revisits the Balkans to recall how the intervention happened and see the harm the people in the Balkans still suffer from.

 

The 1999 NATO operation was the culmination of Yugoslavia's decade of bloody dissolution, which split the entire region along ethnic and religious lines. Mihailovich was there when the cruise missiles started hitting Novi Sad and other major cities. Touted as a surgical humanitarian intervention to stop the violence in Kosovo, in reality, Operation Allied Force killed more civilians than troops and devastated civilian infrastructure of the nation.

It had plenty of unintended consequences too, from hitting a civilian train, a marketplace and the Chinese Embassy, to polluting the land with depleted uranium. The toxic substance is used for armor-piercing munitions and is believed to be the cause of a spike of cancer cases today.

 

The political legacy is arguably as toxic as the medical. Kosovo, the area split with the help of NATO battering, remains unrecognized by plenty of nations and turned out to be a bountiful recruiting ground for jihadist groups like Islamic State. And ethnic divisions in the Balkans don't seem any less severe.

Watch RT documentary 'Hellbent: 78 Days of Bombing Yugoslavia' to learn more.

 

Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia

balkanist.net

Memories of a Bombardment: Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia - Balkanist

 

CONTINUED:  http://balkanist.net/memories-of-a-bombardment-20th-annivesary-of-the-nato-bombardment/

spiked-online.com

The tragedy of Kosovo

Philip Hammond

12-15 minutes

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Twenty years ago this week, NATO launched its first major military campaign. The US, Britain and other NATO powers pounded Serbia for 78 days. This was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender.

The Kosovo War was the final chapter in the break-up of what was then Yugoslavia. The province's ethnic-Albanian majority faced rising repression throughout the 1990s, while most of Yugoslavia's constituent republics broke away — through protracted bloody conflicts in the cases of Croatia and Bosnia. Although the official policy of Kosovo-Albanian leaders was non-violence, the growing influence of the armed separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) led to increasing attacks on the central state authorities and on Kosovo's Serbian minority.

As they had done in Croatia and Bosnia, Western governments threw fuel on the flames by supporting the separatists, while portraying themselves as peacemakers. NATO leaders were fully aware that, as the UK's then defence secretary George Robertson admitted on the day the bombing began, until early 1999 'the KLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been'. As NATO also knew, the KLA strategy was to escalate conflict, precisely in order to precipitate Western action. One Kosovo-Albanian leader told the BBC afterwards: 'The more civilians were killed, the chances of international intervention became bigger, and the KLA of course realised that.'

So it was that the world's most powerful military alliance could present its assault on a small European country as a 'humanitarian' operation. Initially, the idea was that bombing would prevent a refugee crisis. As then prime minister Tony Blair put it at the time: 'Fail to act now, and [we]… would have to deal with the consequences of spiralling conflict and hundreds of thousands of refugees.' Predictably, the effect was the opposite: the bombing itself led to exactly these consequences as conflict within Kosovo intensified.

NATO's response was to ratchet up the propaganda, denouncing the Serbs as 'Nazis' committing 'genocide' in Kosovo. NATO leaders were helped by sycophantic media coverage, since most journalists were already fully on-board with the idea that the West was a force for 'good' against 'evil' in the post-Cold War world. It is a story we have heard many times since: NATO's Kosovo campaign was held up as a supposedly successful model by those arguing for military action against Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2018.

But this idea is well past its sell-by date. The argument for 'humanitarian military intervention' is always that the ends justify the means: that the risk of death and destruction in the short term will be vindicated by the ultimate goal. At the end of the Kosovo conflict, Blair pledged that the international community would 'build a Kosovo which, in the end, will be a symbol of how the Balkans should be'. Twenty years on, they have had ample time to make good on that promise.

How the Balkans should be?

The distance between rhetoric and reality gapes widest in relation to the claim that, as Kosovo's EU-approved constitution proclaims repeatedly, it is 'a multi-ethnic society'. This, after all, is supposedly what the war was all about: Blair claimed at the time that 'it was fought for [the] fundamental principle… that every human being, regardless of race, religion or birth, has the inalienable right to live free from persecution'.

As he spoke, tens of thousands of Kosovo Serbs were fleeing the pogroms that immediately followed the war. Many thousands more have left in the years since, because NATO intervention did not resolve the underlying conflict. Serbia still claims jurisdiction over the province, but constant low-level violence, intimidation and harassment continue to make normal life impossible for Kosovo's Serbs and other minorities. Eruptions of serious violence occurred in 2004, 2008, 2009 and 2011.

Post-war Kosovo is not a peaceful place, and – despite being the only place in the world where you can meet someone named Tonibler walking down Bill Clinton Boulevard – in recent years it has exported more militant jihadis per capita than anywhere else in Europe. According to a 2017 report by the UN Development Programme, over 300 young men from Kosovo went to join Islamic State in Syria, some climbing 'to the top of the ISIS hierarchy', while others have 'carried out attacks on Western Europe and in the USA'.

Some commentators have blamed the influence of the Saudi-funded Islamic charities who set up in Kosovo after the war, possibly unaware that the KLA used to be an importer of jihadis. As the British author Mark Curtis has pointed out, Western intelligence agencies knew about the KLA's active collaboration with al-Qaeda before the war. The response of NATO governments at the time was to supply arms and training.

Many analysts point to stalled economic development as a key 'push factor' driving a rise in extremism, and indeed Kosovo has the lowest per-capita GDP in the region. Unemployment is at over 30 per cent (around four times the European average and worse than Greece at the height of its recent economic crisis), rising to over 55 per cent for youth unemployment. Yet many more people have left Kosovo in search of jobs than have travelled abroad in pursuit of martyrdom. Rather than straightforward economic immiseration, probably the more significant factor is a wider sense of disenchantment with the reality of 'independent' Kosovo.

The 'failed state' built by the West

Kosovo today is the product of years of intensive international intervention. It was ruled directly by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) from the end of the war in June 1999. In 2008, Kosovo declared itself an independent state – but this was 'supervised independence' under the auspices of the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX). Even since formal supervision officially ended in 2012, extensive international oversight has continued: a recent study noted that the US and EU are 'vigorously and persistently intervening in [Kosovo's] internal affairs'. There are still around 4,000 NATO troops and over 500 EULEX staff in Kosovo, plus the office of the European Union, the 500-strong Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe mission, and the United Nations Kosovo Team comprising 19 agencies and hundreds of staff.

Kosovo, in other words, is a showcase for Western state-building efforts – it has received more aid per capita than anywhere else – just as the 1999 NATO intervention was itself a showcase for what Blair called the 'doctrine of international community'. Yet the outcome, according to international relations academic Aidan Hehir, was that 'the West built a failed state in Kosovo'. Or as another scholar, Arolda Elbasani, puts it: 'Even when endowed with massive resources and unlimited powers, the international community has not been able to deliver on its own set of goals: a multi-ethnic, functional and democratic state.'

Instead, it has delivered a virtually mono-ethnic, dysfunctional state where minorities have either fled or live in precarious enclaves, and where voters have become disillusioned by the corruption and criminality at the highest levels of the ruling institutions.

A 2005 UN report highlighted 'organised crime and corruption' as the 'biggest threats to the stability of Kosovo', noting that 'the government has not taken the necessary… action to fight organised crime and to prevent corruption'. Yet this was during the period of direct UNMIK rule, so if anyone was going to take action it would presumably have been the UN itself. Matters did not improve under the supervision of the EU. A 2010 Council of Europe report on 'Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo' documented 'shady, and in some cases open, connections between organised crime and politics, including representatives of the authorities'. Its findings were confirmed by another investigation in 2014.

'State capture' and Western evasion

Many of these problems are personified by former KLA leader Hashim Thaçi. Immediately after the war, the KLA became the 'Kosovo Protection Corps': Thaçi commanded it, as well as heading the provisional government. He led Kosovo to self-declared independence as prime minister in 2008, and since 2016 he has been Kosovo's president. Once fêted in the West as 'the George Washington of Kosovo', Thaçi was identified in the 2010 Council of Europe investigation as the boss of the 'Drenica Group' – former KLA leaders turned 'criminal entrepreneurs' who have engaged in murder, kidnap and unlawful imprisonment, who exert 'violent control over the trade in heroin', and who have 'designs on a form of "state capture"'.

Even sympathetic analysts have acknowledged the problem of 'state capture' in Kosovo, whereby 'state resources and institutions are used for private ends', involving 'pervasive' networks of corruption and patronage that hold back development. Understandably, many are frustrated with the lack of progress. Yet ultimate blame for Kosovo's problems lies with the West.

The mayor of Priština, Shpend Ahmeti, is surely right when he argues that the local problem of 'state capture' is the outcome of the EU's preference for 'stability over democracy'. As Hehir also suggests, it is precisely because Kosovo has been a showcase for international state-building that the Western supervisors of Kosovo have been reluctant to confront its problems. Certainly in the period of direct rule, the priority was to maintain a façade of stability rather than risking the conflict that would result from tackling the sordid reality of Kosovo's mafia-style politics. Given the lack of improvement, it seems likely that the EU's belated 'discovery' of the KLA's extremely well-known criminal connections, and their increasing preoccupation with 'state capture' by the very people they groomed to take charge, are just further attempts to dodge responsibility.

Ironically, one consequence of this evasive approach is that the EULEX mission – set up with the express purpose of fighting corruption and upholding the rule of law – has itself become mired in corruption scandals. In 2014, EULEX prosecutor Maria Bamieh demanded a corruption inquiry against her own colleagues, but EULEX responded by sacking her. Bamieh says she had been told by the UK Foreign Office to ignore evidence of corruption. In 2017, chief EULEX judge Malcolm Simmons resigned, alleging corruption and political interference, but then became the subject of counter-accusations of criminal conduct, and revelations that he had never been qualified to act as an international judge in the first place.

Whatever the truth of these various allegations, it seems clear that, as one former EULEX employee reportedly said of the mission, 'there's little demand for accountability, because there is ultimately more concern for job protection'. Others have also identified the relationship between international organisations with 'expansive powers' but no 'line of authority or accountability', and the wider 'sense of general malaise and malfunctioning' in Kosovo society. In Elbasani's damning description: 'International staff travelled around Kosovo in luxury cars, frequented upmarket cafés that catered specifically to them and lived exclusive lifestyles [which] set them a world apart from the impoverished and dysfunctional polity they helped to create.'

The people attacked by NATO in 1999 certainly won't be celebrating this month, but it seems equally unlikely that the anniversary will generate much enthusiasm among those whom the intervention was supposedly designed to help.

Philip Hammond is professor of media and communications at London South Bank University and is co-editor, with Edward Herman, of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis.

Picture by: Getty.