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Slaying the partition vampire

Serbian President Vucic’s speech in northern Kosovo on Sunday has attracted a lot of attention because of this nauseating line:

Miloševic was a great Serbian leader; his intentions were certainly the best ones…

That’s too bad, because this unfortunate passage obscures the main thrust of the speech, which is represented better in this passage:

Serbia fought honorably and bravely against NATO in ’99, protecting itself. And we lost. They were much stronger, richer, much bigger cowards and they could drop many bombs from the sky on our people. And we lost, just like we had lost 610 years earlier. We were left without significant territories; Serbs abandoned many of their thresholds not wanting to live under the Albanian authority.

When you lose a war, you pay a price for it. A high one; the highest. And we, Serbs, even today pretend as if nothing had happened. We pretend that it was not us, with our own stupidities and under the pressure of the western world, who participated in proving our own guilt also for the conflict in Kosovo and Metohija.

Absent from this speech is the President’s partition proposal that has mobilized so many electrons lately. On borders, Vucic suggests they will not be easily changed:

Because when they tell you how I want to change borders- they’re not telling the truth, because where are the borders today, where are they, does anybody know where they are? We think one thing, the Albanians, bigger in numbers and stronger in Kosovo, think differently. One part of the world thinks one thing, the other thinks other. Actually, I want to change your rights and I want us to do everything we can, to preserve everything we can in Kosovo and Metohija, because our situation is not the same like the situation thirty, fifty or sixty years ago. I want us to gain for you all those rights you are entitled to, and which are the part of what is called the civilized world.

Admittedly I am reading between the lines, but this sounds to me much more like abandonment of the partition proposal than advocacy of it. He is telling Serbs who live in Kosovo that he will advocate for their rights within Kosovo, not for them to leave it.

That message is also implicit here:

I’ve come to tell you what we will concretely do and what I brought to our people in Kosovo and Metohija. We came with a comprehensive investment plan for ten Serbian municipalities, all ten. All four north-Kosovo municipalities: Zvečan, Leposavić, Zubin Potok and Kosovska Mitrovica. But also for Novo Brdo, Gračanica, Ranilug, Parteš, Klokot, Štrpce…for each place where Serbs are majority, but also for all Serbs, where they live, and where they are in a huge minority.

And there is this:

And there are no mythical borders. I want ones within which live people who have rights belonging to them. I want the ones because of which no one will be humiliated, and certainly not Serbia.

And when I say that we want agreement, we want compromise, not a dictation. We want to hear everything, but we also want to be heard. Finally and first of all, I want you to live here and to make it yours.

Throughout the peroration, Vucic underlines that the future of the Serbs in Kosovo needs to be settled by negotiation, not arms, and that it will take time–it will not be settled soon.

All of this suggests to me that he has given up on partition, at least in its more dramatic form. Why? I suspect an ethnic map of southern Serbia tells much of the story (the map comes to me through Sinisa Vukovic):

Once Kosovo President Hashim Thaci suggested the majority Albanian municipalities of southern Serbia (in blue) would have to be ceded to Kosovo if Serbia wants the northern Serbian majority municipalities, the partition proposal looked a lot less appetizing. How would that get through Serbia’s parliament? The thin yellow line, which bisects both Albanian and Serb municipalities (the latter in red), is Belgrade’s north-south route to Greece and Thessaloniki, Serbia’s main outlet to the sea. You may not care about that, but the Serbian Army definitely does.

I don’t imagine the partition proposal is completely dead, as no one has yet pounded a wooden stake into its heart. No doubt someone will suggest ceding only the Albanian municipalities west of the road to Kosovo, while someone else may push the idea of only some of the northern municipalities (not including North Mitrovica, which was Albanian majority before the war) joining Serbia. But vampires can also be killed by sunlight. That I hope is what is happening in this case: open discussion of the implications of partition has certainly weakened the idea, if not killed it.

I do hope people will not waste any more time and political energy on it. Serbia has a legitimate concern with the welfare and security of Serbs in Kosovo, just as Kosovo has a legitimate concern with the welfare of Albanians in Serbia. No democratic country can ignore its co-ethnics across a border, but none should want to move the border or the people. It is time to discuss how best to protect both Serbs in Kosovo and Albanians in Serbia, allow them a reasonable and symmetrical degree of self-governance, and enable them to prosper. That can and should be done without new ethnic entities and vetoes.

If those requirements can be met, both countries will want to ensure stability through the mutual recognition required for current EU members to ratify any new accessions. Then the vampire really will be dead, and coincidentally the border will for most purposes disappear.