Kosovo's Plot Thickens
By Elizabeth Pond Three German spooks are back home after a nine-day sojourn in a Kosovo prison, and a European rule-of-law mission named "EULEX" is now stationed in northern Kosovo after a nine-month vacuum there. Between them, the two events define the new landscape in the world's newest state. Neither event is quite what it seems on the surface. The three German Intelligence Service (BND) fellows were jailed on the implausible charge that they had set off a bomb at the Pristina headquarters of the senior European Union official there. And, argues Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic implausibly, Serbia and the United Nations are finally allowing the EU's rule-of-law mission to deploy in Serb-majority northern Kosovo only because EULEX will be "neutral" on whether Kosovo is independent or is still a province of Serbia. Below the surface, things look a lot more interesting. The first episode gives every sign of being a warning to the BND not to snoop on organized crime in Kosovo, which accounts for up to 80 percent of the heroin that enters Western Europe. And diplomatic fudge leaves enough ambiguity for Jeremic to fend off ultra-nationalist Serb critics by ignoring EULEX's explicit mandate to "supervise" Kosovo's conditional independence and guarantee the minority rights of the five percent of Serbs in this 90-percent Albanian country. Even further below the surface, reality is at its most intriguing. It might seem odd for the Kosovars to single out the BND for unique humiliation; German, British, Italian, and American agents all spy on criminal gangs-and Berlin has long been a special patron of Kosovo, leading the EU drive to facilitate independence last February and giving Pristina more financial aid than does any other EU member. Yet, in internal reports that have leaked out to the public, the BND and the German military have indiscreetly fingered senior Kosovar politicians as being allied with traffickers. Hence the special satisfaction, perhaps, in daring to bite the German hand that feeds but criticizes Kosovo. As for those EULEX rule-of-law teams, the first fact to note is that their long-delayed deployment in northern Kosovo infiltrates them into a hotbed of Serb mafias that profess ultranationalism but cooperate splendidly with Albanian smugglers south of the Ibar River. It was these mafias that recruited Serb mobs to burn down customs posts and chase UN officials out of the north when Kosovo declared its independence. The second fact is that the new pro-European Serbian government shares the EU dislike of these Serb mafias, which were originally set up by the pro-Europeans' ultranationalist foes in Belgrade. The Serbian government is therefore quietly seeing to it that this time around, Serb mobs will not attack the new international officials. So don't judge the progress of Belgrade, the EU -- or the BND -- by the zero-sum rhetoric. Measure it instead by seeing how far their tacit win-win collaboration squeezes out the local mafiosi in 2009. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/sais/nexteurope/2008/12/kosovo s_plot_thickens.html
