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A bird’s eye view of north Kosovo

A well-informed, well-situated birdie offers the following picture of what is going on in northern Kosovo and its broader implications.  None of it is surprising, and none of it is confirmed by hard evidence, but worth pondering nevertheless.  Solutions are going to have to take current circumstances into account:

The main reason why most ordinary Serbs in northern Kosovo are refusing to integrate into Pristina’s political system and institutions is not that they fear local kingpins but because they also benefit from smuggling even if they are not criminals themselves.  Almost everyone there has at least one relative – in either their immediate or broader families – who is involved in smuggling business, and almost all Serb families are interconnected in one way or another. Profits from smuggling are so huge that gang bosses are able to bribe a large number of people into turning a blind eye to organized crime. In other words, even if you are not directly engaged in illegal business, you can benefit indirectly from it. The result is that most people have virtually no job but are nevertheless able to provide for themselves thanks to these high profits from smuggling. Therefore, they see no interest in changing a situation favorable to themselves, in spite of all the anarchy that exists in the area.

The Serbian gendarmerie troops deployed across areas bordering Kosovo are ordered to prevent only the illegal transfers of commodities from Kosovo into Serbia but not from Serbia into Kosovo.

Belgrade finds it difficult to dismantle the parallel institutions in northern Kosovo because a number of high-level Serbian politicians from nearly all relevant political parties and consecutive governments (including the incumbent one) were in earlier periods involved in smuggling and other criminal activities related to Kosovo by providing political protection to prominent criminals and getting in return a share of the profits.  This enables criminals and their accomplices from unreformed parts of security-intelligence apparatus to blackmail these politicians with compromising material. So, even if they were willing to comply with demands from Brussels – and especially Berlin – to dismantle the parallel Serb structures, their hands are virtually tied.

Of particular interest is that this account puts the emphasis on things Brussels should worry about:  the selective porousness of the boundary between Pristina’s control and Belgrade’s, the pervasive influence of organized crime and the compromised situation of Belgrade’s national leadership.  

Some of my readers will object that this concerns only the Serbian side of the equation.  They are correct.  I don’t have the same kind of inside view of the Albanian side, though I will be glad to publish it if someone reliable provides it.  I have no doubt but that there are beneficiaries south of the Ibar river that separates the areas of Belgrade and Pristina control.