chroniclesmagazine.org

L'Affaire Assange

7-9 minutes

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By:Srdja Trifkovic | April 12, 2019

Julian Assange's arrest inside the embassy of Ecuador in London would not have been possible had that country's government not authorized the British police to enter its theoretically sovereign territory. The lesson is clear: if you plan to seek asylum in a foreign embassy, you should be careful to choose the diplomatic premises of a country (a) not likely to be pressurized into betraying you; and (b) comfortable enough to make a long sojourn tolerable.

The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations reaffirmed the long-established principle of inviolability of diplomatic premises. The host-country's police and security forces are not allowed access without a specific authorization of the chief of mission, which was granted in this case. Assange had spent almost seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy, after being welcomed there by the country's former president Rafael Correa. The hosts' political calculus has changed to his detriment over the past two years, however.

The British police arrested Assange supposedly for skipping UK bail seven years ago, but also—and far more importantly—under a previously secret U.S. indictment. The exact charge is for conspiracy, with Chelsea Manning, to hack into a "classified U.S. government computer." Assange lawyer Barry Pollock said the allegations "boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information and taking efforts to protect the identity of that source." Assange had predicted that this would happen years ago, and stated it as his reason for seeking asylum in the first place.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D, W.V.) gloated "He is our property!" when told of Assange's arrest, and he accurately reflected the sentiment shared by the entire Beltway swamp, Democrats in particular:

Assange committed the unpardonable sins of embarrassing the establishment—from members of Congress to intelligence officials to the media. And he will now be punished for our sins. Despite having significant constitutional arguments to be made, it is likely that he will be stripped of those defenses and even barred from raising the overall context of his actions in federal court. What could be the most important free speech and free press case in our history could well be reduced to the scope and substance of an unauthorized computer access case.

Before becoming a fugitive Assange had unveiled a massive, likely unconstitutional NSA surveillance program potentially affecting all Americans. He later published emails that showed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign lied in various statements to the public, including the rigging of the primary for her nomination. As USA Today columnist Jonathan Turley says, "No one has argued that any of these emails were false. They were embarrassing. Of course, there is not crime of embarrassing the establishment but that is merely a technicality." The American media machine nevertheless views the WikiLeaks founder primarily through the lens of the 2016 election, after which he was denounced as a Russian cutout who threw that election for Trump. That is not true, but it is certain to slant much of the U.S. mainstream media coverage to Assange's disadvantage.

The problem Assange ultimately faced was related to Ecuadorian domestic politics and the country's external vulnerabilities. Its current president Lenin [sic!] Moreno, elected in 2017, is a Leftist who has made peace with the Empire, a la Greece's disgusting bo-bo PM Alexis Tsipras. One of the fruits of Moreno's volte-face has been a massive World Bank loan, which would not have been granted without Washington's political blessing. Moreno's decision was not legal under Ecuadorian and international law: Assange is a political refugee and the country's government cannot rescind asylum once it is granted. In addition he was given Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017, which theoretically should have given him an additional layer of protection. Evidently Assange should not have sought refuge in the embassy of country susceptible to American pressure.

In this context it is useful to recall the destinies of two Hungarian notables after the collapse of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising. Cardinal József Mindszenty, the Roman Catholic primate of Hungary, spent 15 years in the U.S. embassy in Budapest (1956-1971). He was eventually allowed to leave, after Pope Paul VI offered a compromise declaring Mindszenty a "victim of history"—instead of communism—and annulling the excommunication imposed on his political opponents. For the rest of his life he resided in Vienna, because he took grave offense at the Vatican's suggestion that he should give up the primacy of the Catholic Church in Hungary in exchange for uncensored publication of his memoirs . . . but all that is a minor footnote now.

As hundreds of Soviet tanks rolled from the east in the first week of November 1956 and the uprising collapsed, Hungary's reformist Prime Minister Imre Nagy and some of his associates made the fatal mistake of seeking sanctuary in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest. The ensuing impasse in Soviet–Yugoslav relations was ended when Nagy was forced to leave the premises, after the new government of Janos Kadar and its Soviet masters gave Tito the guarantees of safe conduct for the fugitives. They were duly arrested (as Tito knew they would be), removed to jail in Romania, and finally deported to Hungary for trial in 1957. Nagy was shot on June 17, 1958, and buried, face down, in an unmarked grave. It was only after the fall of Communism that Nagy's grave was located and he was given a proper burial attended by 100,000 people.

Assange will not be executed, but his fate will be unpleasant. A hint of what awaits him came when he was taken to Westminster Magistrates' Court and found guilty of breaching bail only hours after his arrest. He denied the offense, with his lawyers arguing that he had a reasonable excuse and he could not expect a fair trial in Britain as its purpose was to "secure his delivery" to the United States. District Judge Michael Snow described the defense as laughable, adding: "Mr Assange's behaviour is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests. He hasn't come close to establishing reasonable excuse." He remanded Assange in custody ahead of a future sentencing hearing at Southwark Crown Court. 

Assange will not be executed but his fate will be unpleasant in the extreme. It is an even bet that Britain will extradite him to the U.S. In an unpleasant federal facility he will have many years, decades even (he is 47), to ponder the mistake of not seeking protection of a real country. He will be treated brutally, pour encourager les autres.

Julian Assange is not a particularly likeable man. Some of his actions may have been legally shady and morally ambivalent. In the end he deserves our sympathy because he will be pilloried by the sworn enemies of decency and civilized life.

[Image via Snapperjack from London, UK. [CC BY-SA 2.0]]

 

counterpunch.org

The Tragedy and Fallacy of NATO’s Balkan Experiment: 20 Years On

by

11-14 minutes

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Photograph Source Darko Dozet – CC BY-SA 3.0

March 24,1999 was an ordinary school day in Belgrademid-week (Wednesday). Suddenly, half of my high-school class quietly left for home early, citing relatives calling in from overseas saying that the NATO bombing campaign has startedin the South, including an authorisation to hit Belgrade. My friends and I (for whom the satellite TV was an unimaginable luxury!) reluctantly left our interrupted class, each one of usburied deeply in our thoughts as to what the conflictmight actually mean. We rememberedwellthe convoys of refugees pouring across Serbia’s westernborder during the Croatian and Bosnian wars, with many refugee children attending our school too and eventually blending in withthe locals. The state broadcaster RTS television was playing its usual program, heavily controlled by Milosevic’s cronies, with no sign of impaling events. Around 8.12pm, which was the time for widely popular Latin telenovelas, there was a loud bang in the neighbourhood and all of our apartment block’s windows shook. Is it firecrackers? A little while afterwards the air raid sirens began;thenow famous commentator fromtheindependent Studio B television channel Avram Izrael was about to start with his daily commentary about air raids. This was the first bomb that was dropped on Belgrade, a European capital during an offensive military operation, hitting very close to home. In our proximity there were several military facilities underneath Strazevica and Avala mountains, which became a daily target for NATO’s yet another failed Balkan experiment. The symbol of Belgrade and former Yugoslavia, the Avala Tower and a television transmitter, was destroyed during one of those raids, only six days after RTS headquarters were bombed killing a dozen journalists and which the Amnesty International declared a ‘war crime’.

We had no atomic bomb shelter in our building(throughout the old Yugoslavia, some of these can still be found), and one family built a home in our basement whose doors they generously opened to the children at night, including myself and my best friend who was often visiting us. Newer buildings had proper shelters from the days of the old Yugoslavia, but we could not go there as they were already full. Our neighbours were stocking petrol in the basement cages;if a bomb was to fall on our building, we would have become a giant firecracker ourselves.I remember stuffing all our major possessions (family jewellery and some money in the foreign currency) in a brown bear (a souvenir from Australia) with a large zip across its belly and holding our passports close by. Mine was different – it had a clear stamp from the Australian embassy and a 3 month tourist visa on it, unused. The embassies were shutting down along with the borders. Only the Hungarian one remained open, but NATO by then already targeted an Albanian refugee convoy citing collateral damage. One question was doing the rounds: Werewe going to end up facing one ofthose ‘mistaken missiles’, adding to a rising civilian toll of this conflict? Bridges in Novi Sad were already destroyed as people were crossing them. The Chinese Embassy in Belgrade had been hit, killing three and wounding twenty embassy staff members. The bus had to go around and around to get to the northern border, while there were soldiers hiding in the bushes near the highway as I could see through a foggy window, with my mother accompanying me to our farewell in Budapestand short-stay there organised by a relative.There is a sizeable Serbian community in Hungary (once a large ethnic group within the Austro-Hungarian empire) and a Romaniorchestra played a famous song for us at the dinner table withominouswords “Adio for now, and who knows when and where we will meet again”.

This was a fortnight after the raids began. My memory of that era is still vivid, stark and unspoiled. The feeling of weird, dangerousexcitement when listening to the anti-aircraft fire and observing the capital city covered in spring darkness as the electricity was cut. People were unsure whether the light would attract any attention from theinvisiblekilling machines which we could ominously hear above our heads; as a resulteverybody was reluctant to even put candles on. There was the lingeringsound of dogs howling on the streets. There were numerous scenes of people in the city centre protesting with music and song against the bombing while defiantly stationed on the main bridges in Belgrade, defending them from NATO bombs. Thousands of people each daygathered. It was an inspiration to live each day as it came. People were greeting bombs with humour and song.

For public servants it was compulsory to attend work, putting citizens in harm’s way. My mother’s company, the famous Sava Centar Convention Centre (it was originally built to host by Yugoslavia the first Non-Alignment Movement conferencetherein 1961)was on the NATO’starget hit list as it hosted one of three major television channels. It was a stroke of luck that it was not hitduring the NATO bombing spree in the heart of Southeast Europe.

Surreal times for surreal people, with neighbours greeting each other with real smiles for the first time in years, or even decades. Some sending their children to the countryside, only for some areas there also to be hit with even more collateral damage. What was reallyhappening in Kosovo went underreportedlocally, just like what was happening in the rest of Serbia and Montenegro internationally. For me then came a one-way ticket to Australia and a wonderful Australian family with whom I lived while attending a prestigious Anglican college in Perth. I didn’t look back but part of my heart was forever left behind. Custody was transferred to my father from Australia so that my status could be made permanent. Less than a decade later I worked, ironically, as aparliamentary servant in Canberra advising the Australian parliamentarians on NATO!

It all came back to me with a jolting reminderlast month; the 20^thanniversary since the brutal, unprovoked and extraordinary attack by 19 NATO Alliance members against a sovereign nation in Europe, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, composed of Serbia and Montenegro. As a living teenage witness of that pan-European tragedy, the 24^thMarch will be remembered as a black day for many peoples living in the heart of the Balkans and their children who now reside in the West as a result of that conflict. For 78 days they had to re-live some of the experiences of their ancestors who were carpet bombed during the Second World War first, in a case of bitter historical irony, the Nazis in Operation Retribution in 1941, then by the Allied forces which was, by many accounts, even worse and in which some of my family members lost their young lives.  The Kosovo War was a dramatic turning point for international politics, suggesting the limits, and hypocrisy, of humanitarian intervention.  Even long-standing defenders of such rights, including Vaclav Havel, felt it necessary to attack the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without explicitUNSCapproval, despite having a mere 35 percent of the population supportingit.With unjustified optimism, he argued that this had been the first war not waged “in the name of ‘national interests’.”

The NATO bombing attack on Serbian and Montenegrin territory, initiated withevangelical zeal by President Bill Clinton of the United States (who was on the mend from his Monica Lewinsky scandal) and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, brought the world close to another dangerous crisis with Western and Russian forces. A deeper conflict was probablyavertedthanks to the swift thinking by a British Lieutenant-General Sir Mike Jackson,who resisted themilitary confrontation with Moscow that was ardently advocated by his boss, NATO chief Wesley Clark with now famous words: “No, I’m not going to do that. It’s not worth starting World War III”. NATO, however, bombed hospitals, schools, children’s playgrounds, petrol stations, trains, factories, all in the name of ‘peace’ and ‘conflict prevention’. Hundreds of thousands were reallocated because of this conflict.

Carving out the Kosovo territory from a sovereign nation in Europe ran against all international law principles the world has known, causing a turning point in the West’s relations with Russia and ushering a new, politicised principle of the so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’. NATO’s military operation was, ironically, named ‘Merciful Angel’, giving precedent to regime-change scenarios from Iraq in 2003 to Libyain 2011. It also caused another mass migration in the Balkans, with hundreds of thousands of people being firstly internally displaced across the region, then over the next couple of years emigrating from the Balkans into Western Europe and further across the seas all the way to Australia and New Zealand. The intervention perpetrated the very thing it was meant to halt: mass displacement and disruption.

The Balkans is now living with the legacy of that humanitarian impulse initiated by NATO countries, oneheavily contaminated with depleted uranium from the NATO bombs, with dire consequences for human, animal and environmental health still being heavily debated. There is currently a move by Serbs to initiate a lawsuit against NATO for the contamination and damage done. The bombings destroyed much of Serbian industry as the targets were not only military: schools, hospitals, factories, petrol stations, TV stations and other civilian infrastructure suffered terribly from the NATO bombing. Serbia and its break-away Kosovo province turned semi-independent state (with international assistance) are now among the poorest areas of Europe, with massive brain-drain, youth unemployment and widening social inequality as well as reliance on foreign remittances. Yet it remains highly popular as the sought-after travel destination, famous for its nightlife and defiance through music and humour which at display daily during NATO bombing and media campaign against Serbs and rump Yugoslavia in 1999.

I went on to do extraordinary things in Australia, finishing four degrees and working as both public and parliamentary servant. All of my studies also dealt with the issue of Kosovo war in different ways, all invariably finding it debilitating to the European landscape: myHonours thesis saw the Kosovo war as the catalyst for change in German and Italian foreign policies after the Cold War; in my Master’s thesisconsidered itan obstacle to democratisation in the Balkans, and in my PhD found it to bea lingering legacy which has delayed Serbia’s EU accession prospects to this day. I provided tailored and independent advice to the Federal Parliament’s Presiding Officers, who often took me along to their meetings with international dignitaries. I took a parliamentary delegation overseas and facilitated the visits of many international visitors to the Parliament, including from NATO and a prominent lobbyist for the Kosovo war whom I found quite pleasant on a personal level. As I raisea young family in Sydney, the conflict still exists in my dreams and the feeling of displacement that they occasionally bring, along with the feeling that crimes were committed during those 78 daysby 19 members of NATO Alliance which went on to build the largest military base in Kosovo for Southeast Europe.

Dr Nina Markovic Khaze is a sessional lecturer at the Department of Security Studies and Criminology, Macquarie University, Visiting Fellow at the ANU Centre for European Studies, andpolitical commentator for SBS Radio and has been writing for different news outlets over the years.

 

Playing with Fire: Talk of Shifting Kosovo's Borders Sparks Concern

spiegel.de

Playing with Fire: Talk of Shifting Kosovo's Borders Sparks Concern - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International

SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg, Germany

10-13 minutes

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April 05, 2019  04:15 PM

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These days, his statesman's uniform fits the former rebel commander perfectly: bespoke shoes, dark suit, golden cuff links. Flanked by reverent-looking toadies, Ramush Haradinaj recently sat down for an interview in Pristina, at the seat of the Kosovo government.

If it weren't for Haradinaj and his comrades, Europe's youngest republic might not exist. In the nineties, at the fiercest phase of the ethnic Albanian revolt against the Serbian occupiers in Kosovo, he commanded part of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a paramilitary organization known by its Albanian initials UCK. Haradinaj's nom de guerre was "Smajl." Today he is the head of government in a country searching for its place in Europe.

Twenty years after the NATO bombings that, starting on March 24, 1999, forced the withdrawal of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, Kosovo remains the problem child of the Balkans. This tiny country, with barely 2 million inhabitants, 90 percent of whom are Albanian, is currently not recognized by more than 80 countries around the world, including five EU members. That insecurity is impeding the country's progress. Its citizens are the only Europeans west of Belarus who still require a visa to travel to the Schengen area. Every third employable resident is jobless.

Potentially even more alarming, discussions about the country's borders have recently cropped up -- the kind of talk that many people thought had faded into the past. Leading ethnic-Albanian politicians in Kosovo argue about whether the Serb-dominated north of the republic should be left to Belgrade as part of an exchange of territory. The presidents of Serbia and Kosovo discussed this question under the oversight of Federica Mogherini, the EU's chief diplomat, but Prime Minister Haradinaj rejects any such proposals, claiming they are dangerous nonsense. "The tragedies in the Balkans always had to do with borders," he says. "Whoever raises these questions again now invokes new tragedies."

Over 13,000 people died between February 1998 and June 1999. Haradinaj knows the horrors of the Kosovo War. The former commander has stood before the International Criminal Court in The Hague twice for crimes against humanity, including murder and rape. He was ultimately acquitted both times. "I did what was necessary," he says, looking back. Though he makes it sound like he didn't even participate. He claims that during the war, and afterward, it was about "surviving in a lawless society." Even today, in his statesman's uniform, Haradinaj is a fighter. With customs duties of 100 percent on imports from Serbia, he is trying to force the government in Belgrade to recognize Kosovo -- and, in the process, is riling up the United States, the country's protector.

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Ever since the autonomous province of Kosovo was allowed to cut itself free from Serbia in 2008 with the explicit permission of Madeleine Albright, Washington's ambassadors have been the secret rulers of this country. But these days, U.S. President Donald Trump's man in Pristina is facing resistance. Haradinaj coolly explains that the custom duties were a "sovereign decision of the Kosovar government." In other words, it means Pristina is no colony of Washington's and reserves the right to take revenge for things like Serbia's most recent veto against Kosovo joining Interpol.

Geopolitical Turning Point?

Was this a first step out of the shadow of the American superpower? Haradinaj says Kosovo needs to learn to defend itself: "We had no choice. Serbia has been acting more and more aggressively lately. Our openness and generosity have been misread as weakness."

Although Trump expressed in letters to the heads of state in Belgrade and Pristina that he hoped to be able to sign a "historical agreement" at the White House as soon as possible, a long-term peaceful solution is not in sight. For a long time, a partition of Kosovo was out of the question for Washington. Now it sounds like things have changed. "We no longer have any red lines; if the two countries suggest a deal that involves a change in the borders and that is accepted by the citizens, then that is fine with us," said one high-ranking U.S. official in Pristina, who added that when it comes to the "struggle between the superpowers," Washington is mostly concerned about "maneuvering Kosovo to the West."

That means, into the EU and NATO, which is to say, away from the Russian sphere of influence. The latter begins in the city of Mitrovica, the primarily Serbian part of Kosovo north of the Ibar River, and stretches anywhere in the Balkan region where questions of alliance are still unresolved. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, Moscow is using logistical and military support to keep the threat of the country's division alive.

Pierre Crom/ Getty Images

A mural glorifying Serbian fighters on the Serbian side of Mitrovica bridge

In a region in which ethnic Albanians live in several countries and the smallest border movement threatens to upset the balance, Kosovo's unresolved future is dynamite. And then there are the mass protests against the governments in the neighboring countries of Albania, Montenegro and, especially, Serbia, showing the impatience of inhabitants who have been spent years waiting to join the EU.

Anyone who plays with fire in Kosovo -- on the historic fields dotted with medieval monasteries that, according to Serbian myth, are the cradle of the nation -- risks setting off a firestorm. And yet, Mogherini, John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic are all considering giving the north of Kosovo to Serbia, and offering the mostly ethnic-Albanian Presevo Valley to Kosovo. Kosovar President Hashim Thaci is also in favor of this, but is largely alone in his own country in having that stance.

The unwritten, but internationally respected agreement not to change any of the old internal Yugoslav borders is now being questioned. It is a dangerous precedent. Who then could deny the Bosnian Serbs an alliance with Serbia, or the ethnic-Albanian North Macedonians one with Albania?

Potential New Trials

Anyone who visits Mitrovica in northern Kosovo sees posters behind the Ibar Bridge depicting the presidents of Russia and Serbia, Vladimir Putin and Aleksandar Vucic, peacefully assembled under the Cyrillic headline "We are brothers -- god stands with us." Oaths of loyalty between Russians and Serbians are not only a part of folklore here. They are also a geopolitical calculation.

The tone in Kosovo has gotten sharper. Its own protection force could gradually be turned into a regular 5,000-strong army. To date, NATO has guaranteed security in the country. Its secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has warned against serious repercussions in the relationship with the alliance.

And because Albania's head of government, Prime Minister Edi Rama, is angry about what he sees as a stalling tactic by the EU, he is now threatening to bring the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo back to the motherland. He considers a joint head of state and foreign policy a serious alternative to EU membership.

The border between the two states is already fluid and those traveling from Kosovo to Albania encounter only superficial inspections. In Pristina government circles, the creation of a "mini Schengen" in the western Balkans is already under discussion -- an option that would unite Albanians who live on either side of the border. A shared experience of injustice and the blood splattered through the mountain landscape have brought together the people on both sides of the border.

As of recently, potential Albanian war crimes are once again being addressed in The Hague. Under examination is the degree to which the Kosovar guerrilla army, UCK, may have incriminated itself. Many of the country's leading politicians were once members of the group. Since January, an international court subject to Kosovar law has been taking part in negotiations. Old wartime comrades of Prime Minister Haradinaj have already been invited, and it has intentionally been left unclear whether they are to appear as accused or as witnesses.

In the godforsaken Tropoja, on the Albanian side, two men in a cemetery are pointing, without hesitation, at the grave of a UCK fighter who died on this side of the border -- and where one of his brothers later placed the severed heads of two Serbian soldiers. There are photos proving the gruesome ritual murder occurred.

The government in Pristina is arguing that possible war crimes carried out by the Albanian side can of course be investigated. But patience among the ethnic-Albanian population is running thin. Investigations took place under UN supervision until 2008, then came the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and the EU's EULEX mission. If a special court were to investigate the UCK once again, it would likely not be well-received.

The West's grotesquely inconsistent approach is exemplified by the fact that ex-commander Hashim Thaci, now president of Kosovo, and Fatmir Limaj, the deputy prime minister, may currently negotiate with head EU diplomat Mogherini through different channels despite the fact that both of them were heavily involved in wartime activities of the UCK.

"There are, of course, some people on both the Albanian and Serbian sides who say, 'I won't negotiate with that bastard over there,'" admits a leading U.S. official in Pristina. But the Trump administration, he says, wants to achieve a historical solution similar to a Korea deal: "We need to make progress. The status quo in Kosovo is critical -- either the relationship between the two countries will improve, or it will go completely down the drain."

As long as the EU doesn't manage to show Kosovo the path forward, and do so as a unified body, the country's course will be set in Washington. Kosovo's prime minister complains that the goals of the Europeans are hard to determine, unlike those of the U.S.: "When our people recently flew to Brussels for discussions with Mogherini, they had a 30-page proposal in their luggage." And what did they get from the EU negotiators? "Nothing," says Haradinaj, "except coffee and water, though free of charge."

 

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.

 

Janusz Bugajski: Moscow’s Balkan Partition Strategy

cepa.org

Moscow's Balkan Partition Strategy

6-7 minutes

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MOSCOW'S BALKAN 
PARTITION STRATEGY

What Are the Kremlin's Ulterior Motives for Backing Balkan Land Swaps?

For Washington, a potential territorial exchange between Serbia and Kosova could normalize relations between the two states and help stabilize the wider region. For Moscow, the prospect of land swaps can add a new dimension to its divide and conquer plans in the Western Balkans and establish usable precedents elsewhere.

In recent

months, the prospect of border adjustments between Kosova and Serbia has been at the center of political debate throughout the region. Although any such plans are tentative and high-level discussions have not been transparent, even raising the legitimacy of territorial changes has sparked both hope and fear in several states. When Washington reportedly gave the green light to such negotiations between Belgrade and Prishtina, Moscow pounced on a new opportunity to foster conflict and promote its influences.

During the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Russian officials backed Slobodan Milošević's plans for a larger Serbian state that would encompass Montenegro, Kosova, half of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and parts of Croatia. They were not averse to changing the borders of former Yugoslav federal units in order to strengthen their main ally in the region. The Kremlin also calculated that Balkan border adjustments could bolster its own plans to carve up former Soviet republics and enlarge the Russian Federation.

Russia's new partition strategy in the Western Balkans has emerged in the past few months with several overlapping goals. The first objective is to create fissures among Albanian politicians and divide Albanian societies in Kosova, Albania, and Macedonia. Albanian populations are not only renowned for being staunchly pro-American, they are also deeply resistant to Russian political and economic penetration. Moscow may now exploit any emerging divisions over border changes to implant itself.

In Kosova there is a growing disconnect between those who support and oppose a transaction involving sections of Kosova's four northern municipalities in exchange for parts of three Serbian municipalities in the Preševo Valley. Moreover, any closed-door discussions inevitably beget rumors that can be exploited by provocateurs to inflame political disputes.

Kosova's President Hashim Thaçi and Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj have expressed diametrically opposed positions on border shifts. Thaçi met with Putin during the Paris Peace Forum in November 2018 and reportedly discussed the territorial question. It is worth remembering that the Russian leader regularly whispers disinformation to foreign leaders to test their reactions and plant ideas that suit Kremlin interests.

After his recent visit to Washington, Thaçi declared that he had received guarantees that Russia would recognize Kosova once an agreement with Belgrade was implemented that could entail border adjustments. However, any pledges by the Kremlin must be treated with enormous caution, as Putin is notorious for breaking agreements that suit his larger ambitions, whether these are arms treaties with the United States or border agreements with neighboring countries.

A second Kremlin goal is to exacerbate divisions between Serbs and Albanians so that neither Serbia nor Kosova can enter NATO or the EU. The most effective way to close doors to membership is by creating diversions that foster inter-state conflicts so the disputants are viewed as unfit for accession. Moscow is well aware that both Serbian and Albanian nationalists will pounce on the prospect of territorial acquisitions and can be encouraged to pursue more ambitious irredentist claims, such as dividing Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, or Macedonia.

It is unclear whether the Serbian government is fully aware of Moscow's ploys or whether it is being duped. President Aleksandar Vučić needs to be mindful that Serbia could be drawn into more protracted conflicts with neighbors by working too closely with Russia. Belgrade's stated goal in forging an agreement with Kosova is for Serbia to gain faster entry into the EU. But why should the Kremlin assist Vučić in an EU accession endeavor that it has tried to quash in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere?

As Russian officials drive wedges between the region's capitals, they can simultaneously offer regional settlements and inject themselves as mediators to reduce the role of NATO and the EU. By purportedly assisting in resolving regional conflicts, Moscow also calculates that it can gain additional advantages, whether in lessened Western opposition to its gas projects in Europe or a special status with diplomatic immunity for its intelligence base in southern Serbia.

A third motive for Russia's support for Balkan land exchanges is to establish usable precedents, particularly for its own partition of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. Moscow's coerced border adjustments can be propagandized as legitimate moves that mirror Western support for ethnic homogenization in the Balkans. This would help reduce calls for sanctions and other punishment against Russia for carving up its neighbors' territories.

In an ideal world, a bilateral border exchange between Serbia and Kosova could be arranged without provoking political conflicts, ethnic resentments, or irredentist claims. But conditions in the Balkans and other regions where the Kremlin has injected its influences are far from ideal. With "normalization" between Serbia and Kosova as the tempting prize, Western actors may be stepping into a partition trap whose unintended consequences may prove more far-reaching than was bargained for.

Europe's Edge is an online journal covering crucial topics in the transatlantic policy debate. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. 

Photo: "Vladimir Putin in Serbia March 2011-1" by premier.gov.ru under CC BY 4.0.

Janusz Bugajski
25 February 2019

 

 

nationalinterest.org

What the Evolution of NATO's Missions Means for the Future

by Ted Galen Carpenter

8-10 minutes

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Throughout the Cold War, American and European leaders consistently portrayed NATO as a defensive alliance. They emphasized the peaceful nature of their cooperation in contrast to the Kremlin’s record of belligerence and aggression. Moscow’s brutal suppression of even modest political deviations within its East European satellite empire helped confirm the proclaimed difference. Soviet tanks rolled into East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush reform movements. Western insistence that the Soviet Union was a dangerous aggressor while NATO was a purely defensive association was quite credible.

Unfortunately, post-Cold War NATO’s image as a collection of democracies pursuing defensive objectives corresponds less and less to reality. Robert W. Merry, former editor of Congressional Quarterly, the National Interest , and the American Conservative , aptly observes that instead of appreciating how the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union was a boon to the security of the West, U.S. and NATO leaders “turned NATO into a territorial aggressor of its own.” He concludes that NATO today is “a danger, not a guarantor of peace.”

Avoidance of offensive actions and objectives disappeared early in the post–Cold War era. The interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo emphatically transformed NATO from a defensive alliance designed to deter or repel an attack on its members into an organization with an offensive orientation. In Bosnia, the Alliance used force simply to prevent a secessionist movement from succeeding; no aggression against a NATO member had taken place. Four years later, NATO attacked a sovereign state, Serbia, recognized by the international community, to detach one of its provinces, Kosovo. Once again, the target of NATO’s military wrath had not committed the slightest act of aggression—or even threatened to do so—against any Alliance member.

The rationale for NATO military action had expanded dramatically. Citing a security justification for the interventions in the internecine Balkan conflicts flowing from the breakup of Yugoslavia required a major stretch of logic. Even most NATO partisans knew better than to emphasize such a far-fetched rationale. Instead they focused on the alleged need to prevent a humanitarian tragedy . Even that justification failed to hold up to any serious scrutiny.

A few NATO traditionalists were decidedly unhappy about the Alliance’s new missions or expanded geographic focus. Writing at the time of the Kosovo war, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was caustic about the increasing focus of the “new NATO” on out-of-area missions. “What was wrong with the old NATO?” he asked rhetorically. “For the clever young thinkers of the [Clinton] administration,” Krauthammer added sarcastically, the Alliance’s traditional deterrence mission apparently was “too boring.” He accused them of suffering from “Acheson envy,” by wanting to create a memorable new international order. Worse, he saw them as wanting to refashion NATO as “a robust, restless alliance ready to throw its weight around outside its own borders to impose order and goodness.”

Krauthammer’s observations were extremely perceptive, but even with his prominence in the American foreign-policy community, his concerns about NATO’s new focus and the dangers it posed, went largely unheeded. NATO continued to become an increasingly offensive alliance with an ever-expanding out-of-area orientation.

Indeed, as transformative as the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions were, they at least occurred in Europe, albeit outside the formal boundaries of the Alliance. Even during the Cold War, NATO (and especially the United States) maintained informal, but important, security ties to Yugoslavia. Washington also made it clear to Moscow that any military aggression against Yugoslavia would be considered a serious threat to the transatlantic community, even though the country was not a NATO member.

But other NATO military missions now take place far outside the European theater. That point became evident following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States when NATO members invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which proclaims that an attack on one member will be considered an attack on all. Thereafter, Germany and other Alliance members sent forces to assist the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan.

The new missions reflected a dramatic expansion of NATO’s geographic coverage. It had become a misnomer even to regard the Alliance as a “transatlantic” organization to protect the security of Europe and North America. Indeed, as the Afghanistan operation confirmed, the focus increasingly was on problems outside those two regions. That point was reinforced when a majority of NATO members joined the U.S.-led assault on Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. It became evident again in 2011, when the United States backed its European allies, especially Britain and France, to launch military attacks against Libya. The ostensible purpose of the aircraft and cruise missile strikes was to thwart a bloodbath that Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime might unleash on innocent civilians. The reality was that the intervention was another regime-change war.

The proliferation of such far-ranging missions has not been healthy either for NATO’s European members or the United States. Sending troops to Afghanistan entangled European forces in a messy, intractable war in a country that posed little threat to any of the European countries. In essence, NATO governments signed on to an amorphous, armed nation-building venture that Washington was pursuing. Conversely, a divided Obama administration signed on to a regime-change war in Libya that France and other European allies were pushing. In both cases, the resulting policies were ill-considered ventures that did not benefit the best interests of either the United States or its European partners.

Indeed, a major reason why Islamic radicals have attacked targets in Europe is because of the involvement of those countries in U.S.-led wars in the Muslim world, especially Iraq and Syria. The perpetrators of the December 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris shouted out: “This is for Syria!” France had joined with its NATO allies to back the U.S.-dual campaign to oust Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and eradicate ISIS. French aircraft had been bombing ISIS-controlled areas for more than a year. The Paris attacks were bloody payback—as have been subsequent incidents in multiple NATO countries.

If increasing their exposure to America’s wars in the Middle East and Central Asia is now a crucial requirement of alliance burden-sharing, the Europeans would be wise to opt-out. That step might or might not cause the Trump administration to reconsider the U.S. commitment to NATO, but as Washington pushes the Alliance to adopt an increasingly offensive focus, and one outside of Europe at that, the allies could be making a major, self-destructive blunder to follow Washington’s lead.

At the same time, responding favorably to European calls for humanitarian or regime-change missions in the Balkans and North Africa, or for a needlessly confrontational policy toward Russia, is not in the best interests of the American people. The growing uneasiness on both sides of the Atlantic is evidence both of a fraying consensus about NATO’s proper role and the reality of a divergence in European and American security interests. The “old NATO” of the Cold War era is obsolete, and the “new NATO” of military interventions with vague justifications and a nearly boundless geographic coverage is a meddlesome aggressor.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest , is the author of twelve books and more than 750 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support for Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements (2019).

 

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Assessing the revival of EU enlargement in the Western Balkans

8-10 minutes

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Several efforts aimed at giving greater impetus to the EU enlargement process in the Western Balkans took place in 2018, but without securing substantive results. Anna Nadibaidze outlines some of the major challenges that remain for the process as the EU seeks to balance its aspirations for influence in the region against concerns over what future enlargement might mean for the EU's own stability.

Last year was supposed to demonstrate a significant revival of EU interest in the Western Balkans, with several key events designed to give new life to the region's European accession process. Under the Bulgarian presidency of the Council of the European Union, the European Commission revealed its new Enlargement Strategy paper, President Jean-Claude Juncker completed a tour of the region's capitals, and a top-level EU-Western Balkans Summit took place in Sofia in May.

As Austria took over the presidency, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) agreed on a deal to change the latter's name to Republic of North Macedonia – an issue which acted as an obstacle to Macedonia's EU and NATO accession path. Both Serbia and Montenegro opened new chapters in their negotiation processes, and the EU hosted several ministerial meetings for Serbian and Kosovo officials as part of their normalisation dialogue.

Despite these developments, there were also major setbacks in the region last year, many of which remain unresolved. Albania and Macedonia's accession processes have been delayed by a decision of the 2018 June European Council due to their lack of progress in reforms.

Tensions between Serbia and Kosovo sparked over a controversial border swap deal, the details of which remain unclear, despite EU Foreign Affairs High Representative Federica Moghereni's efforts at providing a platform for dialogue. The conversation stalled as Pristina imposed 100 per cent tariffs on Serbian goods, despite the EU condemning the move. In December, a decision of the Kosovo parliament to launch a military structure sparked further problems with Belgrade, and attracted warnings from the EU.

 

Federica Mogherini and Serbia's Aleksandar Vučić at the 2015 Western Balkans Summit, Credit: EEAS (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Romania, which took over the EU presidency in January, is seeking to maintain the region on its agenda. It is understandable why consecutive EU presidencies keep enlargement on their priority list. Enlargement is strategically important for the Union as a whole, because the Western Balkans continue to be crucial for the security of the EU's borders.

Brussels cannot ignore the fact that challenges such as migration, concerns over radicalisation, organised crime and the arms trade have an important impact on Euro-Atlantic security. European Parliament President Tajani said during his visit to Serbia last year, "Your security is our security," while Juncker warned, "Not too long ago, the region saw a fierce war. If we take away the Western Balkans' accession perspective, that could soon repeat itself."

Moreover, the slow progress of EU engagement with the region over recent years has encouraged other players, notably Russia, Turkey, and China, to get more involved. Serbia and Montenegro have a historically close relationship with Moscow, as demonstrated by President Vladimir Putin's visit to Belgrade on 17 January.

Feeling threatened by the EU's enlargement towards its traditional spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, Russia has been showing interest in building stronger connections with the Balkans. Although Moscow's actual political and economic attractiveness remains limited compared to the EU, Brussels will have more leverage in the region if it is prepared to engage with and respond to these external challenges.

The obstacles on the road to accession

The rationale for the Enlargement Strategy and other EU efforts is clear, but whether they have produced the desired results, or whether they will be effective in the near future, is debatable.

There is a whole laundry list of challenges in the region, the two main ones being the need for reforms and good neighbourly relations. For Serbia, the major obstacle is normalisation of relations with Kosovo, with the EU expecting to see a legally-binding agreement before Belgrade can finalise its accession. Border disputes remain unresolved, and the EU has been clear that it does not intend to import these conflicts. It already has to deal with tensions between two EU members, Slovenia and Croatia, who are unable to resolve their border issue.

Dealing with these problems will likely take many years, which leads to another challenge: accession fatigue. With the process having already taken a prolonged period of time, citizens of many Western Balkan countries are growing increasingly tired of politicians pushing for reforms, while not meeting expectations. In 2018, according to the Balkan Opinion Barometer, 26 per cent of the region's population believed that accession will never happen, 14 per cent expected accession to be in 2030, 24 per cent said it would happen in 2025, and only 12 per cent said 2020. While these dynamics vary from country to country, rising Euroscepticism should be counted as a challenge.

The EU's enlargement dilemma

On the European side, member states remain divided on the issue of enlargement, partly because of a concern about the consolidation of EU norms in countries that joined in 2004 and 2007. Recent flashpoints, such as Poland and Romania's judicial reforms, Bulgaria's corruption problems, as well as Hungary's turn towards 'illiberal democracy', cast doubt on these countries' willingness to implement EU laws. This inevitably leads to the fear of further clashes if some Western Balkan countries join the Union too quickly.

Public opinion also appears to be divided. A recent Eurobarometer poll shows 43 per cent of the EU public support "further enlargement of the EU to include other countries in future years," while 45 per cent are against. The support is mostly concentrated in 'new' member states from Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, many EU leaders want to first reform the EU before moving on to enlargement. For instance, French President Emmanuel Macron mentioned that he was not in favour of widening the Union before deep reforms were carried out.

Brussels faces the dilemma of accommodating different positions in its enlargement plans. Some form of credible commitment to the Western Balkans is necessary to strengthen the attractiveness of the European model, deal with external influences, and importantly, show the EU's vitality after Brexit. The UK's departure will have an impact on the EU's redefinition of its global role, and engagement with the Western Balkans is one of the ways to demonstrate Brussels' willingness to remain a relevant actor.

At the same time, as it cannot push the process too quickly given many member states' reservations, the Commission's approach seems to be to keep the Western Balkans in a state of limbo, where the EU confirms the European perspective of the region, but where accession developments are based on merit and any time frames remain indicative.

Enlargement policy remains a powerful mechanism in the EU's foreign policy toolbox. It allows the bloc to have considerable leverage over its neighbourhood if the prospect of joining is credible. As seen with the recent efforts, the EU is aware of the Western Balkans' importance and tries to make use of its tools to address regional concerns, mostly over security.

But progress is being held back by problems in the region, and by internal EU disputes and fears of admitting more unstable countries into the club. Given these obstacles, the Commission will have to limit itself to statements and summits without making any firm promises, and continue engaging with the region, but without securing substantive results.

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Note: This article 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

Anna Nadibaidze – Open Europe
Anna Nadibaidze is a research and communications associate at the think tank Open Europe. She holds an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics.