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Where am I?

That’s what a loyal reader asks:  she wants me to comment on recent events in Northern Kosovo, where the Pristina government seized a border post in northern Kosovo Monday evening that was then attacked and burned, allegedly by Serbs.  One Kosovo policeman was killed.  NATO forces have now taken possession of the border post, resisted by Serbs.

Read all about it at Outside the Walls, but ignore the nonsense about NATO starting a war and acting illegally.  UN Security Council resolution 1244 never gave local hooligans (or Belgrade) the right to control the Kosovo side of the boundary or border, which is properly secured by NATO if the Kosovo Police Service and Customs are unable to do it.

None of this is surprising.  It was only a matter of time before Pristina/Belgrade differences over the status of northern Kosovo led to violence, as they have in the past, and it could get worse.  I know of no two countries on earth where borders are not agreed and demarcated that don’t have big problems, often violent ones.

The odd thing in this case is that Belgrade and Kosovo agree where the line limiting Kosovo territory is, but they disagree on whether it is just an administrative boundary within Serbia or a border between two sovereign states.  Belgrade claims all of Kosovo as sovereign territory but only exercises sovereign control in the northern 11% north of the Ibar River.  Pristina claims independence, now recognized by 77 countries, but it is unable to gain entry into the United Nations or enforce its laws–including customs–in the north.

If the burning of a border post is the worst that comes out of this, we’ll be lucky.  The issue here is the fundamental one in the Balkans:  why should I live as a minority in your country when you can live as a minority in mine?  Both Serbs and Albanians are saying no, they don’t want to live as a minority in a state dominated by the others.  Albanians say no because of their actual experience living in Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Serbia.  Serbs are saying no because they fear being treated by the Albanians the way they treated the Albanians.

All of that is quite comprehensible.  What is less clear is why anyone should expect people in Washington to worry about a minor disturbance in a faraway place, when it faces a lot bigger issues. The answer to that question unfortunately is that this incident–or some sequel–could unravel 15 years of relative progress in the Balkans.  Pandora’s box can be opened in many places, but northern Kosovo is definitely one of them.  Over at the Foreign Service Institute, they have for years used a crisis management simulation for training senior officers that starts with rioting in Mitrovica and ends in partition of Bosnia.  Partition of Macedonia and Serbia (both Presevo and parts of Sandjak are majority minority) are also real possibilities.

Even a wide-open Pandora’s box might not attract much of Washington’s attention these days, obsessed as we are with our own budget problems and more or less three wars in places more important to us than the Balkans.  It’s good that NATO has now intervened, a move that will presumably stop the violence.  And it is good that the Security Council has refused to allow a public discussion that Serbia sought as a stage for its Foreign Minister to continue to provoke as much trouble as possible.  But don’t expect the American cavalry to come galloping to the rescue.

The only thing that will nail Pandora’s box closed is an agreement between Pristina and Belgrade on status:  first status of northern Kosovo, then status of Kosovo as a whole.  The EU has the lead on Belgrade/Pristina talks, which should discuss northern Kosovo as soon as possible. Even if five EU members haven’t recognized Kosovo, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t recognize that opening Pandora’s box is a really bad idea.  It is truly bizarre that Belgrade, which claims all of Kosovo as its own, is now trying to divide it.

I can’t imagine why Belgrade would put its hopes for EU candidacy at risk for 11% of Kosovo.   Nor do I see why it is supporting hoodlums in northern Kosovo, even if some of those hoodlums are more than likely on Serbia’s secret service payroll.  If Serbia were serious about its EU candidacy, it would arrest whoever killed the Kosovo policeman and turn the murderer over to the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo.

Kosovo has less to lose, hence Pristina’s ill-conceived and ill-executed seizure of the border post, but if it wants sympathy in Washington and Brussels for its efforts to establish sovereignty over all of Kosovo it will need to avoid provocations.  Neither Europeans nor Americans will be happy to see NATO troops tied down on the line between Kosovo and Serbia.

The issue that precipitated this mess, believe it or not, is whether Serbia will accept “Republic” of Kosovo on Pristina’s customs stamps and documents.  I gather Pristina intended its seizure of the border posts to allow it to block imports from Serbia into Kosovo so long as Serbia continues to refuse imports from Kosovo with the dreaded “Republic” word inscribed.  Does the EU really want to begin negotiating membership with a country that can’t settle a dispute of this import with its neighbor, and aligns itself with hooligans?  Does Kosovo really want to blot its copybook with the EU over the R-word?

So where am I?  Right here in DC, hoping that Belgrade and Pristina will come to their senses and sort out what is, after all, a relatively small problem in the current world order.

PS:  A birdie tells me I was wrong about the R-word.  It has not appeared on Kosovo customs stamps since 2008, and Pristina might have dropped it from the customs documents.  Belgrade still wasn’t prepared to agree.

PPS: For an update on the situation, see Jeff Jorve’s “Breaking with Customs” at The American Interest.  He has at least two great virtues:  he has been in Mitrovica this week and he was an excellent student in my post-war reconstruction class last semester.  First class piece that calls for Pristina to start proving to the Serbs in the north that it is willing to take their concerns into account and help them in a difficult situation.

Let’s be practical

As I thought I might be giving a talk this week about the Balkans, I prepared the following text, which I would not want to see go unused. So here are my latest, but not very new, thoughts about the Balkans:

The Balkans are a region that produces more history than it can consume but also generates less future than its people would like.

There are two places that still merit attention in Washington. One is Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the state created at Dayton in 1995 is facing a serious partition challenge from Republika Srpska, its Serb-dominated half. The other is Kosovo, where a similar challenge arises from Serbia’s desire to hold on to the northern 11% of the country.

These are the last territorial issues in the Balkans, a region once wracked by ethnic claims. Either one might, if mishandled, generate instability and ethnic conflict, vitiating 15 years of progress. Not only Bosnia and Kosovo might be affected, but also Macedonia and Serbia, which has Muslim and Albanian-majority areas that will want whatever the Serbs get in Bosnia or Kosovo. We need to ensure that Pandora’s box remains closed.

That reassurance can no longer come only from the United States. Today, the European Union holds most of the leverage in the Balkans. The prospect of EU membership—now ensured for Croatia and not too far off for Montenegro—has become a major incentive for Balkan reform, where otherwise there is an inclination towards ethno-territorial breakdown.

We need the Europeans to secure stability in the Balkans, but they also need us. American-led interventions ended the Bosnian war as well as Yugoslav repression in Kosovo. Nowhere are Americans more appreciated than among Bosnian Muslims and Kosovars.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Let’s start with Bosnia. In the first 10 years after the Dayton agreements were signed, it made good progress with a lot of international tutelage. But Bosnia has stalled for the past five years, since rejection in 2006 of the April package of constitutional amendments. They failed to reach a two-thirds majority in the Bosnian parliament by just two votes. It was a setback from which Bosnia has still not recovered.

Since then, Milorad Dodik, now president of the Serb-controlled 49% of Bosnia, has set course to make his Serb entity as autonomous as possible, denying the validity of decisions by the internationally designated High Representative and challenging the authority of Sarajevo-based governing institutions and courts. His stated goal is independence for Republika Srpska, even if he has often stepped back from irreversible steps in that direction.  It is not an accident that Dodik has also been predicting that EU membership for Bosnia is 50 years in the future.

We need to recognize that Dodik is serious. His strategy is to maximize the separation of Republika Srpska from the Bosnian state so that he can, if political conditions ever permit, achieve independence in the future. This is essentially the same strategy that was pursued successfully by Milo Djukanovic in Montenegro, which became independent in 2006.

There is, however, a big difference between Montenegro and Republika Srpska, whose population today is overwhelmingly Serb because of an aggressive ethnic cleansing campaign during the Bosnian war. Montenegro gained the support of all but its Serb minority for independence and conducted a referendum under strict supervision of the international community. Dodik has no intention of allowing the return to Republika Srpska of its pre-war Muslim plurality. To the contrary, the RS is unwelcoming to Croat and Muslim returnees and maintains an atmosphere hostile to non-Serbs in its schools, press, governing institutions and social life. Ratko Mladic, now on trial in The Hague for genocide and crimes against humanity, is still a hero in Republika Srpska, which is funding his defense.

There is another difference in Bosnia:  secession of Republika Srpska would lead quickly to secession of at least some Croat-majority areas of Bosnia, leaving in central Bosnia the “green garden”:  a non-viable, rump Islamic state.  Neither Zagreb nor Belgrade would want to see the green garden planted in their midst, and it is hard to picture the Americans or Europeans liking the idea either.  Avoiding this outcome was a major motive for the Americans in supporting a united Bosnia in the 1990s; it is no less important in 2011.

If ever there is a referendum in Bosnia, it should be conducted in the entire country on a serious proposition:  do you want to live in a Bosnia that can qualify to become a member of the European Union?  I have no doubt at all that such a proposition would pass with a strong majority and silence most talk of secession.

The European Union approach to this problem has been accommodation. Dodik this spring scheduled a contentious referendum on the Bosnian court system and the High Representative that would have set a precedent for an independence referendum. The High Representative was prepared to annul the legal arrangements for the voting, something he can do as the referendum violated the Dayton agreements. Instead, the European Union, without telling the Americans, arranged to accommodate Dodik’s demand for discussions on the Bosnian court system, without consulting the Bosnian government.

I have rarely seen American diplomats more outraged, though they have largely kept their fury out of the public eye. Blind-siding the Americans—actually it is usually called sand-bagging in the bureaucratic world—no doubt gave Dodik a great deal of satisfaction, as it meant that the European Union came to him and met his demand for discussion of institutions belonging to the Bosnian state, without representatives of that state present.

So what we are seeing in Bosnia is obvious deterioration of the international consensus on how to handle Dodik’s determined and consistent efforts to gain the kind of autonomy that will make independence some day in the future possible.

Kosovo

I am pleased that we are not seeing the same thing in dealing with Kosovo, where the EU has been leading a dialogue effort between Belgrade and Pristina intended to resolve practical problems that would improve life for both Serbs and Albanians. Robert Cooper, who has led this effort on behalf of Brussels, has kept the Americans at the table and in the loop.

The dialogue has now produced its first modest results: agreements on mutual recognition of documents and license plates as well as provision by Serbia to Kosovo of copies of official records taken at the end of the NATO/Yugoslavia war. Other more far-reaching agreements are thought to be imminent. This illustrates clearly what can be achieved when the Americans and Europeans act together.

There is still, however, a long way to go. Belgrade has said it will never recognize an independent Kosovo, which is not a problem so long as it eventually lifts the Russian veto on its membership in the UN General Assembly. This it will have to do before Serbia can enter the EU, which will not want to accept a new Cyprus-like divided member. In fact, Serbia is under pressure to specify sooner rather than later on what territory it intends to apply EU laws and regulations—the acquis communitaire. It hopes to hold on to at least the part of Kosovo north of the Ibar river, which is contiguous with Serbia and is still governed by Belgrade. If it specifies all or part of Kosovo, Serbia won’t be taken seriously as a candidate for EU membership–it would be best if the EU can be convinced not to allow it candidacy status until it settles the issue of the north with Pristina.

The Serbian political leadership, even its more forward-looking and pro-European president Boris Tadic, has painted itself into a corner on Kosovo issues. Belgrade refuses to meet with Pristina officials who are clearly identified as such.  It needs to find its own way out of this cul-de-sac. I would suggest it work along this path: recognition not of Kosovo’s independence, but of the legitimacy of the Kosovo’s democratic institutions, with whose representatives it has already reached limited agreements.

Pristina could help this process if President Atifete Jahjaga would invite Tadic to visit Kosovo’s capital and pay a courtesy call. If he refuses, he embarrasses himself: why wouldn’t he call on the democratically legitimized president of a territory he claims is part of Serbia? If he accepts, we get past a silly hurdle that the Serbs have erected for themselves.

The American role

What is the American role in all of this? We need to do what we can to complete the state-building process in Bosnia and Kosovo so that American troops and civilians can turn their attention to more pressing matters.

Here are my relatively few recommendations for what the United States should still do in the Balkans:

1. Working with the EU, get Serbia to tell RS it will never be independent or part of Serbia and that Dodik needs to turn his attention to strengthening the Bosnian state so that it can become an EU member.

2. Urge Pristina to invite Tadic to visit.

3. In a joint statement with the EU, declare that Kosovo and Bosnia will not be divided and can only hope to enter the EU as states within their well-established borders.

Even the five members of the EU that have not recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty can, I believe, acknowledge that its independence will not be reversed and that partition of either Bosnia or Kosovo is a bad idea. If we expect Belgrade to be practical, we should expect ourselves to be practical as well.