Kosovo rises on international agenda
By Howard LaFranchi
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Published October 15, 2006
With unsettling nuclear developments in North Korea, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and political upheaval in the Middle East, little attention is being paid to the Balkans, which might seem like a preoccupation of the post-Cold War 1990s.
But Kosovo -- a Serbian province of 2 million people that experienced a NATO bombing campaign in 1999 -- is on the brink of bursting onto the world stage once again. With the United States and the European Union pressing for resolution of Kosovo's final status this year, it once looked like independence was assured. But now Serbia is trying to put that decision off, which could reawaken Balkan unrest.
After seven years of United Nations control, the majority Albanian and Muslim population is clamoring for independence. But the Serbian, largely Christian, minority is campaigning to remain attached to Serbia. The Serbian Kosovars claim that independence would mean creation of an Islamic fundamentalist state in Europe and expose them to ethnic violence.
Beyond those issues, other factors seem primed to raise Kosovo's status on the international agenda. The United States would like to free up the 1,700 peacekeeping troops it still has in the province. Economic investment in a region that is an important trade and energy route is being held up by uncertainty over Kosovo's status.
Closely watched region
And while some specialists warn that failure to resolve Kosovo's status could turn it into a powder keg again, others caution against hasty action. They say Kosovo is being closely watched by other restless regions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia -- including Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova -- and could be used to fire up breakaway movements.
"It may seem hard to imagine that there was a day not so long ago when the Balkans were the biggest foreign policy issue on the U.S. plate, but the simple issue is still there," said Daniel Serwer, a Balkans specialist at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington. "Part of the population wants to pull away and be independent, and another part wants things to stay the same. It's the repercussions that make things complex."
U.S. officials have been saying since January that this will be the year of decision on Kosovo's final status. "The people of Kosovo deserve greater clarity, and as we approach the end of the year, I suspect they will get greater clarity," said Daniel Fried, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, on a stop last month in Pristina, Kosovo's capital.
The U.N. special envoy to Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, is supposed to deliver a status settlement recommendation next month. Anticipating that the report will favor independence, Serbia is seeking to head it off by proposing a new constitution that specifies Kosovo is part of Serbia.
U.S. and European Union officials say Serbia's actions are unlikely to derail the push to determine Kosovo's status -- though they say the tactics (possibly including a referendum on the new constitution and elections) could delay a decision, which ultimately is to be made by the U.N. Security Council, until next year.
U.S. groups active
While these maneuvers are going on, in Washington supporters and opponents of Kosovo's independence are redoubling their efforts to win adherents. Anti-independence groups backed by Serbia have been running newspaper ads and sponsoring seminars in Washington to warn of a radical Islamist state and renewed ethnic cleansing if Kosovo is allowed to break from Serbia.
"Granting independence to Kosovo would be a reward for the crimes the Albanians have committed, and would create a base for criminality and jihad in the very heart of Europe," said Artemije Radosavljevic, a Serbian Orthodox bishop in Kosovo.
Bishop Artemije, who has made several trips to Washington to plead the case of the Serbian population, claims that more than 3,000 Kosovo Serbs have been killed or kidnapped in the years of international administration. He adds that 150 churches and monasteries have been razed and thousands of Serbian houses destroyed. He says he has found sympathetic ears in the U.S. Congress, but little movement from a pro-independence stance in the State Department.
Mr. Serwer, who is also vice president of USIP's Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, said that while there have been some cases of violence against Serbs, the numbers have been "grossly trumped up" by the anti-independence lobby to create a more alarming picture.
Mr. Serwer reserves his ire for the references these groups make to Islamic terrorism "in an attempt to tap into American fears," he said.
"These claims, that go so far as to equate an independent Kosovo to an al Qaeda refuge, are so outrageous and blatantly anti-Muslim that they are despicable," Mr. Serwer said.
Pro-West orientation
Holding a similar assessment is Janusz Bugajski, director of the New European Democracies Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and an independence advocate. "The population of Kosovo is one of the more pro-Western and pro-American populations in the world," he said. "They had volunteers to fight [alongside the United States] in Afghanistan and Iraq, so to say they are [Islamic] fundamentalists is to spread disinformation."
Beyond that, Mr. Bugajski cites reasons to settle Kosovo's status now. He worries the population could start to see the peacekeepers as occupiers, and he says uncertainty over the province's status is discouraging foreign investment. "I also believe that Serbia doesn't need the distraction of Kosovo as it modernizes and moves toward membership in the European Union," he said.
Indeed, some European officials say the international community must be careful not to play the Kosovo issue in a way that reinforces reactionary forces in the anticipated elections.
Such potential political implications have other specialists cautioning about Kosovo's influence. "This goes beyond Kosovo and affects a number of countries in the greater Black Sea area that are fractured," said Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of the National Interest political journal in Washington. "You have to at least ask the question if a too-hasty move to independence in Kosovo encourages the disintegration of other states."
__._,_.___ CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Published October 15, 2006
With unsettling nuclear developments in North Korea, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and political upheaval in the Middle East, little attention is being paid to the Balkans, which might seem like a preoccupation of the post-Cold War 1990s.
But Kosovo -- a Serbian province of 2 million people that experienced a NATO bombing campaign in 1999 -- is on the brink of bursting onto the world stage once again. With the United States and the European Union pressing for resolution of Kosovo's final status this year, it once looked like independence was assured. But now Serbia is trying to put that decision off, which could reawaken Balkan unrest.
After seven years of United Nations control, the majority Albanian and Muslim population is clamoring for independence. But the Serbian, largely Christian, minority is campaigning to remain attached to Serbia. The Serbian Kosovars claim that independence would mean creation of an Islamic fundamentalist state in Europe and expose them to ethnic violence.
Beyond those issues, other factors seem primed to raise Kosovo's status on the international agenda. The United States would like to free up the 1,700 peacekeeping troops it still has in the province. Economic investment in a region that is an important trade and energy route is being held up by uncertainty over Kosovo's status.
Closely watched region
And while some specialists warn that failure to resolve Kosovo's status could turn it into a powder keg again, others caution against hasty action. They say Kosovo is being closely watched by other restless regions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia -- including Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova -- and could be used to fire up breakaway movements.
"It may seem hard to imagine that there was a day not so long ago when the Balkans were the biggest foreign policy issue on the U.S. plate, but the simple issue is still there," said Daniel Serwer, a Balkans specialist at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington. "Part of the population wants to pull away and be independent, and another part wants things to stay the same. It's the repercussions that make things complex."
U.S. officials have been saying since January that this will be the year of decision on Kosovo's final status. "The people of Kosovo deserve greater clarity, and as we approach the end of the year, I suspect they will get greater clarity," said Daniel Fried, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, on a stop last month in Pristina, Kosovo's capital.
The U.N. special envoy to Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, is supposed to deliver a status settlement recommendation next month. Anticipating that the report will favor independence, Serbia is seeking to head it off by proposing a new constitution that specifies Kosovo is part of Serbia.
U.S. and European Union officials say Serbia's actions are unlikely to derail the push to determine Kosovo's status -- though they say the tactics (possibly including a referendum on the new constitution and elections) could delay a decision, which ultimately is to be made by the U.N. Security Council, until next year.
U.S. groups active
While these maneuvers are going on, in Washington supporters and opponents of Kosovo's independence are redoubling their efforts to win adherents. Anti-independence groups backed by Serbia have been running newspaper ads and sponsoring seminars in Washington to warn of a radical Islamist state and renewed ethnic cleansing if Kosovo is allowed to break from Serbia.
"Granting independence to Kosovo would be a reward for the crimes the Albanians have committed, and would create a base for criminality and jihad in the very heart of Europe," said Artemije Radosavljevic, a Serbian Orthodox bishop in Kosovo.
Bishop Artemije, who has made several trips to Washington to plead the case of the Serbian population, claims that more than 3,000 Kosovo Serbs have been killed or kidnapped in the years of international administration. He adds that 150 churches and monasteries have been razed and thousands of Serbian houses destroyed. He says he has found sympathetic ears in the U.S. Congress, but little movement from a pro-independence stance in the State Department.
Mr. Serwer, who is also vice president of USIP's Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, said that while there have been some cases of violence against Serbs, the numbers have been "grossly trumped up" by the anti-independence lobby to create a more alarming picture.
Mr. Serwer reserves his ire for the references these groups make to Islamic terrorism "in an attempt to tap into American fears," he said.
"These claims, that go so far as to equate an independent Kosovo to an al Qaeda refuge, are so outrageous and blatantly anti-Muslim that they are despicable," Mr. Serwer said.
Pro-West orientation
Holding a similar assessment is Janusz Bugajski, director of the New European Democracies Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and an independence advocate. "The population of Kosovo is one of the more pro-Western and pro-American populations in the world," he said. "They had volunteers to fight [alongside the United States] in Afghanistan and Iraq, so to say they are [Islamic] fundamentalists is to spread disinformation."
Beyond that, Mr. Bugajski cites reasons to settle Kosovo's status now. He worries the population could start to see the peacekeepers as occupiers, and he says uncertainty over the province's status is discouraging foreign investment. "I also believe that Serbia doesn't need the distraction of Kosovo as it modernizes and moves toward membership in the European Union," he said.
Indeed, some European officials say the international community must be careful not to play the Kosovo issue in a way that reinforces reactionary forces in the anticipated elections.
Such potential political implications have other specialists cautioning about Kosovo's influence. "This goes beyond Kosovo and affects a number of countries in the greater Black Sea area that are fractured," said Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of the National Interest political journal in Washington. "You have to at least ask the question if a too-hasty move to independence in Kosovo encourages the disintegration of other states."
Comments
October 13, 2006 09:41 AM
Fascinating. With all due respect, how does one win the Nobel Peace Prize by being the first to leave the negotiating table? I am not aware of a single success having come out of the Pristina-Belgrade talks in Vienna. If Ahtisaari had found a way to help these two parties find some common ground before throwing up his hands, THEN I would say, "That guy deserves a Nobel." (BTW, I am an American living in Pristina, been here for five years. I came to Kosovo/a as a bridge-builder, and I'll leave the same -- though I must say, it's killing me. BTW2: My country is not SCG. If you were to add 'Kosovo' to the pop-up list on your registration page, you'd make a lot of people happy down here -- the *compromise* being that Kosovar Albanians spell it with an 'a'.)
October 13, 2006 10:41 AM
Who is Agim Ceku? It's great to see that Margaret Beckett greeted him with such respesct.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/total_coverage/kosovo/ceku.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/00,,1920947,00.html
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/polbet0306.htm
http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/july00/hed292.shtml
How can anyone be the Prime Minister of a PART of a country? The only comparison I can make is say, being Prime Minster of Scotland, Wales or Ireland!
Kosovo and Metohija are a part of Serbia and no amount of ethnic cleansing by the Albanians of all other minorities is going to chage that fact. NATO occupation will not change that fact either. It will end for them just like Iraq.
NATO is desperate enough to get out and leave the region in a worse mess than when they went in. If they don't deliver on their promises the Albanians will have their guts for garters. Not a nice prospect. The soldiers on the ground have seen what the Albanians are capable of.
October 13, 2006 11:09 AM
I think it would be wrong to see Russia as utterly opposed to Kosovan independence. In fact the only reason I can see for them opposing it is that they want to maintain close relations with Serbia. It would certainly be wrong to see them as opposed because it might encourage secessasionary struggles in the former Soviet Union. Russia WANTS secessationary struggles.
Not on its own territory obviously, but many years of appalling brutality and bloodshed have seen that Russia's territorial integrity is intact. If Kosovo gets its independence however, then Russia will feel free to call for independence in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Trandniestria, Eastern Ukraine etc etc. In fact Kosovan independence would almost definitely strengthen Russia's hand in its backyard.
October 13, 2006 11:47 AM
If full independence can be granted to Kosovo - from which a large proportion of the Serbain minority has fled due to intimidation - where would that leave the future status of Republika Srbska? Why should the Bosnian Serbs be expected to accept a Bosnian Muslim-dominated government in Sarajevo while the Albanians in Kosovo are granted independence from the Serb-dominated government in Belgrade?
October 13, 2006 12:00 PM
The "bad news" from Kosovo is that 240,000 people remain ethnically cleansed from their homes. Meaningless "independences" that get handed back the next day to Brussels and other EU elite unaccountable structures are not worth a single death.
October 13, 2006 12:31 PM
Ah yes ... Kosovo. The part of Serbia which NATO (without the UN resolution which "progressives" seem to think is mandatory nowadays) fought so hard to remove from Serbia and hand to a bunch of terrorists (the KLA) - and without so much as a squeak of protest from the BBC (but that was the nice Mr Clinton - wasn't it. Not the nasty Mr Bush).
From a part of the world where all the artificially created (by Tito) internal boundaries of Yugoslavia are considered sacrosanct and unchangeable ... except Serbia's.
This being a place which NATO went into to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe", which ... erm ... only kicked off *after* the bombing started - to Clare Short's apparent surprise (she not having made any preparations for the unforseen fact that civilian populations tend to run away from places that are being bombed - and where NATO has fulfilled its promise of preserving a "multi-ethnic Kosovo" by presiding over a colony which has seen the systematic ethnic cleansing of a large proportion of its ethnic Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Macedonians and even non-Albanian Muslims (most of whom had to take refuge in nasty racist Serbia).
A place chock-full of as yet undiscovered "mass graves" and "rape camps" alleged to have been created by people who had the cheek to believe that they had the right to put down a terrorist uprising within their own country.
As somebody else has pointed out - why should Serbia be liable to be carved up according to demography, but not Bosnia? It is no wonder that the Serbs believe that double-standards are being applied here.
And the result of all this wonderful western intervention? The re-Balkanisation of the Balkans, a Bosnia which has even less independence now (and for the foreseeable future) than it had when it was part of Yugoslavia (and which even had to suffer having Paddy Pantsdown as its Grand Poobah for a while), and a Balkans where the only remaining multi-ethnic society is ... erm ... nasty racist Serbia.
Way to go.
October 13, 2006 12:50 PM
"Warrant for the arrest of Agim Ceku has been withdrawn because of his new prime ministerial status," quotes an Interpol release issued on March 24.
http://www.ccmr-bg.org/vesti/frommedia/media0180.htm
So much for 'the end of impunity'. NATO and their thuggish allies are still immune from prosectuion for the crimes they committed in Kosovo.
October 13, 2006 12:56 PM
Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, managing director of the Grameen Bank, was awarded the Nobel for his efforts toward eradicating world poverty. [MSNBC] Mr. Ahtasaari is a shoe-in for 2007. I'm assuming, of course, that he'll find a way to get a picture of Agim and Vojislav shaking hands -- with smiles on their faces.
October 13, 2006 02:05 PM
Agim Ceku was one of the greatest generals in Croatian army. He has won nine major awards for achievment during the Croatian-Serbian war.
What people don't know is that he never fought in Kosova/o. He was only appointed the head of KPC (Kosovo Protection Corps) only few weeks before the end the war in 1999.
As a person he is very nice, honest and friendly. He is a former Army University tutor in Belgrade-Serbia.
October 13, 2006 02:39 PM
Aim Ceku was only great because he killed and cleansed Serbs as did Godovina. And if they were great then Milosevic was great too. He could have been appointed the head of KPC but that does not do him justice for heading the KLA so I am sorry, but your statement does not clear his name. Second, your other statement that he is very nice, honest and friendly, is impossible, because as we have seen he is a successful politician and no politician gets there by being nice, honest and friendly. Look at George Bush!! Politicians are greedy, driven, full of B.S. and can lie to your face. Those are the facts don’t try to make it seem like he is innocent and a nice guy because we all know its untrue, otherwise Kosovo would be a stable region within Serbia if this all was true but in fact even without Serb "ethnic cleansing" and "aggression" it is the most violent and unstable region in the Balkans. Thank you very much.
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