By PHK
Would an independent Kosovo be as unique as UN, US and EU officials contend? Or would it, sans Serbia’s agreement, open a Pandora’s box of secessionist movements throughout the region and elsewhere as the Russians argue?
This dichotomy is supposedly the crux of the issue – but as everything else in the Balkans the answer is more complex than meets the eye.
It’s been eight years since the lengthy dispute between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo erupted into a shooting war that caused a reluctant international community and even more reluctant Clinton Administration to intervene militarily through a 78-day bombing campaign and diplomatically in tandem with and upon the urging of the European Union.
Aside from a post World War II commitment to Greece, the U.S. was never eager to become involved militarily in the Balkans at least until former Soviet allies and Warsaw Pact members Romania and Bulgaria were considered for NATO membership. They joined in 2004, the second wave of post-Cold War NATO.
Mistake
When Yugoslavia erupted in 1991, then Secretary of State James Baker scoffed that the US “didn’t have a dog in that fight” and sighed a deep sigh of relief when the Europeans were eager to handle it on their own.
The Europeans couldn’t: the EU’s foreign policy making apparatus was still too weak and its military wing not strong enough to deal with the violence that was fueled by then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s playing of the ultra-nationalist Greater Serbia card for his political advantage.
Yet even at their weakest, the Russians demanded a say in the region’s future. These reasons are historic. By the 1990s, the Russian government - supported by Orthodox clergy - did this primarily through continued support of whatever policies the Serbs decided to pursue justified publicly in the name of orthodox religious affinity.
Meanwhile, the EU had no integrated rapid reaction force. The Clinton administration learned this to its chagrin in Bosnia and then again in Kosovo when U.S. and NATO forces enabled the fledgling Kosovar army (KLA) to dislodge the Serbians. Meanwhile US, EU and UN diplomacy checked and engaged the Russians.
It was not, however, until President Boris Yeltsin out-maneuvered hardliner and former head of Russia’s intelligence service Yevgeny Primakov as Prime Minister and made Viktor Chernomyrdin his special envoy on Yugoslavia that a settlement to that shooting war in Kosovo was reached. Chernomyrdin had closer ties to the West than the ever suspicious Primakov.
In 1999, the Russians had vociferously opposed the NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia. They supported the Serbs against the Kosovars for primarily strategic reasons although the rhetoric on the home front emphasized Russian support for Serbian orthodoxy against Muslim infidels. This sold well in Russia particularly given the Russian wars against Chechen separatists.
The Serbs, in the Russian view, had become the victims - not that times had changed, the population had become increasingly Albanian Muslim and the region was the economically poorest in all of Yugoslavia. Unemployment in the province ran rampant. As early as 1982/3 ethnic demonstrations had all but closed the capital Pristina to outsiders when we stopped there en route to Belgrade from Athens. Even at that time, it was obvious that Serbs and Albanians lived in tense separate worlds within the same city.
In 1999, Russia feared a change in NATO’s mission from defensive to offensive, opposed NATO attacks on its Serbian ally, the alliance’s welcoming of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic as new members and NATO’s announcement that the door would remain open to more new European members. The strategic balance in the region had changed – and not to Russian advantage.
The temporary agreement that emerged in the wake of the 1999 war was UN-protected Kosovo overseen by the contact group of six nations including Russia and the U.S. pending a final resolution. The result was the establishment of a UN protectorate that would lead to a highly autonomous region within what remained of Yugoslavia, but not full independence.
Now
The 1999 settlement was negotiated by veteran Finnish UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari who was brought back in 2005 when it became clear that tensions between the two communities were threatening to break into wide scale violence yet again and UN administration was faltering. His recommendations this time – after painful and lengthy negotiations with both sides - include an independent Kosovo (under EU supervision and with an international governor) that includes highly autonomous regions and generous minority rights for the seven to ten percent Serbian population who still live in the province as well as access to the Serbian Orthodox holy sites for believers from outside the new country.
The Milosevic regime is long gone. Serbia has had an elected government since 2000, but continued ultra-nationalism and consequent unwillingness to relinquish Kosovo combined with Kosovar insistence on independence from Serbia remain major factors in the ongoing stalemate. Inconclusive Serbian elections on January 21, 2007 and the inclusion of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia in its new constitution last fall have not helped.
It’s clear that Russia, Serbia’s protector, has decided to dig in its heels. Of all the issues outstanding between the U.S. and the Putin government - I understand - independence for Kosovo along the UN negotiated plan or perhaps otherwise will be the most difficult to achieve.
This may help explain why the W administration quietly put his administration’s spring push for a final Kosovo settlement on the back burner in July and into the lap of the State Department in apparent deference to Putin’s meeting with W in Kennebunkport. The issue was just not raised.
Whether, as US National Security Advisor Steve Hadley has suggested with respect to the new Russian Missile Defense proposal, hard liner Yevgeny Primakov is also acting as a back scenes advisor on Russian policy on Kosovo, or whether the views of Primakov just live on in the psyche of Putin’s foreign policy advisors, I don’t know.
What has not been reported widely in the western media is that in May Russia responded to the Ahtisaari plan by “calling on Kosovo Albanians to do more to protect minorities, develop decentralization, create the conditions for sustainable returns, and preserve cultural and religious heritage sites.”
According to a report in the EU Observer, “all of these elements are in the Ahtisaari proposal but Russia is against any form of independence until they are fully implemented. The main point of disagreement . . . is whether Kosovo will be in a better position to meet these obligations as a part of Serbia or as an independent state, with substantial international support and assistance.”
I think the Russian position on Kosovo foremost needs to be seen in terms of the Russian view of its long term strategic interests in Europe, how Putin and his advisors view Russia has been treated by the U.S. and the Europeans and the rather limited “carrots and sticks” the Russians have at their disposal in influencing the policies of its only remaining European client.
During the 1990s, the U.S. did not live up to a promise not to expand NATO. Instead, NATO membership crept up to the Russian border. The “colored revolutions” brought western influence ever closer to the Russian heartland and the W Administration’s high handed refusal to negotiate bilateral arms control treaties with the Putin government – or most anyone else - or treat the Russians as a true strategic partner has added salt to the wounds.
Russia’s newly found wealth based on the ever rising price of petroleum on the world market has given the country new leverage abroad. Since the Russians think strategically this should come as no surprise that they will use it as a foreign policy weapon.
Whether Russia has used the oil and gas sales leverage wisely thus far is questionable. Threatening Western Europe, Ukraine, or any or all of the Baltic Republics with turning off the pipe brings back bad memories of winter 1990 when the Soviet Union turned off the spigot to Lithuania in retaliation for that republic’s unilateral declaration of independence. In the end, the Soviet’s heavy fisted approach failed – but perhaps the Putin government has forgotten the chaotic aftermath that transpired.
Today, the Russians claim that they will support whatever the Serbians agree to but that’s only part of the picture. This position is fair, on the surface, in terms of internationally agreed upon requirements for peaceful secession.
However, if the Putin government will truly support whatever the Serbs will agree to, then the trump card for Kosovo’s independence might well be an economic – not territorial – one. The economic dimension, I think, has been under reported in the western media.
Could the Serbs be seeking the best offer - at least in private? The country is one of Europe’s poorest. Kosovo, with its sky high unemployment rate, makes the situation worse. The Serbian public is dispirited and still too isolated from the thriving EU surrounding it.
Meanwhile, in June 2007 RFE/RL reported: “Moscow has shown a keen interest in recent years in buying up Serbian firms, including in energy and communications, as well as other fields. Some Serbian politicians, such as Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, have hinted to the EU that Serbia might prefer a "Russian option" in its foreign policy if Brussels does not give Belgrade concrete prospects for membership.” Herein, therefore, may lie a key.
At Russian insistence, yet another round of negotiations will begin. At US insistence, it will be limited to 120 days. In the interim perhaps the European Union and the U.S. will look again for additional “carrots” that might satisfy the weak Serbian government’s needs and, if possible, blunt – or better pacify – a suspicious Russia.
Gradual independence for Kosovo under EU supervision and with UN Security Council blessing need not be a zero-sum game: negotiated settlements rarely are.
Map credit: Perry-Castaneda Map Collection.