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Pandora’s box opens also in Serbia

Yesterday’s House subcommittee hearing on Kosovo and Serbia focused mainly on Chair Rohrabacher’s strong advocacy of self-determination for everyone.  Why, he asked repeatedly in many different ways, should we force people to live in a state where they don’t want to live?  Isn’t self-determination fundamental to Americans?  Why should we not want it for others?  What is sacrosanct about borders drawn by dictators, monarchs and colonialists?  Why shouldn’t everyone be able to choose the state in which they live?  Why would we give that choice to Kosovars and not to others?

He was joined in these refrains by at least three of the four experts on the non-Administration panel of witnesses.  I was the most vigorous of the dissenters, helped along the way by Democratic Representatives Engel and Keating.  Any newbie watching the show might have thought that there is a real debate on this issue in Washington, and maybe even a partisan divide between Republicans who advocate self-determination and Democrats who want to trap people as minorities in states they do not want to live in.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Representative Rohrabacher is an outlier, not a trend.  There is no real debate in Washington, where both Republicans and Democrats generally prefer the traditional position in favor of state sovereignty except where there is mutual agreement to divorce (e.g., Czechoslovakia, the breakup of the Soviet Union and Sudan’s partition).  Even then, the preference is definitively in favor of changing the status of a pre-existing boundary (from an internal one to an international border) rather than moving it to accommodate ethnic differences.

Why is this the case?  To make a long story short:  it saves lives.  Trying to move a border to accommodate ethnic differences is never simple or straightforward.  There is always someone on the wrong side of the line.  That someone will either try to move the line again, or the majority on his side of the line will try to move him, or both.  This is how ethnic cleansing begins.  It ends in death and destruction, sometimes on a genocidal scale.

Why then did some of us advocate Kosovo independence, which amounts to partition of Serbia?

First, it is important to note that the boundary between the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo and Serbia was not moved.  In the eyes of those who recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty, the status of the boundary was changed to an international border, but it is drawn where Tito left it.  This is not because we think there is something sacrosanct about former Yugoslavia’s internal borders, but simply because redrawing it is problematic and likely to lead to conflict.  There are something like 10,000 Albanians who would like to return to homes north of the Ibar river.  There are more Serbs who live south of the Ibar than north of it.  They don’t want to leave–they’ve proven that by staying this long.  If the border were redrawn at the Ibar explicitly to separate Serbs and Albanians, you’d have a lot of unhappy people unable to return or retain their homes.

Second, there really was no choice.  UN Security Council resolution 1244 removed Kosovo (in principle all of it, including the territory north of the Ibar) from Serbian sovereignty in 1999.  From then until Kosovo declared independence in February 2008, Serbia made no effort whatsoever to “make unity attractive,” in the phrase used in Sudan.  In the meanwhile, the UN was relatively successful in building up democratically validated institutions in Pristina, which now enjoy  substantial but not universal Serb participation.

When Belgrade approved the new Serbian constitution in 2006, it needed a “double majority” (50% of those voting had to approve and 50% of registered voters had to vote).  It got the second majority only by crossing off the Kosovo Albanian names on the voter registration lists, thus denying Kosovars the right to block adoption of the constitution by not voting in the referendum.  This for me was the last straw.  It meant that Belgrade did not regard the Kosovars as citizens of Serbia.  Therefore they had to be citizens of a different state.  That state is now the Republic of Kosovo.

The Kosovo situation is not, as US government officials often claim, “unique.”  There are certainly parallels and worse in Kurdistan.  But the Kurds, for their own reasons, have not yet chosen to declare independence, knowing full well that the US, Turkey and Iran lean heavily against.  That 17% of Iraq’s oil revenue also weighs heavily against.  The fact that the boundary between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq is not yet agreed would make a Kurdistan declaration of independence a sure-fire way to start a debilitating conflict in a country that is now the world’s third largest oil exporter.  That conflict would likely spread to “Eastern” Kurdistan (which is inside Iran) and to Turkey.

Redrawing the border between Kosovo and Serbia would likewise ignite regional conflicts.  Albanian nationalists would see it as triggering their right to unite with Albanian communities in Serbia, Macedonia and Albania, a right explicitly denied in Kosovo’s constitution.  Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated 49% of Bosnia and Herzegovina, would seek either independence or union with Serbia.

That is enough to deter me, but I’ve saved the worst for last:  Serbia itself would be put at risk.  Its Vojvodina province, or part of it, might well be inspired to seek independence or union with Hungary.  Bosniak-majority municipalities in Sandjak would certainly want to join Bosnia, never mind that they are not contiguous with it.

I trust this “Pandora’s box” scenario is one the international community will choose not to trigger by redrawing Kosovo’s borders.  But I fully anticipate that Albanians in southern Serbia, Bosniaks in Sandjak, Hungarians in Vojvodina and perhaps other minorities elsewhere in Serbia will start asking for the same rights Serbia has gotten in the Belgrade/Pristina agreement for the Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo.  I’ll be interested to hear whether those who want everyone treated equally will advocate for them, or side with Belgrade when it denies them the right to govern themselves, including choosing their own police chief and having a special appeals court panel.

Pandora’s box opens also in Serbia.  Best to keep it closed.

PS:  Here are the videos of the hearing.