Round table held on 29 May 2009 on Kosovo
Publication day: 3/6/2009 On 29 May 2009, IDC Paris organised a debate on the right of Kosovo to secede from Serbia. The main speaker was Slobodan Samardzic, the former Serbian minister for Kosovo, who argued that the secession was illegal and a violation of international law. His paper is published under the section “Research” on this web site. Two neutral experts kindly agreed to come and reply to his arguments, Dr Eric de Brabandere of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and Professor and Dr Cedric Ryngaert of the Universityof Leuven in Belgium. Slobodan Samardzic served as adviser to and then minister under Vojislav Kostunica, the man who overthrew Slobodan Milosevic after contested electrions on 5 October 2000. He therefore embodies a new spirit of pro-Western orientation in Serbia. Yet Mr Samardzic, who is Vice-President of Kostunica’s party and a professor of political science at the University of Belgrade, bitterly contests the way in which Serbia has been let down by her European and American allies. His main argument focussed on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 of 10 June 1999, which fixed the status of Kosovo following the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. That resolution, he insisted, thrice reaffirmed Kosovo’s status as an integral part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia of which today’s Serbia is the successor state. (Kosovo, indeed, was always part of Serbia within the Yugoslav federation.) The resolution provided for negotiations about the future status of Kosovo and these negotiations did indeed take place, from 2005 onwards. However, they were broken off when the Albanian authorities in the province declared independence in February 2008, with the support of the European Union and the United States. He added that the period of UN administration of the province (1999 – 2008) had been a period of systematic persecution against the Serbs and other national minorities in Kosovo. His two respondents were in considerable agreement with the former minister. Eric de Brabandere said that secession was a political issue on which international law did not necessarily have the right to adjudicate. Not everything can be governed by international law, he argued. Cedric Ryngaert took a different view, saying that there was a body of jurisprudence on the right of secession and that the essential point was that it was illegal except in cases of massive violations of human rights. Natalia Narochnitskaya, the president of the Institute, asked what confidence one could have in the new European Union administration of the province when it was releasing from prison or refusing to prosecute people convicted or suspected of war crimes. She also emphasised the long list of desecrations perpetrated against Serb Orthodox churches in the province. There was a strong debate after the main speakers had finished. A former French ambassador to Croatia clearly disagreed with Mr Samardzic and Mrs Narochnitskaya. He claimed that the status of the new EU administration in Kosovo, EULEX, was legal because confirmed by a report of the UN Secretary General, and he countered the allegation about the desecration of churches saying that hundreds of mosques had been destroyed in Kosovo prior to June 1999. Mr Samardzic in turn countered both points, first by denying that the Secretary General has the right to rescind a Security Council Resolution (which created a UN administration) and second by claiming that the destruction of mosques was due to NATO bombing not attacks by Serb forces. Others who intervened included a former commander of French special forces in Kosovo in 1999, who said that the NATO war had been based on a massive campaign of disinformation. The audience included senior army officers, government officials, academics and students http://www.idc-europe.org/actualites.asp Serbian News Network - SNN [email protected] http://www.antic.org/
