Anyone anywhere anytime

There is a tone of desperation creeping into Belgrade’s remarks on the failure of the dialogue with Pristina.  Serbia will meet anyone anywhere anytime under any chairmanship.

The trouble is that the EU isn’t going to want to continue to meet without real results.  Catherine Ashton, who will be traveling in the Balkans this week, has invested a lot in the Pristina/Belgrade dialogue.  She has more important things on her plate, including a difficult nuclear negotiation with Iran.  We are approaching the drop-dead date for her report to the EU on April 22.  Missing that opportunity will result in a delay in giving Serbia a date to start its EU accession talks at least until after the German elections (September 22) and likely much longer.  Belgrade needs to do something to get Ashton to modify her itinerary and stop off in Serbia (and I’d hope Kosovo as well).

For all the dazzling complexity of the issues in northern Kosovo, the vital question for Belgrade should come down to this:  will Serbs be better off accepting reintegration of the north with the rest of Kosovo, or will they not?

My answer to this question is unequivocal:  the Serbs south of the Ibar river are clearly better off having more or less accepted that they live in an independent Kosovo where they can govern themselves at the municipal level while enjoying a good deal of positive discrimination at the national level.  They unquestionably have complaints.  Rada Trajkovic famously complained that she wasn’t allowed to park her car with Serbian license plates in the Kosovo government parking lot.  There are also far more serious complaints of discrimination, intimidation and violence.  But the bottom line is clear:  the Serbs south of the Ibar are staying and participating in Pristina’s institutions even while flying Serbian flags and painting big signs that say “Kosovo is Serbia.”

I believe the Serbs north of the Ibar would also be better off accepting the reality of Kosovo’s independence and exploiting their rights and privileges under the Ahtisaari agreement, which is more than generous in providing for local self-governance while allowing them to maintain their Serbian (as well as Kosovo) citizenship and to receive education and health services provided by Serbia.  But doing that requires that Serbia abandon its efforts to maintain sovereignty over the north, even if it continues to have a lot of sway there.

To put no gloss on it:  the police and courts in the north cannot be Serbia’s police and courts.  They must be Kosovo’s, acceptable to northerners but under Pristina’s authority.  Less than this endangers Kosovo’s claim to sovereignty.

This is what Belgrade is still resisting.  Continuing to do so will make the EU wonder whether it can ever establish a clear border between Serbia and Kosovo.  It will not make northern Kosovo Serbs any better off than they are now.  Tax-free smuggling, their major enterprise, may make a few of them well off, but economic development in the north has basically stood still since 1999.  Nor will continuation of the present situation help the Serbs who live south of the Ibar, where Serb domination of the north has fed growing Albanian nationalism, especially among those who have been prevented from returning to the north for more than a decade.

For both Serbia and Kosovo, solving the problem of the north is vital to getting on with much more important business:  creating jobs, improving economic performance, fighting corruption and organized crime, governing well, preparing for EU accession.  Neither government would be wise to continue the current situation.  Both would be wise to reach an accommodation.  If there is a serious agreement, six months from now no one will remember what the row was about.  If there is none, they’ll be stuck in this rut for years.