Let’s be clear
“Europe may have reacted hastily” by recognizing Kosovo, a Member of the European Parliament is quoted as saying on Serbia’s B92 website. This sentiment has appeared regularly in recent weeks, based on unsubstantiated allegations by a Council of Europe rapporteur who opposed Kosovo’s February 2008 declaration of independence.
While the allegations require serious investigation, the efforts to call into question Kosovo’s independence are unjustified. Kosovo became independent because Serbia stopped treating its majority population as citizens. This was clearest in Milosevic’s attempt to remove Albanians from Kosovo in 1999, but it was no less damaging to Serbia’s claims of sovereignty when the post-Milosevic Serbian state did not count the Kosovo Albanians on the voter rolls for the 2006 referendum on its new constitution, thus denying them their right under the then existing constitution to block the adoption of a new one by not voting (the then existing constitution required that 50 per cent of registered voters participate in the referendum, a percentage that would not have been reached had the Albanians been counted).
Members of the Kosovo Liberation Army that fought for independence in the late 1990s now stand accused at the Council of Europe of heinous crimes. These allegations have been circulated for a long time: they are stock in trade in Belgrade, where officials have investigated them and spread rumors about them for 10 years. This does not mean they aren’t true–they clearly need to be investigated more objectively and professionally. It does mean we should suspend judgment and treat those individuals allegedly involved, including Prime Minister Thaci, as innocent until proven guilty in a properly constituted court with jurisdiction over the case. If the allegations are eventually found to be true, a possibility that cannot be excluded, that would still not bear on Kosovo’s independence any more than accusations of corruption against Croatia’s former prime minister bear on Zagreb’s bid for EU membership.
Much more immediately damaging to Kosovo than the unsubstantiated allegations are the claims, reported not only by B92 from EU sources but also by Albanian sources, that threats and fraud plagued not only the December elections in Kosovo but also the January 9 rerun in several municipalities. These elections were an ideal opportunity for Kosovo to demonstrate unequivocally its democratic credentials. Whoever has tampered with the voters and the votes has done his country serious harm.
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2 thoughts on “Let’s be clear”
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Meh, that MEP could have very well been someone from the 5 naysayers. Not something Albanians would lose sleep on.
What is disturbing regarding the EP and the Kosovo elections is that the former could not send observers (badly needed!) to the latter due to its internal divisions but still think they can be judgemental on the issue. The eurocrats ought to descend on Earth once in a while.
As I remember, most of the international observers – not to include Ambassador Dell – were originally willing to give the Dec. 12 elections their stamp of approval, and it was the various parties and Kosovar NGO observers who raised the alarm. On the other hand, were the problems serious enough to call the overall results into question? Some of the irregularities Lunacek complained about included things like “family voting,” where elderly couples tried to enter a booth together. At least in the second election I don’t think there were any reports of pre-stuffed ballot boxes. Investigations are underway, procedures will be changed, but with the Serbs ready to pounce on any missteps, you’d have thought they would have been more careful. It would be helpful if the recounted results of the first election and those of the second are both published, but I have no idea whether this is the usual procedure. It would be good to have some idea of the scope of the problem.
It’s been one long holiday in the Serb newspapers ever since Marty’s report came out – a chance for vindication, to rewrite history, possibly to start the tide of derecognitions of Kosovo’s independence some confidently expect. Marty’s interviews (available only in Albanian, AFAIK), back-pedaled a bit, and he went out of his way to explain that he had never been against Kosovo’s independence as such, merely the way that it had been declared – it should have been done in a legal fashion, with all the i’s dotted. The EU should have played its hand better and not allowed the Americans to play such a great role … Unfortunately he didn’t have time to explain exactly how the EU should have played its hand. He also pointed out more explicitly than he had in the report that all the “evidence” provided by the Serbian Special Prosecutor was unusable – he even said that the office should spend less time on public relations and more time on serious work. I’m eagerly awaiting the Serbian translation of the entire interview by B92.