Tag: Balkans
Anyone still interested in Macedonia?
Last time I headlined a blog post asking whether anyone out there was interested in Macedonia, I got a ton of visitors to www.peacefare.net, so I thought I would try again. Here are my notes for a presentation I did yesterday. I was asked to focus on cross-border linkages. No fair asking what others said, or who else was there, or where this discussion was held: it was done (in DC) under Chatham House rules. Needless to say, these notes were not delivered verbatim, but they are true to what I said and represent my views:
Macedonia
March 21, 2011
1. I was asked to explore the interconnections in the Balkans – including cross-border issues – from a Macedonia-focused perspective.
2. I suppose being a talking head on the Balkans over the past 15 years does gives me some perspective on the issues. Before that I was Mr. Federation in Bosnia as well as an office director in State Department Intelligence and Research in 1996-97, when we tracked Dayton implementation, the virtual collapse of Albania, the rise of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Zajedno demonstrations.
3. Let there be no doubt: what happens in Kosovo does not stay in Kosovo, and what happens in Bosnia doesn’t stay in Bosnia.
4. I imagine it is perfectly obvious to all of us that ethnic partition in either of Macedonia’s neighbors could be catastrophic for Macedonia. Certainly the Macedonians understood this when they recognized Kosovo, hoping that its borders would not be changed, and proceeded successfully with the demarcation of their own border with the new state.
5. Likewise, if Macedonia comes apart it will affect Kosovo and Bosnia. That is not the issue today, but I can assure you it was the issue in 2000/2001, when a very calm and rational Prime Minister Georgievski called me in, making me promise that I would not bring the American Ambassador or Jim Pardew.
6. He then told me he wanted to partition Macedonia and asked that I take that message back to Washington.
7. I refused, telling him I did not work for the U.S. Government but knew perfectly well how unwelcome his proposal would be.
8. The problem with partition is not only the idea of drawing a line, but the difficulty of deciding where to draw it. This is especially true for Macedonia, where the largest Albanian city is Shkup. Look at the difficulties that have arisen over a Church museum on the “wrong” side of the river. Can you imagine what it would take to draw a new national border at the river? The answer is clear: war. And that war would quickly spread to Kosovo and to Bosnia.
9. So disintegration is subject to the domino theory in the Balkans. What about integration?
10. Certainly we know that integration works well for the organized crime networks, which have no difficulty cooperating across borders.
11. I hasten to add that this is also true for the taxi drivers. One day in 2000 or 2001, when my staff had failed in weeks of efforts to arrange ground transportation from Belgrade to Pristina, I called the concierge at the Hyatt.
12. The next day Milenko, the doctor of taxi cab science, deposited me at Gate 3, Podujevo, and I was picked up by his “colleague” from Pristina.
13. I have taxi-hiked all over the Balkans since.
14. Once I got to Pristina, I quickly ran out of Serbian cell phone credits. Psst, I whispered to the concierge in the hotel Baci. Would it be possible to buy more here in Pristina. Of course he said loudly, any of the guys on the street will sell you credits for your Serbian phone.
15. So integration is possible in the Balkans, and basically healthy even if it involves gray market cell phone credits.
16. The problem is that the official efforts at integration are always running behind the unofficial ones.
17. Macedonia in particular has been slow to take advantage of what Europe is offering.
18. There are reasons for this: The big threat in the Balkans today is lack of progress: on the Macedonia name issue, on Bosnia’s constitutional reforms, on Pristina/Belgrade dialogue. That last has begun to move, and I hope it will produce good results.
19. These are long-standing irritants that are being allowed to remain unresolved and are blocking progress towards NATO and the EU. This is a mistake—Brussels and the Balkan capitals need to find a way of moving forward, even if only slowly. Washington should help, but it doesn’t want to play the primary mover role any longer.
20. Macedonia has been a candidate country for EU membership since December 2005. Its progress is at best slow: the progress report in November 2010 has lots of “little progress,” “limited progress,” “modest progress.”
21. It seems to me the way the government covers for this is to be belligerent: towards the EU, the US and Greece.
22. Let me say a final word on the name issue, because it is the main obstacle to more rapid integration of Macedonia into NATO and the EU.
23. I testified years before the US recognized Macedonia by its constitutional name that it should do so, and I got then Senator Joe Biden wagging a finger “no” in my face for my trouble.
24. I am entirely sympathetic to the Macedonian position in substance: a country is entitled to call itself, its people and its language anything it wants. If nothing else, the interim accord, which allows Macedonia to use the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, should apply.
25. I hope they win their case at the International Court of Justice, which might at least get Macedonia into NATO, where it belongs.
26. But I can’t help but suspect that Prime Minister Gruevski uses the name issue for political purposes, not only getting votes but also hiding lack of progress on EU reforms.
27. The EU could be tougher with Macedonia—they give a lot of euros to Skopje every year.
28. The name issue will presumably be settled in court, or not.
29. But is it time to make the money more conditional on EU-required reforms?
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One big decision made, another coming
With kind permission of theatlantic.com, here is my piece they published this evening:
The Strikes on Libya: Humanitarian Intervention, Not Imperial Aggression
This has much more in common with the international response to Bosnia than it does with the war in Iraq
The destroyer USS Barry fires Tomahawk missile at Libya from Mediterranean Sea. By Reuters.
A coalition of the willing attacks an Arab country. French warplanes strike armored vehicles. American cruise missiles take down air defenses. It all sounds to some too much like Iraq redux. But it is not. The proper analogy is Srebrenica. This is the international community acting under international law to prevent mass murder.
The current military action against Libya is clearly authorized by the UN Security Council. Qaddafi has claimed it is illegal, but even China and Russia (who abstained from the UN vote) cannot doubt that Resolution 1973 authorized the use of force to protect Libyan civilians. Neither will Germany, Brazil, nor India (all of whom abstained). Angela Merkel has already said “We share the aims of this resolution. Don’t confuse abstention with neutrality.” The others may not like it, but if they had serious legal or political objections they could have voted against. Or maybe their interests in becoming permanent Security Council members overwhelmed their reserves. Either way, the resolution had all the votes it needed.
These strikes are not based on doubtful evidence. Qaddafi has said plainly what he intends to do to civilians who resist, even peacefully, and he has demonstrated repeatedly that he is prepared to carry out his threats. Even on the morning of the attacks, his armor entered Benghazi, in clear contradiction of his own Foreign Minister’s declaration that Tripoli would respect the cease-fire. Later Qaddafi’s spokesman disowned the foreign minister’s statement.
There is a solid coalition backing the military action, one that includes several Arab countries as well as the U.S., France and the United Kingdom. Even the Italians, who have historically close relations with Libya and even with Qaddafi personally, are on board. Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates were present for the meeting in Paris that launched implementation of the UN resolution, as was the Arab League. (Saudi Arabia was missing.) While Russia, China, India, and Brazil were absent, Germany was present.
The U.S., while it has claimed outsized credit for the diplomacy, is not visibly in the lead of the military action. UK and France have claimed that honor, with NATO as the operational forum. American contributions are likely to be substantial, in particular when it comes to cruise missiles, intelligence, command and control and other U.S. assets. But this is not an American operation with a coalition tacked on.
This leaves the question of purpose. Is this offensive, like the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, an effort at regime change, with Qaddafi the ultimate target? Or is the objective, as Hillary Clinton claimed after the Paris meeting, only to protect civilians? For the moment, this is a distinction without a difference. Unless Qaddafi changes not just his tune but his behavior, he represents an imminent threat to civilians throughout Libya. It is up to him to convince the coalition that he is prepared to change his behavior, as he successfully did in 2003 when he gave up his nuclear weapons program.
But it seems Qaddafi won’t change: he appears as attached to the use of force against his people as Ratko Mladic was against thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia. Qaddafi rightly knows he can only stay in power if he can kill Libyans.
Srebrenica, not Iraq, is the right historical precedent for what is happening in Libya. In 1995 the West failed its declared intention to protect civilians in a Muslim-populated enclave in eastern Bosnia, declared a “safe area” by the UN. There weren’t enough Dutch peacekeepers in the area to defend the Muslims and, as a result, thousands of men and boys were massacred in cold blood.
Only a few weeks later NATO responded to Serb attack on another “safe area,” Sarajevo. NATO launched a bombing campaign that broke apart the Bosnian Serb Army and allowed Croat and Muslim Federation forces to advance on the Serb army. As the Serbs reeled from the air attack, they took hostages and used them as human shields. They also parked armored vehicles near mosques and schools. We should expect Qaddafi to do likewise.
When NATO stopped the war, the Muslim Federation had taken about 66 percent of Bosnian territory and might well have gotten to 80 percent within 10 days. At the Dayton Peace Accords, we rolled the federation forces back to 51 percent of the territory, because of a previous agreement between parties on how to bring peace to Bosnia. This decision to curb the federation made implementing peace the difficult task that it remains today, more than 15 years after the end of the conflict.
If history is a guide, then, the next big decision on Libya will be when to draw down the international military campaign. Does it stop when Qaddafi backs down, even if his forces still control a good part of Libya? That would be a hard peace to implement. Or do we wait a bit until his regime collapses and he flees or dies? This may be as important as the decision to launch the military strikes, as it will determine whether Libya remains a single state or suffers the kind of semi-dismemberment that still makes Bosnia, and Iraq, difficult places to govern.
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This is interesting
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic is cited today as saying that Serbia has to find a solution for Kosovo before it can enter the EU, which might happen by 2015. This is not new, nor is it as promising as it sounds at first reading, because he adds:
Such compromise would guarantee economic and political autonomy of Kosovo, without jeopardizing Serbia’s territorial integrity….We cannot have a long-term peace if we support one nationalism against the other. It’s good to support the European kind of compromise which is not satisfactory but it is functional.
It is also said that he cited two precedents: Hong Kong and the two Germanies. Both of these are cases in which reintegration into a single sovereign state was the eventual result.
Anyone who follows Kosovo knows that autonomy within the context of even nominal Serbian sovereignty is no longer possible, if it ever was. Nor will reintegration happen, except in the context of EU membership for both Belgrade and Pristina. Belgrade cannot hope to govern Kosovo the way China today governs Hong Kong or Berlin governs East Germany. That’s a pipedream.
Djelic’s statements are nevertheless interesting, as they suggest that Belgrade is beginning to think seriously about what it has to do about Kosovo in order to get into the EU. This should be the vital question for Belgrade. It is also urgent, since the EU is unlikely to move quickly on an application for membership from a state that cannot define its own borders.
It should also be the vital question for Brussels, which so far has not spoken unequivocally about the need to resolve the Kosovo issue before Serbia can enter the EU. It is of course hard for Brussels to speak with one voice on this subject, as 22 of its member states have recognized Kosovo and 5 have not. Some of those 22 are sure to block Serbian membership so long as the Kosovo issue remains unresolved and have said as much publicly and privately. Getting an unequivocal statement out of the 27 would go a long way to clarifying the situation. You don’t need to have recognized Kosovo to know that EU membership for Serbia is impossible without resolving the Kosovo issue.
Washington will also have to be clear with Belgrade about the need to resolve Kosovo before Serbia can enter NATO. This is less urgent, as Serbia understandably shows few signs of really wanting NATO membership. But no one should be encouraging Belgrade to think that anything less than a full resolution of the Kosovo issue is vital to Serbia’s long-term relationship with the United States.
Pristina should take notice too. It would be perilous for Kosovo if Serbia were to enter the EU first, even if it has accepted Kosovo as a sovereign state. Belgrade would then have a veto on Pristina’s EU membership. The only reasonable solution to this problem is for Pristina to accelerate its own efforts at preparing for EU membership. It has done well to meet the EU technical requirements for the Schengen visa waiver, and I hope the EU will come to its senses and allow that to go forward. But there are many other areas in which Pristina is lagging. It needs to get its own house in order. Governing well is the best revenge.
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That was easy!
EU mediator Robert Cooper opened talks between Pristina and Belgrade Tuesday in Brussels, marking the launch of a dialogue process called for by the UN General Assembly last fall and likely to last many months if not years. Chief negotiators Borko Stefanovic and Edita Tahiri are eminently capable and qualified exponents of their respective sides and will be expected to try to keep the talks going despite shaky political situations in both capitals.
I’ve now heard several different versions of the agenda, with Stefanovic saying the first item was land registers, diplomatic sources saying it was supposed to be customs (an obviously sensitive issue for the Serbian side) and the Americans originally interested in establishing the authority of the Kosovo courts in northern Kosovo.
I’m not sure it matters much. Whatever works is okay for me. But I do think it will be difficult to keep the focus on practical issues without wandering off into status questions. If you don’t think land registers can be linked to status issues, guess again. Serbian government and Church land claims in Kosovo are extensive. The link of status to customs and courts is too obvious to mention.
This is one of those diplomatic dances that drives outsiders nuts. All the diplomats agree the talks are about practical issues, not status, but it is also perfectly clear that the eventual goal is to get to a situation in which Serbia can accept Kosovo as a sovereign state, one way or another. Membership in the UN might be sufficient, if formal diplomatic recognition proves too difficult.
Nothing less than that will get Serbia into the EU, and nothing less than that will satisfy Pristina and Washington either. We just don’t say it in polite company, because it will make life harder for those Belgrade who want to prioritize Serbia’s EU membership. But that symmetrical table, with the Pristina delegation on one side and the Belgrade delegation on the other, already presages the eventual outcome.
That is not to say there isn’t a lot of work to be done on practical issues, or that it won’t be useful to start with them. The potential agenda is long: land registers, customs, authority of the Pristina institutions in northern Kosovo, mutual recogntion of documents, return of artefacts, state property, citizenship, pensions, salary arrears, transportation and telecommunication links, police and border patrol cooperation…. Resolving at least some of these issues will improve relations between Pristina and Belgrade–which have been virtually non-existent since the 1999 NATO/Yugoslavia war.
I trained both Serbian foreign service officers and Kosovan officials for these talks years ago. I’m delighted to see that they are happening, and I wish both sides well in pursuing their legitimate interests. Success in these talks will help a good deal to move the Balkans closer to the EU. Failure is not an option. Best wishes to Edita and Borko!
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Refighting the Bosnian war
The arrest in Vienna on a Serbian warrant of the Bosnian general who led Sarajevo’s defense at the beginning of the Bosnian war in 1992 is the latest Belgrade effort to rewrite history. Jovan Divjak, an ethnic Serb, is accused of war crimes for an incident in May 1992. During the UN-negotiated evacuation of a Yugoslav National Army (JNA) general an his aides from Sarajevo, the UN-protected convoy, which without authorization from the Bosnian side carried soldiers, weapons and files, was attacked and 18 people killed.
The merits of the war crimes accusations have already been considered in London last year, in the case of Ejup Ganic. The British court found that the Serbian authorities had abused the judicial process and released Ganic, after months house detention.
But if you want to see for yourself Divjak’s role, get the documentary The Death of Yugoslavia (it’s available from Google Videos on line) and watch the general call for those firing on the convoy to stop. It’s in part 4. Start with Divjak at about minute 28, and watch the part about the detention by the JNA of Bosnian President Izetbegovic, which is essential background to the convoy incident at minute 44.
Why would Belgrade pursue this legal case now? Serbia’s current leadership is mainly focused on getting the country into the EU, but it is also determined to satisfy nationalist sentiment by establishing that Serbs were victims during the wars in Yugoslavia. I have no problem myself in acknowledging that: Serbs suffered not only during the war, but also thereafter under the continued autocracy of Slobodan Milosevic.
But it is past time–almost 20 years have gone by–for Serbs to adopt a version of history that is recognizable by their antagonists. Arresting Divjak is as much an abuse of judicial process as the arrest of Ejup Ganic and dishonors Serbia’s democracy.
PS: The thesis that Belgrade is refighting the Bosnian war is elaborated in more detail and with ample support in an RFE piece by Nenad Pejic. He writes
Standing behind all these cases are figures in Serbia’s security organs, police, and military who are backed by far-right political forces….Despite having all these cases dismissed one after another — and the case against Divjak will surely be dismissed as well — the rightists have achieved their goal. Serbian media covered all the arrests with patriotic jingoism, and ethnic tensions across the Balkans were inflamed. Divisions were deepened. Tolerance suffered another setback. The soil was prepared for future conflicts or partitions. And pro-Western forces in Serbia have been sent a strong message about the power of the far right. They are still fighting a war that has been lost.
PPS: I guess if the Austrian Foreign Minister thinks the extradition of Divjak is “unthinkable” that means it won’t happen. But the request is still an embarrassment to Serbia.
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“Bosnia and Herzegovina does not exist beyond the entities”
With gratitude for the translation, I have posted Milorad Dodik’s letter to the Ambassadors of the member countries of the EU and Peace Implementation Council in BiH, in which among many other things he claims that “Bosnia and Herzegovina does not exist beyond the entities.”
The letter has been carefully prepared by Dodik’s lawyers and merits being read in its entirety. Not being a lawyer, I would not want to get into a tussle on the legal issues it raises.
But it is also a political document, one intended to appeal particularly to Americans, whose constitution is cited repeatedly as justification for Dodik’s views.
What are those views? In short, that the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina never existed (“The only thing true is that the „Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina“ did never exist at all in accordance with the international law”), that Republika Srpska and the Croat Community of Herzeg-Bosna were the only legitimate institutions in Bosnia before Dayton (i.e. the Bosniaks who were loyal to the Republic don’t count), that the High Representative is an anti-democratic institution imposed on unwilling subjects, and that the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina that emerged from Dayton is nothing more than the two entities, supplemented later by Brcko district, and can have no functions other than those explicitly assigned to it in the Dayton constitution, or delegated to it by the entities. Not once are the requirements of NATO or EU membership mentioned.
I won’t quarrel with this letter point by point–I’ll leave that to others. I’ll just note that the history is dramatically incorrect and even offensive, as the letter is addressed to the representatives of states that had recognized the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, despite the genocidal efforts of Republika Srpska and its Belgrade master to wipe it off the map.
More importantly for the future, Dodik’s views are not compatible with a functioning Bosnia and Herzegovina that can meet the obligations of NATO and European Union membership. For anyone who still believes Dodik can be cajoled into supporting such a state, I recommend reading the whole thing. There is no way.
What Dodik is committed to here (and elsewhere) is the creation of a Republika Srpska that is sovereign in everything but recognition, which he no doubt believes will follow some day when the internationals tire further and finally accept his version of Bosnian history. He is also committed to grabbing enough state property to keep his ship afloat for a few more years, as it is in parlous financial condition.
The question is whether Washington and Brussels will read, understand and react in ways that make it clear that the only Bosnia and Herzegovina they are prepared to accept is one that can negotiate membership in NATO and the EU. That state will need to go beyond Dayton. The next test for Dodik is whether he is prepared to create a Sarajevo government that has all the powers it requires to take on the responsibilities of NATO and EU membership. I’m not holding my breath.
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