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Making unity attractive

I’ve just arrived back in Pristina from North Mitrovica, where things couldn’t be calmer.  Adults in the shade drinking beer, kids in the sun  enjoying a beautiful, warm Sunday, a few in the river getting happily wet.  A few people moving back and forth across the bridge between the Serbian-controlled north and the Albanian-controlled south without hindrance.

The only real cloud was the guy in the singlet with Karadzic’s portrait.  Who wears the face of someone accused of genocide in another country to the local cafe for a beer with a friend?  The nationalist graffiti and Serbian state symbols everyplace are to be expected. The Serbs of northern Kosovo want to remain citizens of Serbia, not of Albanian-majority Kosovo.

The north seems a good deal less populated and the population older than on the south side of the bridge, but the poverty on both sides is all too apparent.  It is truly difficult to imagine this as the front line in a confrontation that once absorbed the world’s attention.  Today a few bored Italian carabinieri and Romanian police preside over a bridge where nothing has happened for a long time.  Even when the Kosovo government sent its special police in late July to seize control of the customs posts along the border with Serbia, the bridge in Mitrovica remained calm.

Two sentiments dominated the few conversations I was able to have with Serbs in the north:  fear and resentment.  The fear is directed towards the Albanian-dominated institutions headquartered in Pristina.  The Serbs cannot imagine trusting the court system, or being governed by institutions that report to Hashim Thaci, Kosovo’s prime minister and a wartime political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The resentment is directed mainly towards Belgrade, which is viewed as abandoning northern Kosovo in the dialogue it is conducting with Pristina.  Belgrade has already “given away” the Serbs south of the Ibar and seems prepared to give away those in the north as well, the Serbs there believe.  President Tadic has bought himself little credit by taking what the international community regards as a relatively hard nationalist line, or even by proposing partition.

There is also an edge of resentment for the international community in general, and the Americans in particular.  The internationals are collecting nice salaries and doing little.  And the American bombing may even have grown in the Serb imagination.  One elderly pensioner said he thought the Americans would blow up the whole world.

Everyone, north and south, is awaiting the visit of German Chancellor Merkel to Belgrade August 24.  If she tells Belgrade clearly and unequivocally to give up its control of north Kosovo, dreams of partition will be ended.  If she doesn’t, or if she leaves even a slight ambiguity, the aggravation on both sides of the Ibar river will continue.

The Pristina government believes it has succeeded in changing the facts on the ground, so that the border crossings in northern Kosovo will not be returned to Serbian control.  But that will do nothing to enable Pristina to govern the Serb population in the north.  It will need to have the wide degree of autonomy allowed it under the Ahtisaari plan that Belgrade has so far rejected.  But even that much will not come easily:  people in the north lack confidence in Pristina and will need some clear demonstrations that they can expect fair treatment.

“Making unity attractive” is the apt phrase the Sudanese used to describe what was required to keep north and south Sudan together, an effort that failed.  It is what Belgrade failed to do for the Albanians of Kosovo during the Milosevic regime.  It is what is needed now from Pristina to gain confidence of a significant portion of the Serb population in the north.

I am under no illusions.  Some of the Serbs will leave northern Kosovo no matter how gentle and attractive the offers they get, because they have good reasons to fear Albanian retaliation or because their livelihoods depend on the Serbian administration or the smuggling it has enabled.  But the guy who served me burek today may well be one of the many who never did any harm to his Albanian neighbors, would leap at the opportunity to double his sales and can be convinced to stay.

Statecraft is not only knowing when to act forcefully.  It is also knowing when to act gently.  My advice to Pristina is to be absolutely unequivocal about where the state borders of independent and sovereign Kosovo lie, but at the same time to offer to the Serb population of the north self-governance and even preferential treatment if they will stay and begin to participate in Kosovo’s institutions.  I don’t see anything else that has a chance of restoring Kosovo’s territorial integrity.