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.
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9 thoughts on “Making unity attractive”
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Prishtina could start out by encouraging residents of the north to visit Serb-majority towns in the south and see how much control they have over their own institutions, and budgets. The poor Serbian mayor of Gracanica keeps bragging about all the infrastructure projects he is responsible for, but the sewer-lines and sidewalks and business centers never rate a mention in Belgrade. (Every Western diplomat passing through Kosovo is introduced to him, though.)
One reason for the “fear and loathing” of the Northerners has to be the Serbian press, where every instance of rock-throwing (“stoning”) is reported. Vandalism of cemeteries in Serbia is the work of students celebrating the end of the school year, or of a mental defective, or of thieves stealing metal. In Kosovo, tipped over headstones are treated as an offense against all Serbdom, if not humanity. (Comments from the diaspora on instances in Kosovo are especially heart-wrenching.)
During the recent events in the north, Belgrade officials demanded that the West deal with violence in the south perpetrated against Serbs. This seems to have been confined to 1) two elderly farmers being stopped by the police (ROSU, they claimed) and addressed in Albanian. They were “beaten” (certainly no signs of it in the photo, though) and forced to remove their outdated license plates. 2) A house burned down. (Suspiciously little follow-up on this one.) 3) A priest driving through an Albanian town had his cassock grabbed (?) and was told to go back to Serbia. 4) And a returnee being interviewed said that relations between Serbians and Albanians had “cooled” because the Albanians made provocative remarks – although they still got along fine with their neighbors.
Keeping outrage alive is becoming harder and harder.
I agree 100% with your key judgement that the recent events in the north “will do nothing to enable Pristina to govern the Serb population in the north.” But a solution will also need something that goes beyond the Ahtisaari plan in order to deal with the plain distrust the Serbs have in any connections to what they see as an Albanian-run Kosovo state. If not this, then the prospects remain continued stalemate, partition or renewed conflict (prompted by further provocations from the south).
As for Amer(ican), continued efforts to hide from the reality of this distrust by blaming northern resistance on the press, criminals, whatever do not suggest any real familiarity with the situation on the ground. As to the “confined” violence in the south, Serbs might be forgiven for having a different view based on their understanding that it is only the firm hand of the Americans that is constraining that violence for now.
“As for Amer(ican), continued efforts to hide from the reality of this distrust by blaming northern resistance on the press, criminals, whatever do not suggest any real familiarity with the situation on the ground. ”
I’m not trying to hide, I’m trying to understand, and my understanding is based, of necessity, on what I read. (And I read Serbian more easily than Albanian.) – There was a study done in America years ago on the level of fear in different sectors of the public – and it was highest among the elderly, especially those who were essentially house-bound and got all their information about the world from TV news (where, “if it bleeds, it leads”). The situation in Kosovo certainly looks similar. I know what happened after the end of the war and in 2004, but the Albanians have won now, and further progress depends on staying calm and unprovoked.
Or maybe the Albanians really want to see the end of every Serb in the country. In that case, all they have to do is wait: Novosti today writes about the number of village schools (all over Serbia) being closed for having 5 or fewer pupils, and the situation in Kosovska Mitrovica and the surrounding area is described as “dramatic” http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/aktuelno.69.html:341660-Zatvaranje-800-skola. Is it really in the Serbs’ interest to hold out for their preferred solution while the tide is running against them?
Apart from relations between Kosovo and Serbia as two states, a major obstacle to reconciliation between Kosovar Albanians and Serbs is overall history of violence there. When Kosovo was a part of Serbia, Serbian regime was inflicting brutal and indiscriminate repression on ethnic Albanians. Many high-ranking local Serb police officials were given virtually infinite power by Belgrade with the task to suppress even an idea of regaining the previous level of autonomy by the province, let alone independence. Those officials were then massively using the power granted by Belgrade to extort money from wealthy Albanians, regardless of whether one had earned their wealth by legal or illegal means. Thus, for example, the officials were willing to turn a blind eye to illegaly obtained firearms discovered during raids on gangs for certain amounts of cash. At the same time, the officers were likewise extorting money from other rich Albanian families which were not criminals but honorable people. Such corrupt behavior on the part of the Serb officials had a twofold effect: on the one hand, it allowed criminals to accumulate weaponry on a large scale; on the other hand, it concurrently produced fear and resentment among those honest Albanians who were being maltreated without any logical reason at all.
When Kosovo’s Albanian majority finally won the independence they had undoubtedly deserved, extremists among them set off the retaliation that was as indiscriminate as the repression formerly exercised by Serbian regime. Hence such a deep mutual distrust of ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo.
I have to say, there is a great model for autonomy, and that is the Ahtisaari package. The problem is that the Serbs in the north never even considered it. That is because they were encouraged/controlled by Belgrade.
So, firstly, before we talk about any other type of autonomy, we must ask the Serbs in northern Kosovo to consider the Ahtisaari autonomy. (Ivanovic admitted that it was a good settlement). This of course is only possible if Belgrade is told unequivocally that it must stop supporting the internal partition of Kosovo.
@Gerard,
Amer is talking about the causes for the lack of trust. Just saying there is distrust is not a good enough analysis. It is very true that Belgrade money, media nationalism/organized crime are the most important causes for this distrust.
Serbs in northern Kosovo have little reason to distrust Kosovo’s institutions. Pristina never enforced any rule upon them. And the only inter-ethnic conflict in the north is that caused by Serbian parallel structures/crime networks to intimidate Albanians.
@amer: might it be that Pristina spends extra money on the enclaves because it is in a competition with the parallel structures? If there was less money to divide less people might vote in the official elections.
In the North there is a considerable number of Serb refugees from elsewhere in Kosovo who can’t go back to their old place because of safety reasons. Are you really incapable of understanding why they are afraid of an Albanian takeover? Why do you think virtually no Serb has returned to Kosovo’s cities?
@bytyci
Did you ever read the Ahtisaari Plan. I suggest you read it and count how often it grants some right of self determination and then later says that in the end some approval from Pristina will be needed.
As for lack of trust: do you follow the discussion about the bridge near Prilužje? Do you believe that all the fear of that local population is the result of propaganda from Belgrade? Do you remember why Milosevic became so popular in Kosovo? Not because propaganda from Belgrade – the Kosovo Serbs at that time felt abandoned by the Serbian government – but because he paid attention to their existing fears.
Those allegations of criminality aren’t just Albanian or American wishful thinking – reports of Kfor investigations on personalities in the north have recently started appearing at Lajmeship (with helpful translations into Albanian for those whose French is weak): http://www.lajmeshqip.com/dossier/dossier11/nato-iv-marko-jakshiq-doktori-i-krimit-ne-mitrovice, for example.
Danas today http://www.danas.rs/danasrs/politika/celu_istinu_znaju_samo_srpske_sluzbe.56.html?news_id=221649 has a story with quotes of some of the highlights and denials by a couple of those profiled, who say that these are just intelligence reports, not legal documents, and no attention should be paid. At least in Thaci’s case similar reports prompted the Hague to look into the matter. Perhaps in these cases, too, no reliable evidence will be found.
Amer, those KFOR reports are from 2001. So one has to wonder what is the relevance today. A lot is copied from the Serbian press and the “own” intelligence looks very weak. The French text is full of reservations like “it appears” and “he is believed to”.
@Daniel Serwer
I take for granted that you are motivated by sincere democratic feelings. Nevertheless you start your post recognising that “Serbs of northern Kosovo want to remain citizens of Serbia, not of Albanian-majority Kosovo” and end it up hypotising the best ways to make these Serbs citizens of Albanian-majority Kosovo. That seems to me bitterly paradoxical.
Shouldn’t people’s will be the key? Why in the case of Serbs it hasn’t to be respected?