Vol. 11 No. 15 : 21-27 April 2005 Pages 22-23
Kosovo’s independence, the wrong solution for Europe by Jan Oberg and Aleksandar Mitic By this summer, Kosovo will almost certainly have passed a test set by the international community, a test that will allow talks on the final status of this UN protectorate to begin. The positions of two of the three parties are clear: Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority is demanding full independence and offers no sign of flexibility, while Serbia insists on nominal sovereignty, but accepts that Kosovo cannot be ruled from Belgrade again. Unfortunately, the narrowness of the current international debate suggests that the third party – the international community – may enter talks already convinced Kosovo should be independent. Some groups, such as the Brussels-based think tank the International Crisis Group (ICG), argue that independence really is now the only realistic option. But it is not. It is also an unjust, dangerous, obsolete, and anti-European solution. It is unjust, because independence cannot be negotiated, it can only be imposed. Full independence would, in effect, steamroll the aspirations of Kosovo’s non-Albanian communities and those of Serbia. It is dangerous (and unjust), because independence would breach the legal framework which ended the violence in 1999, reward those behind the campaign of ethnic-cleansing against the non-Albanian communities ever since and encourage those who exported violence to neighboring areas in southern Serbia and western Macedonia. It is dangerous, too, because Belgrade must play a role in finding a compromise on Kosovo. And it is anti-European because it is archaic to create new international borders when the entire region is moving towards a “borderless Europe.” So, in its own interests, the West needs to look for other options. It need only look to Bosnia. But the Bosnian example is barely debated – a failure that highlights the paradoxes, the fallacies, the dangerous precedents, and the lack of principled, consistent policies in the international community’s approach to Kosovo. First, like Kosovo, the “entity” of Republika Srpska is a protectorate, with NATO forces on its soil. Like Kosovo, some 90% of its population belongs to one ethnic community. In strategic terms, its majority Serb population has the same aspirations as the Kosovo Albanians: to become independent. But in Republika Srpska, the international community is tearing down all symbols and structures of statehood. Republika Srpska is, in fact, in the process of being gradually absorbed into a centralizing Bosnian state, in the name of stability, multi-ethnicity, and European integration – but against the will of the majority of its population. In Kosovo, the very same international community is doing just the opposite: it is building a state from scratch, treating Kosovo as an independent state in the making. Second, an international community that rightly lauds multi-ethnicity may be about to break up the Balkans’ most ethnically diverse country, Serbia. What kind of example would this set for the Muslim-populated Sandzak area, for Albanian-populated southern Serbia, for the Serbian-populated eastern part of Montenegro, for Albanian-populated western Macedonia, for Serbian-populated eastern Slavonia, for the Hungarian-populated north of the Vojvodina province? Third, if the whole region is on its way to an integrated Europe where borders no longer matter, why create new borders only to bring them down again in a matter of years? Fourth, it is almost certain that Kosovo can gain independence only by bypassing the UN Security Council since Russia and China would undoubtedly wield their veto. A solution without the UN (and without Serbia, as proposed by the ICG) would deal another blow to international law. Finally, there can be little doubt that independence for Kosovo would sooner or later result in a mono-ethnic Albanian Kosovo. What then of the arguments of those who supported the 1999 bombing as a “humanitarian intervention” in the name of multi-ethnicity? The international community should do as it did in Bosnia in 1995, in Macedonia in 2001, and in Serbia and Montenegro in 2003; that is, to search a solution to ethno-territorial conflict that falls short of independence. Why should Kosovo be an exception? If it becomes so, dispiriting questions will linger. Was independence merely an exit strategy for an international community afraid of confronting Albanian extremism and violence and tired of its failures in Kosovo? Most importantly, though, it would be a self-deluding exit. The international community can leave Kosovo, but its problems will haunt it. Jan Oberg is the founder and director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden. Aleksandar Mitic is a TFF Associate. A longer version of this article first appeared in the online magazine Transitions Online (www.tol.org). Srpska Informativna Mreza srpski_put@antic.org http://www.antic.org/ Srpska Informativna Mreza sim@antic.org http://www.antic.org/