The right medicine

Serbia is threatening to intervene in Kosovo if its parliament votes to create an army. NATO is backing Belgrade.

This is ridiculous. The Alliance should be telling Belgrade to stuff it. NATO-led forces in Kosovo should be put on alert to underline the point. 

Kosovo has been without an army since the 1999 NATO intervention that saved it from Serbian President Milosevic’s efforts to reduce its Albanian population by force and its 2008 declaration of independence. NATO has provided the country’s territorial defense, though it governs itself and has been recognized as sovereign by about 110 countries. 

Pristina now wants to convert its security forces, which are only lightly armed, into an army. The US, UK and NATO have been thoroughly consulted. The process will take 10 years or more. If NATO forces are ever to be removed from Kosovo and sent on to higher priority missions, the country will have to have the means to defend itself at least for a few days. NATO should be supporting those who want to lighten its burdens, not those who threaten aggression. 

Belgrade’s agenda has nothing to do with any threat from a Kosovo army, which is non-existent, now and in the future. What Serbia is trying to do is deprive Pristina of one of the vital elements of sovereignty. It is also trying to find an excuse to intervene and occupy the Serb-majority portion of Kosovo’s north, where organized crime figures aligned with Belgrade’s ruling authorities reign supreme. 

NATO backing for these objectives is a serious mistake. So too is Europe’s refusal to give Kosovo a visa waiver program, despite its assiduous and successful efforts to meet the criteria that the European Commission set. Citing domestic political pressures, France and others are saying Kosovo will need to wait until at least 2020. While the EU has consistently lowered the bar for Serbia’s progress on its EU agenda, Brussels seems determined to raise the bar for Kosovo.

Kosovo makes its mistakes too.  The 100% tariffs it recently imposed on Serbian imports is a violation of its international obligations under the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), so far as I can tell. But that mistake will be corrected through the normal CEFTA process. The NATO and EU mistakes are far harder to correct and will leave serious scars on their relationship with an admittedly small country with no near-term prospects of accession.

But that is precisely the reason the EU and NATO should rethink what they are doing. Kosovo as much as Serbia needs Euro-Atlantic prospects if the two countries are to escape the negative spiral they are currently locked in. A visa waiver program for Kosovo, a strong NATO warning to Serbia, initiation under NATO guidance of the evolution of its security forces into an army designed mainly for international deployments, and an end to prohibitive tariffs on Serbian goods are the medicine that can cure the current fever.