Tag: Democracy and Rule of Law
Partition has failed, prepare something else
Serbian President Vucic has announced that his efforts to get something in negotiations with Kosovo have failed. What could he mean, and what does the announcement portend? It is hard to tell, but my guess is that Vucic has come to realize that there will be no unilateral partition of Kosovo.
That is what Vucic wanted: the northern majority-Serb municipalities in exchange for some sort of recognition of rump Kosovo. Kosovo President Thaci has made it clear he would only agree to some version of that proposal if Kosovo gets equivalent territory in southern Serbian municipalities that have Albanian majorities as well as UN membership.
The Serbian security services have no doubt told Vucic that is unacceptable. The land/people swap just isn’t going to work out, as it fails to protect vital interests of both Belgrade and Pristina: the former is concerned about its main route to the sea through southern Serbia and the latter with its main water supply in the north. Moreover, Serbia can no longer–if it ever could–commit to UN membership for Kosovo, which is blocked by a Russian veto in the Security Council.
The failure of this proposition is a relief, as it will avoid raising questions about borders in Macedonia, Bosnia, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Vucic and Thaci may regret it, but the rest of the world should rejoice that Putin has not been handed a prize he would use to try to shift borders to accommodate Russians in what he regards as his “near abroad.” We should also be glad that Serbia itself, Spain, China, and other countries with ethnically diverse regions will not find ethnic secessionists re-empowered.
So far so good, but what about Kosovo? What are its prospects if the land/people swap is dead?
Again I’m guessing, but I think there are still deals to be had. They will not involve UN membership, because Russia now has its own interests in blocking that unless it gets satisfaction on South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, Crimea, and Donbas. But Pristina still wants and needs bilateral recognition, or at least de facto acknowledgement of it authority on all the territory of Kosovo, not least so that it can join multilateral organizations as well as settle issues still outstanding with Belgrade: unpaid pensions, state property, border demarcation, Serbian efforts to prevent Serbs from joining its police and security forces, protection of Serbs and Serb religious sites throughout Kosovo, and creation of a Kosovo army.
Belgrade has wanted to use the creation of an Association of Serb Municipalities, something that has already been agreed, to create in Kosovo a de facto self-governing Serb “entity,” analogous to Republika Srpska (RS) in Bosnia, with veto powers in Pristina. Vucic is likely now to double down on that idea, but it is clearly something Thaci cannot deliver. The Kosovo constitutional court has already ruled out anything analogous to the RS, which has rendered governance in Bosnia dysfunctional. The votes for a constitutional amendment to enable creation of a Serb entity in Kosovo simply don’t exist in the Kosovo Assembly.
Nor do the votes exist in the Serbian parliament for changing its constitution, which claims Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia. Those votes are unlikely to emerge before EU accession is imminent. At that point, Serbia can expect to get nothing in return, since all the leverage will be with the EU, which will not accept Serbia until normalization with Kosovo is a done deal.
So whatever emerges now is likely to be messy. That is not unusual. Colleagues in KIPRED have done us all a favor by reviewing some available options that have proved feasible elsewhere. I’d suggest Vucic and Thaci read that fine paper. They’ve both got good thinkers available. Put them in the same room to come up with something viable for both parties. And in the meanwhile focus political efforts on preparing their electorates for the inevitable compromises.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Only a fool or a charlatan
My post yesterday has aroused some interesting responses. Most important: that I ignored Russia and its efforts to undermine both NATO and the EU.
It’s true. I did ignore Russia, because my primary purpose was to illustrate that we have come a long way. But future progress will encounter Russian-created obstacles. Moscow, which for many years was content to play a relatively minor and often positive role in the Balkans, has now decided instead to try to block NATO membership for those countries not yet in the Alliance: Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia.
The lengths to which Moscow is now prepared to go were apparent in Montenegro, where the Russians plotted and tried to execute an assassination/coup against President Djukanovic. That failed and Montenegro entered NATO, but the Russians continue to support the anti-independence, anti-NATO opposition in Montenegro, thus hindering the evolution there of a serious pro-EU, pro-reform political opposition, which the country needs.
Moscow’s attention has now shifted to Macedonia. Both in Skopje and Athens it is supporting opponents of the Prespa Agreement that would allow North Macedonia to enter NATO and begin accession negotiations with the EU. Russia has several opportunities to block the agreement and its implementation:
- The September 30 referendum could fail either because it does get 50% of yes votes or because more than 50% of registered voters don’t come to the polls.
- Even once approved in the referendum, the implementing legislation could face difficulties in parliament.
- The Greek parliament could fail to approve the agreement, or the government in Athens could fall before doing so, causing an inordinate delay.
The Russians are working on all these fronts to screw things up. Success on any one of them could cause real problems in Macedonia and elsewhere the region, where Skopje’s progress is regarded as vital to maintaining the West’s momentum.
In Kosovo, the Russians’ best bet for messing things up is support to the land/people swap that Presidents Vucic and Thaci are discussing. That would greatly enhance President Putin’s arguments in favor of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia as well as the annexation of Crimea. He is in fact likely to condition dropping the Russian veto on Kosovo’s UN membership, which Pristina thinks has to be part of any swap, on acceptance of those propositions. The Americans have made it clear they will not go along, which could mean Kosovo ends up doing the swap but still without UN membership.
Things are even easier for the Russians in Bosnia, where Republika Srpska (RS) is already owned by Moscow. The RS’s many vetoes and its substantial autonomy mean that Bosnia as a whole will progress only slowly towards the EU and not at all towards NATO. Russia pays for the RS President’s allegiance to its cause with cash as well as weapons and training for his increasingly militarized police and their various militia sidekicks, but it is fair to say that by now most of the population of the RS is thoroughly imbued with a pro-Russia narrative that will be difficult to erase. The pro-Russian narrative is also making headway among the Bosnian Croats, who are not immune to seeing their bank accounts fattened. Driving Bosnia towards a three-way partition suits Moscow’s purposes, as it makes NATO and EU membership unthinkable.
In Serbia, things are a bit more complicated. President Vucic has steered Serbia away from NATO membership towards military “neutrality” but is anxious for EU accession. His problem in getting there is not just the Russians. He must know that the EU will not accept Serbia without a free press and an independent judiciary, neither of which he has been willing to countenance. Moreover, his government is laden with pro-Russian sentiment, due at least in part to its role in preventing Kosovo from becoming a UN member. Beyond that, Moscow has little to offer: a few excess MiGs, an investment in the energy sector that secured the Russian veto, and likely some walking around money. But if Serbia wants serious reform, it won’t find it in Moscow, and if it wants to be considered neutral it will have to get rid of the Russian logistics base it has allowed near Nis.
So yes, the Russians can interfere with EU and NATO prospects for the remaining non-members in the Balkans. They have learned how to do it at low financial cost, including second-rate murder plots and lots Russia Today and Sputnik News broadcasting, as well as Twitterbots and other instruments of cyber warfare. But only a fool or a charlatan would trade the prospect of membership in NATO or the EU for an alliance with a declining regional power heavily dependent on hydrocarbon revenue and facing slow economic growth, even as it overextends itself into the Middle East, threatens the Baltics, and murders its defectors in Britain.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Closer to the goal than the starting point
I prepared these notes recently for a briefing on the Balkans:
1. First, caveat emptor: my perspective is perforce a long term one. I first went to Bosnia more than 30 years ago. My inaugural UN flight into Sarajevo from Zagreb was hit by small arms fire.
2. I needn’t tell you how much it annoys me when Bosnians claim that nothing has changed while sitting with me in a café in Sniper Alley.
3. It annoys me even more when American and European academics regard the statebuilding enterprise in the Balkans as a failure.
4. I agree with all their complaints: there is too much corruption, too little ethnic reconciliation, too much state capture, too little rule of law, too much partitocracy, too little civic engagement.
5. I also agree that getting into NATO and the EU is hard and getting harder: enlargement exhaustion, concerns about immigration, worries about the Euro, and growing xenophobia will make accession difficult.
6. The tone of international relations has changed from the halcyon late 1990s, when the unipolar moment appeared to entail the triumph of liberal democracy and regional economic integration.
7. We are in a period of surging ethnic nationalist enthusiasm, including in the US. The Trump Administration is a white nationalist one whose empathy for Balkan nationalisms is evident.
8. But some things have not changed, at least in word and in part in deed: the promise of NATO and EU accession has been maintained, despite rumors of its demise.
9. All the countries of the Balkans are closer to the moment when they will qualify for NATO and the EU than they are to the early 1990s, when former Yugoslavia came apart.
10. No one can guarantee membership, as it is unclear when and if the political window will open. I trust the Trump Administration will keep the promise to get North Macedonia into NATO next year and that the EU will maintain its promise to open accession negotiations.
11. But after that, things will get harder. If the EU window does open in 2025, as Brussels has promised, it will certainly be a narrow one.
12. If I were a betting man, I’d put a small sum at good odds on Montenegro: it shows the kind of serious commitment to adopting and implementing the acquis communautaire required.
13. The big issue there is pluralism in a country much of whose opposition opposes independence as well as NATO membership. Montenegro needs a constitutional, pro-EU, pro-reform opposition. But it already has free media and a half-decent judicial system (that’s a B- in professorese).
14. Serbia in my view faces bigger problems. With a more complex economy, it will have more trouble implementing the acquis, even if it passes all the necessary legislation.
15. Just as important: Serbia lacks commitment to the needed political reforms. Neither its media nor its courts are independent. It is an electoral autocracy and also lacks a serious, pro-EU opposition.
16. For Macedonia, the main issue today is September 30: if the referendum passes, Skopje will have an opportunity to move quickly to NATO and begin serious EU accession negotiations, provided of course that the Greek parliament also approves the Prespa Agreement and Skopje manages to implement it.
17. Kosovo and Bosnia are the remaining laggards. But discussion of them requires that I deal with the current elephant in the room: swaps of land and people, border correction, partition, or whatever you want to call redrawing current borders to accommodate ethnic differences.
18. The idea is not new.
19. It was the basis of the Vance/Owen plan for Bosnia in the early 1990s, a plan that caused ethnic cleansing as ethnic nationalists tried to homogenize territory they expected to own.
20. Zoran Djindjic was pushing it for Kosovo before his assassination. Some even believe it was the motive for his murder, since it entailed giving up most of Kosovo.
21. Hashim Thaci and Aleksandar Vucic have been discussing it for years in their Brussels meetings, without however coming to a conclusion.
22. There are good reasons for that: Belgrade will not want to give up control of its main route south to Thessaloniki and the sea, and Pristina will not want its main water supply in Serbia.
23. I would add that if the north is incorporated into Serbia the viability of Serb communities south of the Ibar River is doubtful. But you don’t have to believe me: Father Sava, who in many respects is the leading light of the Serbian church in Kosovo, will tell you the same.
24. The issue of Greater Albania would then become a real one. That is the dog that hasn’t barked in the Balkans for decades.
25. Its bite could be much worse than its bark, requiring thousands of NATO troops to supervise the exodus of Serbs south of the Ibar and Albanians from Serb-majority areas in Serbia. How ugly would that be? And how expensive? Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
More on partition
I did this interview with Janusz Bugajski for RTK on September 4, but it was only broadcast last Friday, September 14:
I don’t think anything has happened in the interim to change my views.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Fantasy
Charles Kupchan, who is a professor at Georgetown and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in the New York Times:
Rather than causing a contagion of ethnic separation, normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo may well do the opposite. Serbia is the region’s dominant player. If it settles its impasse with Kosovo, it may well transition from being an aggrieved troublemaker to a satisfied stakeholder. Serbia’s help would be particularly welcome in discouraging Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated region of Bosnia left behind by the war there in the 1990s, from seeking to break away. The positive effects of reconciliation between Serbia and Kosovo further justify a one-off sacrifice of pluralist principles.
This is fantasy. There is no reason to believe that an agreement on ethnic division in Kosovo would not immediately cause a rise in ethnic nationalist claims in both Macedonia and Bosnia. Containing those, in particular if their advocates resort to violence, would be difficult without a major commitment of European and possibly American forces. A land swap would also provide Vladimir Putin with the leverage he needs to push the US to accept the border changes he wants internationally recognized: the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as well as the annexation of Crimea.
Note that Charles uses the classic op/ed dodge: “may well.” I know of no evidence for the claim that Serbia will be content with a piece of Kosovo. Serb nationalists also claim half or more of Bosnia. Nothing about a land swap between Belgrade and Pristina would discourage Republika Srpska (RS) from seeking to break away. In fact, its president has made it eminently clear in public that any land swap will make him push hard and fast for independence. He won’t care that the proposition is not “consensual.” Serbia would not be able or willing to recognize an independent RS without wrecking its EU prospects, but RS President Dodik and Putin would be content with an unrecognized Russian satellite.
Charles describes the land swap idea as odious, but he has not demonstrated how adopting it will improve the situation. To the contrary, it is entirely predictable that the consequences will be negative. Certainly there is as great a likelihood that they “may well” be catastrophic as beneficial.
Pluralism is not an option to be thrown away lightly for unlikely benefits, especially in a world where ethnic nationalism is on the rise. Fortunately constitutional requirements in both Belgrade and Pristina will prevent ta land/people swap from passing muster. Kosovo’s parliament is mostly opposed. Serbia’s parliament may be more compliant, but the required constitutional amendment there would require approval in a referendum with more than 50% of registered voters participating.
The New York Times piece will revive an idea that was already withering on the vine. That’s where it should stay.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
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.
RSS - Posts
