Patience is a virtue
I’m in Pristina, so friends and colleagues are assuming I know something about the talks Thursday between Serbian Prime Minister Dacic and Kosovo Prime Minister Thaci. The truth is I know nothing I wouldn’t know in Washington DC, except that the few people I’ve talked with here are skeptical of any agreement on the northern bit of Kosovo not under Pristina’s control and concerned that the young Kosovo state may get snookered. I imagine that mirror-image concerns exist in Serbia.
Complicating the situation here are three more or less simultaneous bombs that went off Thursday evening targeted at parked government cars. “Dissatisfied” claimed the bombings, which appear not intended to kill anyone but rather to warn the government not to give in on the north.
Vetëvendosje! (Self-determination), a Kosovo opposition political party that opposes the dialogue, has accused Thaci of violating the constitution by offering “special” autonomy to the north. That’s rich, since Vetëvendosje! itself has an anti-constitutional platform calling for a referendum on union with Albania (which is prohibited in the Kosovo constitution). If Thaci were to give away the north, it would benefit Vetëvendosje! more than the government.
The simple fact is that we don’t have enough data on either what was agreed in Brussels or who was behind the bombings to even begin to speculate on the implications. Patience is a virtue. We should give both Dacic and Thaci the benefit of the doubt. They are risking their political careers trying to resolve one of the last remaining war and peace problems in the Balkans, with a lot of help and pressure from their European and American colleagues. Dacic is getting flak in Serbia for suggesting that Kosovo might get UN membership if a satisfactory agreement can be reached on the north. Thaci is getting flak in Pristina for supposedly agreeing that customs revenue collected in the north will go at least temporarily to development projects in the north, in a scheme jointly administered by the Kosovo government, a Serb from the north and an EU representative. Neither of these alleged offenses sounds capital to me, but I’m suspending judgment until we know more.
Let’s wait and see what has really been agreed and how it will be implemented. In the meanwhile, is it too much to ask that all political parties in Kosovo renounce violence and wait for the Prime Ministers to report to their respecctive parliaments on what happened in Brussels?
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Zeri is saying that a special fund for the Serbs of the north from the customs money means that Kosovo has recognized the autonomy of the north. On the other hand, this may be the best way for Prishtina to gain at least a little appreciation from the Serbs living there, based on their experience with the money that Serbia claims it has been sending south and that has quietly disappeared into the pockets of privileged individuals without leaving ordinary people noticeably better off. After B92’s Insajder special series a couple of months ago, hardly anybody bothers anymore to dispute that this has been happening. If the tripartite body – Belgrade, Prishtina, and EULEX – can handle the customs money involved transparently and people can see they’re benefiting under the new system it might help to reduce the animosity level. The government in Belgrade has been helping in this regard by acting like the evil stepmother recently – in response to the B92 series in the Serb communities in Kosovo it’s cut the pay of teachers and medical workers who also receive a salary from Prishtina. (Party workers are probably still safe.) as As a way of keeping anybody’s allegiance, this would seem to be counter-intuitive,frankly. The special customs-money fund may be one of the few examples of a solution that benefits everybody, except perhaps the smugglers, who are already struggling to come up with a respectable excuse for opposing the new customs procedures).