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Blame game

My publication yesterday of the Serbian platform for negotiations with and on Kosovo has attracted a great deal of attention.  I don’t have a lot to add to what I’ve already said, but sleeping on it made me wonder whether the backward-looking platform is best viewed as part of a internal political game in Serbia.

Here is how I put it to Politika, a leading Belgrade outlet:

I’m not sure it really is a hardening of position so much as a revelation of what the real position is.  I also suspect that it was done partly because of inside Belgrade politics:  [Prime Minister] Dacic has been given the difficult issue of Kosovo and was handling it in a way that looked as if it might produce results; now [President] Nikolic has given him a platform guaranteed to fail.

I imagine this is the real position, that is one that reflects what Belgrade would really like.  It makes the negotiations far more difficult, since now Belgrade will have to explain to its public any deviations from what it said it wanted.  The Serbian constitution already made the position of the Serbian negotiator almost impossible.  There is virtually nothing in this newly revealed proposition that is worthy of discussion, but I do hope the talks continue.  The mediators should set the agenda, not the parties.

I would add that it is well worth reading Florian Bieber’s account of some of the details in the proposal, in particular their relationship to the Ahtisaari plan.  He makes the point that much of the Serbian platform is consistent with the Ahtisaari plan.  I wouldn’t quarrel with anything that falls in that category.  The only discussion of those items should be about implementation.  But not all of what Serbia proposes is consistent with the Ahtisaari plan.  The proposals on justice, police and parliament are really deal breakers.

So too of course is the proposition that all of Kosovo remain formally an autonomous province within Serbia, even if only nominally.  Some see this as implicitly abandoning Belgrade’s partition hopes.  That is little comfort.  Belgrade may want some fig leaf solution that enables it to claim that Serbia has permitted Kosovo sovereignty, but sovereignty and territorial integrity there will have to be if Serbia wants to put this issue behind it.  There is no “normal” relationship between neighbors without that.  If Serbia wants to maintain its claim of sovereignty over the entire territory or a part of it, Kosovo will have to equip itself accordingly.

But back to the original point of this post:  the Serbian proposal tells us more about Serbia than about Kosovo.  And what it tells us, I suspect, is that the major political figures there are playing the blame game.