Day: February 8, 2014
Pragmatic Kosovo!
I enjoyed a conversation at SAIS yesterday with two of Kosovo’s finest: Deputy Prime Minister Slobodan Petrovic and Foreign Minister Enver Hoxhaj. Slobodan has led Serb participation in Kosovo’s government for the past three years, holding also the portfolio for local governance. Enver, a political science professor, has participated in many of the international negotiations that Kosovo has undergone over the past twenty years.
The watchword was “pragmatic.” Both speakers are clear about their goals. Slobodan wants improvement in the lives of Serbs who live in Kosovo. Enver wants the Kosovo state to have a well-recognized place in the international community. They have worked together to achieve these goals, but both are ready to compromise along the way, so long as things keep moving in the right direction.
Enver thinks normalization of relations between Pristina and Belgrade means eventual mutual recognition and exchange of ambassadors, but for the moment Kosovo has taken what it could get: an April agreement that recognized its constitution should govern in all of Kosovo and exchange of liaison officers located in the respective capitals’ European Union missions. Belgrade won’t accept Kosovo passports, but it has accepted its identity cards. The other “technical” agreements are also steps in the right direction.
Slobodan thinks the municipal elections held for the first time under Pristina’s authority in Serb-majority northern Kosovo were far from perfect: intimidation and even assassination determined the outcome, which favored a Belgrade-sponsored Serb list. But Petrovic’s Liberals got more votes than ever before and captured what seats they could. The international community should have taken a stronger stand against irregularities and supported those who have been committed to the political process. Next time, he hopes.
In the foreign minister’s view, Kosovo faces some difficult issues in 2014. It wants to get into NATO’s Partnership for Peace but needs to overcome resistance from the Alliance’s non-recognizing members. Kosovo also needs to decide the size, composition label for its security forces. It has passed the halfway mark in gaining recognitions from members of the UN General Assembly and hopes to make it to the two-thirds mark, but it will still face a veto by Russia in the Security Council. Kosovo hosts too many international missions. The UN has been superfluous for some time; the OSCE is overstaffed and undertasked.
The EU rule of law mission is still necessary to handle sensitive cases like that of the recently arrested mayoral candidate Oliver Ivanovic, but the deputy foreign minister thought it important that the remaining cases of this sort be settled expeditiously. In his view, 2014 will be important for the fall parliamentary elections. A gentleman’s agreement to maintain reserved seats for Serbs and other minorities, which were to be phased out after two election cycles, should be respected, not abrogated.
Asked whether the Pristina/Belgrade agreement and recent election results might presage “Bosnia-ization” of Kosovo into two ethnically identified entities, both Slobodan and Enver think not. The already functioning Serb municipalities south of the Ibar will not want to give up what they’ve gained. The northern municipalities are beginning to see clearly that they will gain from operating under Pristina’s authority, as they will retain a good deal of local control as well as substantial resources. If the agreement is implemented in good faith as written and the EU remains the guarantor, the risks are minimal.
I remember a time when I could not have imagined such a conversation. Enver reminded our audience that the war was fought between the Serbian state and the Albanian population of Kosovo. That may be true, but there were long periods when it seemed you could count on one hand the number of Albanians and Serbs willing to have a civilized conversation with each other. Now more than a handful are using democratic institutions to govern together. I know the challenges are still great, but pragmatic can go a long way with time.
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My Bosnian daydream
Like many of the Bosnians quoted by Reuters, I’ve got mixed feelings about the ferocious protests of the past few days. The violence and destruction are deplorable. The resentment and demand for change understandable. The country has seen little economic, political or social progress for more or less a decade.
Bosnia is stuck in an institutional morass created at the Dayton peace talks that ended the war in 1995 but failed to provide functional governance. My colleague at SAIS Ed Joseph thinks the US and EU should make another push at internal reforms in exchange for acceleration of Bosnia’s EU candidacy. I agree that is a good idea. And as he suggests, there are constitutional proposals left over from past efforts that are worth reviving, revising and returning to parliament for approval.
But little will change unless Bosnians decide it has to. Peaceful continuation of the protests is one way to signal the desire for change. Peaceful protests have a much better chance of mobilizing large numbers of people across ethnic lines than the violence of the past few days, which frightens Bosnians concerned with anything that might return the country to war. Minorities in particular worry that the protests may take an ethnic turn. Even peaceful demonstrations unnerve older Bosnians, who may remember that the war started with one.
Another opportunity comes in next fall’s presidential and parliamentary elections. By then, the Dayton constitution will have kept Bosnia enchained in a strait jacket of ethnically-based parties for almost twenty years. The Americans and Europeans would do well to abandon their usual refrain, “we support the process, not any particular candidates.” They need to support those who are ready to cross ethnic lines to find allies willing to advocate constitutional change that will enable more effective governance consonant with EU requirements. Otherwise, the ethnic nationalists may well succeed once again, electing people who advocate an entirely different kind of constitutional change, including independence for Republika Srpska and a third, Croat entity.
These two ideas are the zombies of the Bosnian war. They never seem to die. Here is my wooden stake: both notions would lead to a three-way partition of Bosnia, with one of the emerging entities a land-locked, non-viable Islamic republic ripe for radicalization and seething with irredentist ambitions. It is hard for me to picture a worse neighbor for Belgrade and Zagreb, or a less welcome development from the US and EU perspective.
Fortunately, the idea of a Bosnian Islamic republic isn’t very attractive to most Bosnian Muslims either. The more common and deeply rooted Bosniak attitude is support for a unified secular state on the whole territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with minority protection primarily based on respect for individual (rather than group) human rights and the rule of law. But the Bosniak political leadership has failed to find sufficient Croat and Serb allies to give that vision the votes it needs in parliament, partly because it is so much easier to fish for votes with the bait of Bosniak nationalism.
This is the bad habit Bosnians need to break: the slide back to identity politics because the Dayton political system and long habit make it so much easier to garner votes that way. Someone has to emerge with the capacity to transcend ethnic nationalism and speak effectively for the genuine Bosnian aspirations that put people into the streets this week: jobs, equality, good governance and a European future. When that happens, there will be a rush to cross-ethnic coalitions, because it will be the only way to compete effectively. So far, only Željko Komšić, the Croat member of the presidency, has succeeded at this, which is why he comes in for so much approbation from the nationalists.
Am I day dreaming? Yes. But sometimes daydreams come true.
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