nationalinterest.org

It's Time for a New Approach to the Balkans

by Frank Wisner Amb. Cameron Munter Marko Prelec

6-8 minutes

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Watch the Western Balkans!

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

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

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

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

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

What to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Reuters

 

            nationalinterest.org

Standing Up For Realism

by Editorial

8-10 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Reuters.

 

blogs.lse.ac.uk

EU enlargement in the Western Balkans: The missing issue in the 2019 European election campaign

8-10 minutes

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The campaign for the European Parliament elections on 23-26 May offers an opportunity for key EU policy areas to be debated. Yet as Anna Nadibaidze writes, the issue of EU enlargement in the Western Balkans has so far remained far from the agenda. She explains that with public opinion focused on other topics and both mainstream and Eurosceptic parties lacking enthusiasm for rapid enlargement, the process is likely to slow in both the shorter and longer term.

The campaign for the European Parliament elections has already begun, and unsurprisingly, the issue of EU enlargement, specifically in the Western Balkans, has barely been mentioned. With the Brexit impasse and a number of other pressing issues to solve, enlargement is not a priority and will remain on the sidelines, at least in the short term until a new European Parliament and Commission are formed.

It is not a particularly popular topic among the European public. According to a YouGov poll looking at attitudes towards enlargement in six EU member states (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden and the UK) as well as Norway, in most of these countries, there are more people who believe that Romania's EU membership was a mistake than people who do not. The prospects of the six Western Balkans candidates are also viewed with a degree of scepticism by the public in the countries surveyed.

Chart: Attitudes toward Western Balkans enlargement (selected European countries)

 

Note: Average calculated from results of YouGov/Eurotrack survey conducted in seven European countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK) in December 2018.

Building upon these tendencies in public opinion, it has become easier for Eurosceptic and populist parties to use the 'threat' of enlargement in their anti-EU and anti-immigration rhetoric. The topic is therefore likely to be sidelined for the duration of the campaign, both by the main centre-right and centre-left parties, but also by the EU's institutions.

Romania, currently holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, stated it plans to focus on the topic of accession only after the European elections. Even the publication of the Commission's annual reports on the progress of the candidate countries has been delayed from the usual date in April to the end of May. This is probably to avoid contributing to the populist cause at such a sensitive moment, when polls suggest an increasing number of seats could be won by Eurosceptic parties.

After the elections, when Finland takes over the presidency in July, the Union will be too preoccupied with the formation of new institutions, the (possible) finalisation of the Brexit process and the next stages of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) discussions. The accession process in the Western Balkans is expected to be revived only when Croatia, itself the newest EU member state and formerly part of Yugoslavia, takes over in 2020.

How can a new European Parliament influence the accession process?

While the European Commission conducts accession negotiations and monitors candidates' fulfilment of criteria, the European Parliament also plays a key role as in the end it has to give the green light to the final terms of accession. Its approval is needed for the financial resources allocated to the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) in the MFF. The Parliament also publishes positions and resolutions which have considerable influence on EU policy.

According to current polls, the new Parliament is predicted to be more fragmented, with the mainstream centre-right European People's Party (EPP) and centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) groups facing significant losses. This would mean more complex decision-making and an increasing need to forge coalitions.

Despite this fragmentation, there is a general lack of enthusiasm towards enlargement across the political groupings. The EPP – which is likely to win the largest amount of seats – states that it supports "the concrete European perspective of the Western Balkans" and helping "countries in the region improve their prosperity, as long as they adhere to European standards and achieve progress in the rule of law and the fight against corruption." The largest party in the EPP, Germany's ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), advocates "deepening" EU reforms before "widening" the Union, and stands against any enlargement until 2024.

The S&D group and the Liberals and Democrats (ALDE) support the Western Balkans' accession path, but are strict on pushing for reforms in the region and are clear that the process must be based on merit. The European Greens also support increasing EU engagement with the region, but avoid giving details such as concrete dates of accession. French President Emmanuel Macron's La République En Marche party has been constantly pushing for further reform of the EU before accepting new members, explicitly ruling out the possibility of any accession before 2025.

Most Eurosceptic and populist parties are opposed to EU enlargement, although they do not hold a unified position, as is the case with other foreign policy matters including the recognition of Kosovo and relations with Russia. Anti-immigration parties such as the Brothers of Italy have a strict stance against the accession of countries where the population is primarily Muslim, including Albania. The French National Rally argues that the EU must put a stop to enlargement.

There is cross-party expectation that enlargement is unlikely to happen anytime soon. This was demonstrated at the televised debates of French parties' candidates for the European elections, where ten out of thirteen party candidates said they were against Serbia – who is currently at the most advanced stage of negotiations – joining before 2025, citing the need for reforms on both sides before such a step can take place.

Next steps

At the next European Council summit in June, EU leaders are due to decide unanimously upon opening accession negotiations with candidate countries Albania and the recently renamed North Macedonia. Following the Prespa Agreement with Greece, there is now a more positive attitude towards North Macedonia's accession. However, as mentioned above, the governing parties in France and Germany do not support enlargement in the short-term, and there are suggestions that France is still hesitating about giving the green light. Serbia also expects the opening of two new accession chapters in June.

Declining either one or both of these decisions would be risky both for the region and for the EU. It would mean the EU failing to maintain its soft power rhetoric and its policy of 'giving carrots' to acceding countries. This is especially important with North Macedonia, where a lot of effort was put into implementing the Prespa Agreement with the specific goal of beginning the accession process.

The EU would risk losing leverage over other situations in the region, for instance the Serbia-Kosovo normalisation dialogue. Bilateral relations remain tense as Kosovo maintains its 100% tariffs on Serbian goods, despite Brussels saying the tariffs must be suspended in order for the dialogue to continue.

Progress on the enlargement front will take time, depending on the composition and leadership of the next European Commission, and who becomes the next Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy. Overall, it is unlikely that the newly composed EU institutions will radically change their approach towards the Western Balkans. Public opinion remains focused on other issues, and both mainstream and Eurosceptic parties lack enthusiasm for rapid enlargement. The EU will maintain a certain level of commitment, but the process is likely to slow down in both the short and longer term.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image: High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini attending a session of the Serbian parliament in Belgrade in 2017, Credit: EEAS (CC BY-NC 2.0)

_________________________________

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.

 

sputniknews.com

What's in a Name? For Some Yugoslavia Bombing Was Operation, For Others a War

Sputnik

5-7 minutes

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Serbia marked the 20th anniversary of the NATO bombings in March, but even such a long period of “endurance” was not enough for the country to end the disputes about what it really was: an intervention, an aggression, an operation or a war.

As well as put an end to the controversy whether it was possible to do anything to prevent this “operation” and whether it is possible to do something now to restore justice.

Boris Krivokapic, Professor at the Department of Law at Union Nikola Tesla University in Belgrade and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an interview with Sputnik tried to answer all these questions.

The professor explained that when influential members of the international community attack someone from among less influential representatives, they avoid calling their actions a war, and that's no surprise.

READ MORE: Twenty Years on: The "Peace Conference" That Resulted in Bombing of Yugoslavia

© AP Photo / U.S. Air Force, Msgt. Keith Reed

According to Mr Krivokapic, the sources behind the naming of armed invasions of foreign territories can be found in the history of the perception of war and its legitimacy, experienced by mankind. He recalled that in the past, countries had an unconditional right to wage war.

This right was one of the attributes of their sovereignty, but after World War I this right was limited, while after World War II, not only the use of force was prohibited, but also the threat of its use. The possible instances for the use of force were narrowed down to self-defence and collective measures against an aggressor state, as provided for by the UN Charter.

"This is why 'major players' don't like to call a spade a spade. For them, this is a campaign, an operation… Because if they declare that they have launched a war against anyone they would become the aggressors. Many have already forgotten about it, but the UN is actually a collective security system, an organisation designed to come to the aid of a victim of a aggression. But in the Security Council, which was supposed to deem what was happening as an aggression, the aggressors themselves occupied key seats — three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: the United States, France, and the United Kingdom participated in the intervention", Mr Krivokapic reminded.

Back in 1999, he published a book called "NATO aggression against Yugoslavia — power beyond the law" (NATO agresija na Jugoslaviju — sila iznad prava). In it he recalled that in November 1999 he had taken part in a conference on international law in Spain and his colleagues from Western countries, including Americans from Harvard, had acknowledged that the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was an act of aggression.

READ MORE: 20 Years On: Timeline of NATO's War Against Yugoslavia

The expert noted that Yugoslavia 20 years ago could have sought solutions, referring to UN Security Council Resolution 82, adopted in 1950 in relation to the Korean War. It provides for the possibility of transferring Security Council's authority to the General Assembly. The General Assembly could, according to Krivokapic, have taken some measures, but there was no political will.

The professor noted that over the past 20 years a lot has changed for the better for Serbia and the situation continues to evolve:

"We no longer live in a unipolar world with a single centre of power in charge, now the great powers control each other, and this state of affairs is in the interest of the whole world".

 

© AP Photo / str

As for the stream of comments that Serbia should actively collect evidence in order to lodge a claim against NATO, Krivokapic, noted that no evidence is needed here: just the fact that NATO began this operation is sufficient evidence of aggression.

"Our people are for the most part skeptical of international law, they wonder, ‘how could this happen to us?' But life in general is unfair. Many things in international relations 'work' well, but there are also instances when the norms of international law are grossly violated, this is exactly what happened to us", the expert said.

A lawsuit against the alliance, according to the professor, is an unrealistic scenario, although in theory Serbia could have filed one with the International Court of Justice.

READ MORE: Depleted Uranium, Chlorine and Hydrochloric Acid: Yugoslav Witnesses’ 'Toxic' Memories of NATO Bombings

"The special nature of this court is in the fact that it deals with only claims made by one state against another state, and in order for both parties to start the proceedings, the consent of the party against which the lawsuit is filed is required. That is, we, of course, can file a lawsuit against the United States, but they can say that they do not want to ‘play this game with us'. Another option is to file lawsuits against the states that participated in the bombings in our own courts, but this way we will not achieve any justice and only ruin relations with them. The third possibility is that people can lodge individual complaints with the European Court for Human Rights, but even in this case we most likely will not achieve much success. Only one last option, obviously destined to fail, remains — to file lawsuits against NATO member countries in their courts", Krivokapic concluded.

By Natasa Milosavljevic

 

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.