American Enterprise Institute
for Public Policy Research
The Future of Kosovo
Transatlantic Policy toward the Balkans
October 13, 2005
Vance Serchuk: Good afternoon. I think we’re going to try to get underway now. Senator Sikorski will be parachuting in later as his final guest appearance. It’s a little bit strange. This will be Radek’s last appearance at the American Enterprise Institute in his current capacity as the director of the New Atlantic Initiative.
We really are fortunate today in having a very distinguished panel to talk about a very timely subject – the future of Kosovo, as well as broader questions about the future of the Balkans and U.S. and European policy towards that part of the world. With the release last week of Kai Eide’s report to Secretary General Annan in the U.N. Security Council, this is now an issue that long has been percolating in the news for the past several months. It is now very much at the fore.
NAI’s involvement in this issue goes back a great distance, as Radek himself would tell you if he were here. For starters, NAI was deeply involved from its very founding in the questions related to the fate of Kosovo and the transatlantic partnership. Most recently NAI, at the invitation of the President of Serbia, Boris Tadic, organized a fact-finding mission to Serbia and Kosovo, which took place this past July and in which I participated along with a large bipartisan group.
Rather than engaging in and regaling you with stories of our trip to the Balkans, what I’d like to do is move forward and introduce the panelists we have here today and hear from all of them about their take on what is going to be happening in Kosovo. After everyone has a chance to speak, we will open the audience to questions and answers, and hopefully engage in a bit of a discussion that will produce more light than heat.
Let me briefly introduce the panelists. The first is Joshua Black, a Kosovo desk officer. He’s a true Balkans hand, I think it’s safe to say. Joshua has been involved in the Balkans in one way or another for more than five years now, working at USOP in the political section. He also worked a previous assignment in Pristina on the demilitarization to KLA. He’s also had a Senate fellowship; he’s asked me not to say with whom, but with a certain prominent Democratic Senator. He’s also worked at the Kosovo desk at the State Department.
Helga Flores-Trejo, a good friend of AEI and NAI, is the director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s operations in North America. She is an expert on foreign policy, development issues, and EU affairs. Ms. Flores Trejo previously served as senior program officer at the OSC Mission in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and I also understand that she just came back from a visit to Serbia, which hopefully she’ll be able to tell us a little about.
John Norris is chief of staff for the International Crisis Group here in their Washington D.C. office. I’m sure everyone here is as addicted as I am to ICG, and if they’re not, they should be because they put out some of the most extraordinary reports about the Balkans. This is where I will blatantly shill – he also is the author of a great book, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, out this year from Praeger.
Last, but certainly not least, Janusz Bugajski is director of East European studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here in Washington, D.C. He is the recipient of many rewards, author of many books, and also a columnist for the weekly Koha Ditore in Pristina, Kosovo. As I said, this is a very distinguished group, and we are very fortunate to have you all here. Why don’t we begin our discussion with Joshua, who can fill us in on what the party line is, so to speak, on what’s going on, and then we’ll just go down the line. Thanks, Joshua.
Joshua Black: Thank you. My name is Joshua Black and I’ve worked on the Balkans at the State Department for about the last five years; but the Balkans have been a big part of my life for almost ten years, including my graduate studies. For any of us who have had interest in the Balkans, 2005 and this era is shaping up to be a real year of decision, a turning point, for the entire Balkans.
In Bosnia, we’re now about ten years after the Dayton negotiations. In the last year, we’ve seen some pretty significant breakthroughs on issues like defense reform, and hopefully police reform. On the war crimes issue, we’ve seen some progress. There are still major challenges to arresting some of the worst war criminals in the region, but we’ve reached a point where we’ve clarified for the regional governments the high cost of not fully cooperating with the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
In Kosovo, we are now seeing sustained major international attention. Look how many people are in this room right now for an issue that, for a few years, had retreated to the back pages of the newspaper. I think we see this as the time to solve the last major remaining open wound of the Balkans, to come up with a settlement that will advance this region’s path to Europe, and provide for its stability.
As you know, Kosovo has been under transitional U.N. administration for the last six years. The issue of Kosovo’s future status, whether it should be independent or remain part of Serbia-Montenegro, has not been addressed. It was the decision in 1999 to not address it, and to instead focus on immediate post-war/post-conflict challenges in Kosovo and establishing institutions.
For years, our policy there had been “standards before status.” This is the idea that we are not going to deal with the status issue until Kosovo has taken great steps towards recovering from the war, to becoming a more normal society. Perhaps most critical to the standards, it has taken greater steps to incorporate its Serbian minority and ensure the protection of the Serbian life in Kosovo.
That policy has gotten us many achievements. We have institutions in Kosovo; we have a functioning multi-ethnic police. We began to believe at the State Department, and many of our international colleagues, that we had reached a point where we had a dangerous and unsustainable status quo in Kosovo. To get traction and really move forward on the hardest standards, such as the return of IDPs in Serbia and some of the minority issues, we needed to give Kosovo and the region some clarity about its future. Several days ago, Norwegian ambassador Kai Eide submitted a report to the U.N. that said basically the same thing. It said that the marginal advantage of delaying this issue just a little bit longer was minimal. We needed to start a process soon.
What will that process be? There are still open questions; this is still under discussion within the content group countries and the Security Council. I think that we should emphasize that this process will not hinge narrowly on the sovereignty questions or the independence questions. We’ll look at a wide range of issues of Kosovo’s governance, security, and how human rights are dealt with in Kosovo.
This process, which we expect to begin by the end of the year, will be led by a senior European envoy who will be appointed by the U.N. The decision about who it will be has not been made. There is one strong candidate; this will be discussed in the coming weeks. The United States will also be centrally involved at a senior level throughout the process. We believe that we have a major role to play as we go along.
This process will involve dialogue and negotiation, and I emphasize that word, “negotiation.” I think especially in the Kosovo side, there’s an impression that it will not involve talking to people or making comprises, but we see this as being a legitimate give and take on this wide range of issues. In that process, we will enter with an open mind on the sovereignty question - whether or not Kosovo should be independent, autonomous, or whatever arrangement should be negotiated. We will not open the process saying that this is the way we believe it should go.
The future of Kosovo is for the people of Kosovo and the region and its neighbors to determine. Whatever outcome we end up with, and I hope by this time next year we have an idea of what that outcome will look like, we believe the cornerstone of a status element must be the Euro-Atlantic integration of Kosovo in the entire region. The best guarantee of long-term stability is integrating all of the peoples of the Balkans into Euro-Atlantic institutions, ways of thinking, economic opportunities, and political life.
We also know that in a future status Kosovo, one of the most important settlement elements, one of the most important themes, will be the protection of Kosovo’s non-Albanian citizens, especially the protection of its Serb minority. This is a critical priority of the United States in terms of implementing the President’s democracy agenda, and respecting the rights of all human beings. We expect the Kosovar Albanian majority, regardless of how the sovereignty question is determined, to put ideas on the table that will go far to protecting the cultural and political life of Kosovo’s minorities, the physical security of the Serbian Orthodox patrimony, and to make arrangements with local government that will enable Kosovo Serbs in particular, but all citizens to have greater autonomy in their daily lives.
The post-future status Kosovo also will have an international presence. We do not believe that the international community should go home right way. There will be a period where we will have an international presence with an enhanced EU role, but the details will be discussed in the coming months. It will still have certain authorities in Kosovo. And KFOR, the NATO peacekeeping presence, will also be there for some time. I think all sides have said that NATO has an ongoing role in ensuring the stability of the region.
What are the concerns? What are we worried about as we go into this process? I’d like to come back to this idea of dialogue and negotiations. In Kosovo in particular these days, the word compromise is a dirty word. There are many Kosovars who believe – who say that we demand our independence, we will not compromise on anything. We are telling the Kosovars, the Serbs, and the whole region that compromise is going to be involved in this process, especially when we talk about the status of Kosovo’s minorities. The essence of compromise, a give-and-take where you have to accept things that you don’t like, will be part of this process. We believe that both sides, Belgrade and Pristina, have much to gain from constructive engagement. If they go into this process constructively, they will be able to achieve things. We will be able to come up with a more durable settlement.
It is always dangerous to be optimistic in the Balkans, and indeed many parts of the world. I don’t want to come off as too cheerful on the prospects ahead; it is going to be a difficult process where we have many concerns, including about the security situation. I feel like we have many cards lined up positively right now. We have senior U.S. engagement, which is an important element to making anything work in the Balkans. As I speak this very hour, Under-Secretary of State Nick Burns is in Pristina to meet with the Kosovar leaders and lay out some of our expectations for the process, and he will be traveling to Belgrade tomorrow to meet with the senior leaders there.
And I believe that Kosovo also has going for it real estate. Kosovo is in Europe. Now the pull towards Europe, the magnet of European immigration may have lost a little bit of its luster after the failed referenda earlier this year, but that still is a potent incentive for all the peoples to come to arrangements among themselves that will accelerate their path to Europe and make the Balkans be a normal place, which is what we would like. Thank you.
Radek Sikorski: Thank you very much. I am Radek Sikorski, and I apologize for being late. I suppose being late to one’s last New Atlantic Initiative event is the functional equivalent of being late to your own funeral.
[Laughter.]
We have a distinguished panel, but time is running, so let’s keep our remarks brief. Janusz Bugajski’s long list of publications is in our printed materials, but I think his particular claim to be speaking on this subject today is that he is a columnist for Koha Ditore in Pristina, a weekly in Kosovo.
Janusz Bugajski: Thanks very much for all that. I didn’t expect to be second. It’s always nice to have two introductions.
Let me begin by saying first, congratulations, Senator Sikorski, on your recent election victory. I think it’s going to be a great loss to Washington, but an enormous benefit both to Bydgoszcz and to Warsaw. I’m sure you’ll stay very closely in touch with AEI but also with your other friends in D.C.
Okay, I was going to cut back on this because I expected to have very little left to say after all the panelists, but it looks as though I’ll have more to say than I thought I would.
So let me begin by just reiterating what we heard, that a pivotal time is approaching in the West Balkans. I prefer to call it the West Balkans. Remember, let’s not generalize about the Balkans. The East Balkan states of Romania and Bulgaria have been very successful in the past few years. They are on track for the EU in 2007 and are already NATO members with very close relations with the United States, so we have to be a little bit careful because this sort of feeds into a sort of derogatory perceptions, stereotypes of the Balkans.
Really what we’re talking about is the outstanding status issues of three units: Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. And I believe that the time is now here where the issue of the status of these three units finally has to be resolved or some timetable has to be devised with an end point at which these three entities become legitimate states that can then move toward European Union and NATO.
So I’m going to do something unusual by trying to answer the questions that were set by the conference organizers. And there are three questions, so I’m going to try and address them.
First question: Can diplomacy at last bring peace and stability to the Balkans or do negotiations over Kosovo risk reigniting the wars of the 1990s?
My answer is this: International involvement, rather than diplomacy in the narrow meaning of the word, is essential, I believe, for smoothing the resolution of the three outstanding status issues. Such involvement clearly has helped to ensure peace in the region and security since the military intervention, but long-term stability, I believe, is more problematic without a full commitment by international bodies. By full commitment, I mean decision and implementation of final status for all three remaining federal units of ex-Yugoslavia – I’m leaving out Vojvodina because the choice isn’t there – that can become sovereign and legitimate international entities.
Although there is always the risk of violence, in answer to the question, at some level, I think we aren’t likely to repeat the state-sponsored wars of the 1990s, especially with the sizeable international presence. However, I would say the alternative to resolving status and creating legitimate states is the rise of resentment and possible violence, not only directed at other ethnic groups, but even against international agencies.
Kosovo, as you know, is preparing itself for decisions and timelines for status, statehood, and so forth on its final stages. Kai Eide’s report outlined the achievements but also the shortcomings in Kosovo’s democratic development.
Clearly a great deal needs to be accomplished in ensuring minority rights, rule of law, anti-corruption, institutional reform, anti-crime, and so on; however, I would say talks on Kosovo’s political future cannot be delayed much longer, and this was even admitted Kofi Annan, as any further obstruction could raise tensions in the territory to breaking point. And without legitimate status, further economic and democratic progress seems highly unlikely. So I would reverse this formula and say that standards cannot be met now without status.
And, of course, there will be three parties to the talks. I think Serbia needs to be given a voice and needs to benefit from the process, even if the most rational decision is for separation between Belgrade and Pristina, both de jure as well as de facto. And I would say there are three questions that really need to be resolved, and I’ll be very brief.
First, what can Belgrade be offered so the government does not seek to destabilize the process and so Kosovo’s move towards independence does become the sole issue in the upcoming Serbian general election? Second, how do we bring aboard the reluctant members of the U.N. Security Council, especially Russia and China? And third, to what degree and by what mechanism should independence be made conditional on Pristina meeting specific criteria?
Belgrade, I think is likely to be offered extensive protection for the Serbian minority; internationals, maybe even an awkward framework agreement for the minority population in Kosovo; international supervision of major religious and historic Serbian shrines in Kosovo; a NATO umbrella over the emerging state; a fast track for Serbia through the EU stabilization and association process with a timetable for accession talks, and I think the success of Croatia in the last few days, even, is an important indicator that everything is possible and even EU membership is possible; as well as Serbia’s inclusion in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program together with U.S. military assistance, and this will, I think, in combination help to enhance business investment prospects within Serbia.
However, I would say the contact group must avoid, and the United Nations must avoid, one major potential pitfall, and that is pressing Montenegro to postpone or revoke its planned referendum on independence, calculating, I think mistakenly, that this will somehow compensate Serbia for the loss of Kosovo. I think manipulating the destiny of Montenegro will not assuage nationalism, but is likely to further provoke it by distracting attention from Serbia’s essential domestic reform program, and I think it will also create immense resentment amongst the pro-American and pro-EU majority of the Montenegro population that supports independence.
The United Nations may be an even bigger sticking point during Kosovo’s road to status, as both Russia and China will undoubtedly aim to score maximum political and economic points from the exercise, and they are in a much stronger position, of course, than Serbia. They will seek reassurance that Kosovo will not set a precedent for Chechnya, Tibet, or other places, and they will probably demand some major bilateral concessions from Washington, as well as from Europeans, whether in trade, investment, membership for specific international organizations, as well as a lessened focus on human rights abuses and anti-democratic measures in both states.
Thirdly, I think conditionality will be built into the timetable of independence, as sovereignty and international withdrawal from Kosovo will be staggered while specific criteria for democratic self-governments will be detailed and monitored.
Let me try to answer the other two questions: what is the geopolitical future of the Balkans, and how will the EU’s internal debates affect the integration of Kosovo and Serbia-Montenegro into the trans-Atlantic world? I think there are two possible futures for this disparate region. Europeanization or marginalization – I think the choice is pretty stark.
By Europeanization, I understand a realistic roadmap of entry into both the EU and NATO, as was the case with the recently admitted central Europeans and soon to be admitted east Balkan states of Romania and Bulgaria. If there are long delays in the accession or the prospect is wholly eliminated, then I think there will be precious little incentive for reform and for meeting international standards in effective governments. This could assign the region to a sort of peripheral, corporized gray zone, with increased opportunities for criminal organizations and other non-state interests, resulting in potential depopulation as locals escape to the EU, and radicalize the younger generation with few opportunities of employment. Ultimately, I think it would be less costly and disruptive to have these states Europeanized than marginalized.
Lastly, and I think it’s very important that maybe we can have a discussion on this, what are the lessons of the Balkan experimented nation-building, and what clues do they hold for Iraq and Afghanistan? In the case of the Balkans, by the way, I prefer to call it state-building rather than nation-building. I think most would agree that there are enough nations already in the region, but maybe not yet enough states. I think the key question is how to establish legitimate and local states.
I think one of the main lessons of both the Kosovo and Bosnian missions is that the international involvement has limited mileage without anchoring the political legitimacy and systemic reform in the indigenous political, economic, and security structures. Here I think one would need to focus on the major failings of Oleynik as well as the different missions in Bosnia and other international players, and try to suggest ways of remedying their negative long-term impact in breeding dependency relationships, both political and economic. Even in fostering a colonial-like political culture, in which commands are given and expected to be followed.
I think the Kosovar and Bosnian situations cannot be easily translated to Afghanistan or Iraq. Although there may be some similarities in terms of ethnic and religious divisions, state weakness, and forceful international intervention, the differences are much more significant.
First, hostility to outside institutions in both Kosovo and Bosnia was limited. It did not find any expression in extremist ideology, insurgency, assassinations, sabotage, or terrorism against the foreign presence.
Second, the political leadership and the majority in both countries would actually like to join the international institutions that intervened, particularly NATO and European Union.
Third, the majority of the population remains grateful, I believe, still, to NATO and the United States for intervening even though they may be less enamored of the United Nations, even six years, or in the case of Bosnia ten years, after the intervention. And, of course, there is very little if any popular anti-Americanism or even anti-Europeanism present in either state.
Fourth, I think very important in this, my last point, for Kosovo, unlike Iraq or Afghanistan or, for that matter, Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is a largely ethnically homogenous aspiring state.
For all these reasons, I would say, the simple application of a Bosnian or Kosovar model to other countries may be highly problematic. And I’ll stop there. Thanks.
Radek Sikorski: Mr. Norris is the author of Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo. It’s just been published.
John Norris: Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be here today. I’d like to fill in some of the blanks that I think Josh left. I think, Josh, as a former State Department employee, I am entirely sympathetic. I think he did an excellent job of being fair and diplomatic to all sides, and I’d like to fill in the sotto voce parts that I think he hasn’t been able to say and probably isn’t in a position to say.
First of all, I think the standards before status process was a direct effort by the contact group to kick the can down the road. Nobody wanted to deal with Kosovo. They knew difficult negotiations would be involved. They bought themselves some time with standards. And I can understand why; it’s a natural impulse.
As a friend of mine who is a diplomat in Pristina put it, we put the bar about this high for the Kosovars and they have barely managed to scrape over, and I think it’s a fair way to look at it. And if you’re in Kosovo today, it’s a very strange little netherworld. It is neither province nor country. It simply doesn’t work. It’s a kind of political and bureaucratic Disneyland: you’ve got a place where 70 percent of the property is owned by the state.
Well, what is the state? Does it sit in Belgrade? Is it the U.N.? Is it a provisional institution? In a place where you desperately need to create jobs and employment, not even being able to answer such a basic question such as who owns property is a huge impediment. Would you let Kosovo borrow money? Would you invest there if you went to a politician and says, “Well, who owns this?” and you got a ten-minute lecture and pointed to a U.N. office and then Belgrade and then back and a 1989 constitution . . . it would be a mess. And that’s why I think, fundamentally, there has been recognition, that the status quo is unsustainable.
But I think we also need to be clear that the progress on standards was halting and quite limited. And I think we have not been entirely honest with each other and the public in terms of how fundamental the problems are, not only between Albanians and Serbs, but within the Albanian community and within the Serbian community; relations between Kosovo, Serbs, and Belgrade are testy and sometimes violent and they’ve got quite different agendas and quite different levels of willingness to participate and engage in local institutions.
And Kosovo-Albanian politics is a mess. It’s a system that still relies on cronyism, violence, nepotism, and a lot of bad behavior. I think we all recognize that we need to go forward, but I think we also need to recognize that it’s not going to be an easy negotiation, and it’s going to be a very messy situation that requires extensive international stewardship for a period of time.
It’s also important to note that final status has kind of become the dog that ate my homework of Kosovo. When you ask can we reform the Kosovo Protection Corps; can we dismiss these officers who were no good? Well, we should really wait until the final status is decided to answer that. Should we sell these state-owned enterprises? Well, that’s more up to final status.
The U.N. bureaucracy, local institutions, everybody else involved has unfairly let a lot of important reform issues be held hostage to final status. And I really wish that the six years that we’ve spent billions of dollars and had a huge international peace-keeping force on the ground we’d made a lot more progress on the hard day-to-day business of reform that needs to be done no matter what Kosovo looks like at the end of the day, and I think that’s a bit of a lost opportunity.
So, it is good that we all understand Kosovo needs a new arrangement, and I think we all realize the final status is a vehicle to get there. It will be, in all likelihood, former Finnish President Martti Ahtissaari who leads final status negotiations. He’s an individual I’m quite familiar with. He was involved during the 1999 negotiations. I think he’s a sound choice: he understands European institutions well; he’s been involved in the Balkans for a long time; he’s a seasoned U.N. hand and understands that bureaucracy. The fact that he’s Finnish also says that he’s got a very good window into decision-making and thinking in Moscow, which I think will be a very important part of the negotiating process.
It also sounds like we’re going to have a situation where we’ve got Ahtissaari with three senior deputies. He’ll have an American deputy, a European deputy, and a Russian deputy. I can understand the impulse to do this, and it is welcomed on one level in that it signals a certain level of buy-in from all the key constituencies that this is going to be a process that they’re all vested in, that they all want to see succeed and are all willing to make work.
I do have some questions as to how effective a bureaucratic and negotiating structure that can be. I think it really remains an open question how much authority would Mr. Ahtissaari or anybody who’s in that position be given. It’s going to be hard for the White House and the State Department to see a European genuinely in the lead on negotiations of serious international import. This is not something that comes easily to the State Department or the White House, and if they do not fully empower whoever the lead negotiator is, he will get his legs cut out from him very quickly.
During all the negotiations in Bosnia, I think we remember the whole series of envoys and special negotiators who made their rounds through Belgrade and Zagreb and Sarajevo, but who weren’t given real authority and they ended up not being able to produce. So I think if we are indeed serious about this process, Mr. Ahtissaari has to be given real authority after initial round of consultations to come back and put real proposals on the table.
With respect to Josh who says that we’re going into this process with an open mind, and I would certainly hope that is not the case. I think if we’ve again and again in Balkan’s negotiations, they’ve generally succeeded when we know what we want and we really drive towards that end goal. I think when we go into a process open-minded and a little woolly-headed as I think we did at Rambouillet, it’s a disaster. We better know what our bottom line is going in, and we better have a very clear picture of what we want to get out of it at the end of the day. Thankfully, I think Josh is being a little bit coy because we have spelled out most of our bottom lines at this point. I think if you look at those, it makes pretty clear what the contours of final agreement look like, at least in the broadest sense.
First of all, there have been statements that say there can be no return to the pre-1999 status quo. I think that’s fairly obvious and fairly self-evident. Kosovo had so many problems because its rights were steadily stripped away. They were treated as a very poor and sometimes beaten stepchild by Belgrade during this period. Any effort to shoehorn Kosovo back into that previous arrangement would simply lead to another round of insurrection.
Second, everybody involved has ruled out the creation of a greater Albania, of some kind of merger between Kosovo and Albania, or some part of Macedonia. This is a prospect that horrifies the Russians and the Serbs, and I think horrifies most people in European capitals and here in the United States. I think Albania has enough on its own hands; I think Kosovo has enough on its own hands.
Certainly, we don’t want to open up the prospect of irredentism. I don’t think we should greet the idea of greater Albania any more warmly than we greeted the idea of greater Serbia, or greater Croatia. Pretty much any idea with greater attached to it in the Balkans has proved to be a failure and I don’t think that should change.
The third thing that we’ve ruled out preemptively is the idea that Kosovo can be partitioned. There are some people who look at the map and say, well we will just draw a neat little line along the Ibar; north goes north, the rest goes to the Albanians, a very tidy solution. I think it’s anything but, and as soon as people actually got maps out and tried to divide Kosovo that way, they’d see how problematic it is. A large proportion of Serbs in Kosovo are not in the North.
I think that would put them in a very perilous situation if the province was to be partitioned, and I think it would just further encourage the de facto ethnic cleansing of Serbs in the rest of Kosovo. I think what also opened up a can of worms were other partition ideas in Macedonia, Bosnia, and a lot of places where we don’t want to see that put on the table. I think the fact that Kosovo in final status are treated as unique by the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244 that ended the war is a reason that this shouldn’t lead to other partition efforts, and shouldn’t be used as a model for every separist group around the globe.
Lastly, I think the EU has made quite clear that it hopes whatever emerges in Kosovo actually has sufficient treaty powers and the ability to be a party to an eventual EU membership process. I think that means that some of the more half-baked ideas for sovereignty that we’ve seen coming out of Belgrade, some impossibly loose confederation along the model that is currently not working with Montenegro – three states bound together in such loose fashion that they were only together in name – I don’t think that will be effective. I think the EU realizes Kosovo is going to be its project over the long term. It rightfully wants to be left with a creation that actually can be implemented in some kind of ongoing process towards eventual EU membership. I think that rules out a number of other things.
When you run through all those red lines, no partition, no greater Albania, no return to 1999, and a Kosovo that’s able to navigate EU membership, it’s actually a pretty small universe. You end up with something that we’ve advocated for a long time – conditioned or conditional independence where Kosovo would be given independent status with some very heavy ongoing international presence and intervention in key areas like the judiciary, where clearly the Kosovars have a long way to go to get up to speed.
The general state of public administration in Kosovo is quite poor. Everybody recognizes there will be a security presence for some period of time, whether it has a NATO hat or a European hat, the only bottom line the Albanians seem to insist is that there is an American flag flying over some base somewhere. I think that can certainly be accommodated. I agree that a lot of the problems will be in the specific details of protecting patrimonial sites, minority rights, and trying to figure out some creative solutions to make sure people actually feel like they’re vested in whatever new form of government is put in place.
I do agree that this is a real watershed moment for both Kosovo and Serbia. I think for the Kosovars, they need to understand that final status and probably conditional independence is a beginning and not an end. It is a place that is horribly mismanaged; there is a lot of corruption and violence, there is a very unattractive political process. These are things that the Kosovars really need to be serious about tackling, and they frankly, have not been. If they are not more serious about taking these issues on, any kind of independence, conditional or not, is going to be a very [indecipherable] form over the long haul.
For Serbia, I think it’s a real watershed in that this is the most important chance they have to shed the chronic and corrosive nationalism that has so harmed Serbia’s place in the world, and its internal prospects over the last ten or fifteen years. I think taking a constructive approach to final status talks, and making every possible effort to help round up and deliver Mr. Karadzic and Mr. Miladich to The Hague would send such a positive signal that Serbia has decided its future is in the mainstream of Europe, integration, growth, and reform. The greatest thing Serbia could probably do for itself over the long haul would be to lose Kosovo.
Thank you.
Radek Sikorski: Thank you very much. Helga Flores-Trejo is the director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s, but her claim to particular expertise on the Balkans is that she was previously the senior program officer at the OSCE in Europe at the Mission in the former federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Helga Flores-Trejo: Thanks. I really want to thank you, Radek and Vance, for this invitation because, whether you believe it or not, after spending the last weeks trying to explain German election, dealing now with the Balkans is now almost a treat. So thank you for that.
I also want to mention, since it’s your last event, I was trying to look back and see what you’ve done all these years here. I found it very interesting that your first event, if the Internet is right, was with former Prime Minister Djindjic, so you started with Serbia and ended with Kosovo. I think it’s a very good situation. Thank you so much.
Let me start by saying that I do agree with Kai Eide that there’s never really a good time to deal with Kosovo, but on the other hand, the time has gone now and we have to do it right now for the reasons that everybody has talked about here. I think it’s important though to agree and be very realistic about what will happen, because there’s not going to be any perfect solution for this issue. Anything that we end up with is going to be a compromise, and it’s just the way it’s going to be.
On the other hand, I think it’s important for the EU and the U.S. that they don’t have any illusions that dealing with Kosovo now means not dealing with Kosovo in the next years. I think we’re still going to be there with the Balkans and Kosovo. I just hope that the conditions will be better by solving this type of situation right now.
In my comments, I would like to concentrate on Serbia because that’s what I really know best, but also because Serbia really holds the key for many of the developments in the region. Whether it’s Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, or even Croatia’s future, I think the key is in Serbia. To put it this way, if the domestic reforms in Serbia don’t move, I think it’s going to be very difficult for the whole region to move forward.
The question right now in October, we just had the fifth anniversary of the ousting of Milosevic and the taking over of Djindjic, the question for me that is emphasized is where Serbia is now? What’s the context in which we will be tackling the Kosovo issue?
As Vance said before, I returned from Belgrade just recently, where I had several meetings discussing Kosovo and the political situation over there. I really come back with the firm belief that for Serbia it’s not whether or not there’s going to be an independent Kosovo. The question is how we get to such a process that it doesn’t create any problems and doesn’t affect the region at all, except as a positive one. I think this is the best for Serbia. I definitely think that the decision Serbia has to face is whether they want to go to the EU or they want Kosovo. This is very easy because the EU means democratization, stopping this nationalist discourse, etc., Kosovo would be going backwards instead of forward. So I think this is what they really have to decide.
I do know that EU is really holding the key to solving the issue. It is EU’s accession, the prospective of EU accession, that is the strongest motive for the people in the Balkans, and it will be the strongest tool that we have to solve the question, so we can not fumble the ball this time. We really are in there, but on the other hand, it must be clear here in the U.S. is that you need some team partners. And the U.S. cannot have any illusions of leaving very soon or stopping caring about it because it mainly EU responsibility.
When I was in Belgrade, I kept hearing a lot from government officials, something like this: we’ll deal with us, because otherwise there are always worse people coming; do what we think or otherwise you’ll have to be with the radicals, with the nationalists. And I think this has to stop. I think the West cannot accept these excuses, cannot accept these threats. Ultimately, these are just excuses not to do the reforms that are needed in Serbia. The best for Serbia would be to tackle them.
So let me say a few words about the Serbian situation right now the way I see it. It’s obvious that Serbia is a country in transition in that all the problems that it’s facing are just normal. All the eastern European countries have to face questions of corruption, problems with privatization, organized crime, all that. It’s not an abnormal thing. There is no easy path to reform. But on top of all that, Serbia has to deal with the legacy of the war and the responsibility of the war, so it makes it also more difficult for Serbia to deal with both areas.
And I think if you ask me now, I think Serbia right now is failing in both areas. I think on the questions of reforms, the present government led by Kostunica is really very reactive, very slow, not taking bold states, not really committed. I think there’s lack of vision there where Serbia needs to go.
On the other hand, dealing with the past, which is very important to Serbian society, it’s really not in their interest. It has been surprising, though, that Kostunica has delivered almost fifteen to The Hague. This is good. But if you see what has happened, what he did is paid the families off to send them to The Hague. He has never really explained to the Serbian people why they have to go and giving the reasons, and this is the most important thing, I think, for the society.
I’m not going to talk about the church and the role they play in avoiding the past in Serbia, but I think it’s a major problem.
So, in my opinion, Serbia has stagnated in past years. It’s not moving forward but rather in circles. This is where the Kosovo issue plays such a negative role. This endless Kosovo discussion is always a toy, or rather a weapon, that can be used to distract, to mobilize nationalistic sentiments, and distract from the rather tough reform path that Serbia has ahead. That’s why I come to the conclusion that Serbia would be better off without Kosovo, and that Kosovo is really a burden in Serbia’s path to reform.
Let me just talk a little bit about Serbia. A lot of the discussions in the past and the political scenery has how to deal with the radicals. The SRS, which is really the party that is anti-European, isolationistic, and really nationalistic, that has in the past years also in the polls, if you can believe the polls, gained a lot of support in Serbian society, and I do think Serbian society is still divided where it wants to go.
I think if you look at what Kostunica’s been doing in the past in dealing with the radicals, in trying to defeat them, he has rather caved into their nationalistic discourse, and I don’t believe that’s the best strategy to really give the Serbian the option where do they want to go. I think the other strategy could be rather to take the other extreme. Really the Serbian nationalistic party has no radical opposition on the other side in the sense that you don’t have the really pro-European anti-nationalistic strong force on the other side. There is a lot of muddling through really with reforms and with Europe.
So transition is very difficult, but I think the present government is making it more difficult for Serbia. The general mood that you can see in Serbia is one of disengagement, dissolution. As I said, this is normal for transition, but I think for Serbia it is much more difficult.
As for the negotiations, my last point I think has been said before. The EU and the U.S., to this point, are still working very closely together and I hope it remains that way. They have said what are the four “no’s” [sounds like] in which they are going into the negotiations.
I think what we really have to avoid, and I hope we don’t fall into this, is to have a situation where the U.S. just wants to get out as soon as possible, rush, as the saying, “over my dead body,” there’s no kind of independence for Kosovo whatsoever, and the EU is timid or wants to slow the process. That would be the worst thing. At this moment, I think it’s working, but since the issue is difficult in itself, I hope that also EU and the U.S. cooperation will work on that.
As far as the Serbian position what the government in Serbia has talked about, it’s under the break their position into going into the negotiations is called, and you’ve read about it, more than autonomy, less than independence. This is a very broad concept and it can mean many things. While I was there, the head of the coordination center for Kosovo presented it.
I think for many observers it wasn’t clear that this is something different than what Kosovo had already in the constitution of ’74. But in any case, from what I gather, it’s clear that the Serbian government is saying we can talk about everything in there; the only things we want to exclude for Kosovo in the future is they should not have the border control, no foreign policy, and no seat in the U.N., this meaning Serbian should maintain their sovereignty and anything else can be arranged.
I think in a way for any kind of solution, it’s going to be important how you package it for the Serbian population and the Serbian government. The Serbian government, if they really want to play a constructive part in this or not, in the end if you ask people in Belgrade, I believe Kosovo is really not even under the six to ten items in the agenda. It’s really not the issue. And even the radicals have campaigned more on issues of corruption or organized crime than in others.
The last thing, I think, for Serbia, the best would be to get rid of this distraction and to decide really to go into Europe and do all the reforms they need to do. This is where we have to see this government and this situation with the political leaders in Serbia taking the next step. This is it. This is where they have to decide forward or backward. Thank you.
Radek Sikorski: Finally, Vance Serchuk, who is the leader of NAI’s fact-finding mission to Kosovo in July and is the author of The Future of Kosovo: A European Outlook, published by the American Enterprise Institute.
Vance Serchuk: Thank you, Radek. One of the disadvantages of being the last person to go is that everyone else has already said all of the clever things. It means one hopefully is at least concise, which I will endeavor to be so that we can move to the questions and answers.
The first point that I would make is simply to build the point that John has already touched upon, and that is to appreciate the place that we are now, vis a vis Kosovo, is not a product of success; it’s a product of failure. The only reason we are having this discussion in the first place, the entire push for final status talks, is a function of the failure of March 2004.
Absent that failure, where you had widespread riots across Kosovo and a very visible collapse of what had been purported to be the institutional, security, political, and economic progress that was going on - the current push for the resolution of status simple wouldn’t be taking place, I don’t think. It’s not that the Kosovar, Albanian, and Serbian communities are coming closer to compromise on their own accord, or closer to some sort of understanding. It’s that this explosion took place and there is now a great deal of frustration and exhaustion on the part of the international community. This leads, I think, to the second point that I will emphasize.
Going from Washington to Pristina, the most striking disparity that I saw was the distinction between what we say here and what the international community says here, versus the resources that we actually put on the ground and the things that we actually do. To borrow from the excellent International Crisis Group report, the international community is essentially stuck between the high flying rhetoric of multi-ethnicity and democracy on one hand, and the low-energy cynical realism on the ground.
The contact group says that there will be no partition of Kosovo. And yet, if you go to Mitrovica, there is a partition. The fact of the matter is, it’s not open to a range of options. The international community, contact group, and UNMIK have not done many of the things that they ostensibly say they are in the process of doing.
It seems to be the most dangerous aspect of where we are right now is this ambiguity. On the one hand, we say that our red line is no partition. Simultaneously on the ground, the Serbian government is laying the groundwork for a partition; a partition has already taken place - building roads, sewage, and the entire civil infrastructure to make the partition possible. UNMIK and NATO largely turn their backs to this.
When you have this kind of ambiguity, I think it also creates an opening on the ground for other actors to behave as spoilers. It allows both Albanians and Serbians, who do not want to see a compromise, take advantage of the ambiguity, and interpret it towards their own ends. This ultimately makes compromise less likely.
We have not made very clear, as John said, that there is actually a fairly limited space that we would consider to be an acceptable outcome. It makes things less likely to end up there. I think that has been a lesson that has come out again and again in the course of Balkan history.
It is somewhat problematic that despite very grandiose rhetoric about a long-term commitment to the region, Kosovo, and Euro-Atlantic integration, UNMIK is not committed on the ground to an institution-building or transition strategy; they are just committed to an exit strategy. When one looks at how they’re handling the Ministry of Interior reform, or handing over the Kosovo Police Service stations – which is essentially handing over the keys and walking away – it’s difficult to discern how any of this of this grander vision for democratization for a more effective, functional state is actually getting implemented or operationalized. That disparity is profoundly troubling.
The broader point in all of this, we sit here and say the good news is we are moving forward with a process; we have reached a political decision and we’re going to craft a political decision here in Washington or our partners in the contact group. The reality is there are actors on ground that also get to vote and chose to go their own ways.
You’re dealing with two policies in both Serbia and Kosovo where this not a particularly well-defined or cohesive leadership, where there are invariable schisms, distinctions, and different actors who are trying to pivot for control. It also is not entirely clear when you’re dealing with people, how much power they actually have to go through what they say what they want to do, even when they agree to it.
All of this is not to say that final status talks are not necessary; I think that we are pushing forward on the only approach. Final status does have to be clarified, although I think most of problems in Kosovo have nothing to do with that. For a variety of symbolic and psychological reasons, it is necessary to deal with this. The biggest problem though is that you are setting very high standards with your rhetoric, but committing fewer resources on the ground. At some point, the rubber is going to hit the road on this. There’s just going to be a fundamental disjoint between your inputs and what you want your outputs to be.
The final point. On the eve of the Iraq War, there was a piece in the Weekly Standard that was written by someone who had spent time in Kosovo, which made the argument that, after looking at Kosovo, you can’t possibly let the U.N. touch Iraq. The United States has to do it by itself. It was this scorching attack on UNMIK saying it’s been four years and they haven’t gotten the electricity to work; there are young inexperienced people running things; and there’s corruption. The internationals drive around in large vehicles imposing bizarre systems of voting. There are strange distortions in the economy because of this huge international presence. We just have to keep the U.N. as far away from Iraq as possible. As a result, we got the CPA instead.
When one looks at Kosovo, while the circumstances are extremely different from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of the same systemic problems in the way which we do certain basic things – building institutions and security reform – are not things that are unique to Kosovo.
There are certainly unique U.N. problems, but I think it’s useful to consider part of the problem we’re having is that this is just fundamentally hard. No one really has the tool set; no one has a lot of the institutional mechanisms to make a place like Kosovo work. This is one of the reasons why it’s easier to talk about status. We can do diplomacy much better than we can do reforming the internal process of the way a place works. There’s no easy answer to that particular set of problems, but hopefully, using the experience in Kosovo it should force us to think more rigorously about how we go about trying to address this sort of thing.
I’ll end there.
Radek Sikorski: Thank you. And we have time for some questions. The gentleman here.
Camden Jenkins: I’m Camden Jenkins, the Alliance for a New Kosovo, among other sins, I guess. Nobody mentioned or really bored down on the fact that unemployment in Kosovo is what may be the most inflammatory element in the mix, which clearly is a fragile mix. There’s a relationship there to independence, no matter how you condition it. It’s impossible for a U.N.-monitored organization like Kosovo to attract World Bank, private investment, even the EBRD, which has gone in and done some work in the coal fields, I understand, the fact is that if you don’t get some movement on the economic front, dealing with what I’m told is a 70 percent unemployment rate among young workers – if you have 70 percent of people between seventeen and forty standing around, if it’s Washington, Detroit, or Kosovo, that’s a formula for disaster. And we have to move, and I think that’s what provides the energy or the urgency of getting some resolution, some form of independence to trigger that.
The other thing I would mention is passing is the idea of a greater Albania. I think it was put to bed with the Gallup poll roughly a month to go, which stated flatly that 86 percent of the Kosovar do not want unification with Albania. The best of my knowledge in the conversations I’ve had, the Albanians don’t want the problem either.
So I think that’s not something we really have to worry about. I think moving to where we can trigger economic activity should be perhaps the most important step, and independence or whatever it is has got to trigger that, or else we’re going to face a very dangerous long-term situation.
Radek Sikorski: I’ll take that as a statement rather than a question. The gentleman there. Thank you.
Arj Benedicte: I’m Arj Benedicte from the National Defense University. I was in Kosovo two weeks ago. I have just three very brief observations, which I don’t think were fully made by the panel.
The first impression is that the Kosovar Albanians have really run out of patience with UNMIK – to the point where UNMIK itself is already a target and will be a bigger target if something isn’t done. I think this is what is driving the final status, and will continue to drive it in the direction of near independence, if not complete independence.
The second observation is that the area north of the Ibar River, even though it’s less than half of the Serb minority, is functionally a part of Serbia. I don’t think a partition is the answer, but we’re going to have to create some kind of zone there; something perhaps between the Republic of Serbska and eastern Slovonija. There’s got to be some kind of a special arrangement in that area.
The third observation is that KFOR has got to say. I don’t think we’re ready for a U4 yet, John. I think we have to have an American presence, but integrated into a NATO command. Also, the KFOR operation there is somewhat broken. We have thirty some nationalities involved; they’re all doing their own thing. We really need to integrate the KFOR operation. We’ll probably have to move it north of the Ibar River, in a way that it’s not now. The relationship between KFOR and the CIVPOL, the U.N. Police, is broken. That has to be fixed too. I think we’re going to see some pretty radical changes, but I don’t see an exit strategy in the next couple years for the United States and the West.
Radek Sikorski: Would anybody like to comment on that?
John Norris: Just very briefly. I must have spoken too fast because I did mention a couple of those issues. I talked about the rising frustration of amongst the young in Kosovo, and the danger of marginalization to them if there’s no prospect for them for either independence or European integration. I think through only independence will they eventually be integrated with Europe. I did signal this, and the violence isn’t even ethnic; it could become social.
This ties in with what Janusz was saying about the frustration with the international presence, which is clearly rising. I did mention this somewhere. Hence the international military presence is essential, but the international political oversight has to be gradually, but systematically with a road map, given over to the locals. I wouldn’t call it conditional independence; I would say it is steps towards independence with very specific criteria that they would have to meet.
Arj Benedicte: I would just add something on the composition. Whatever the ongoing peacekeeping force is, I talked about the disputes between Kosovar Serbs and other Serbs within the Albanian community, I think there is a legitimate difference within the Atlantic community about how to deal with it. I know there is a lot of people at NATO headquarters who would like to free up resources and assets and turn it over more quickly than not.
It’s a legitimate question. If Europe is going to have a common security and foreign policy identity, isn’t this kind of an ideal model for something that they should be able to take on? You could make arguments pro and con. I don’t think there will be a rush towards the door. Certainly, the American diplomats I’ve spoken with understand that at least having a symbolic ongoing American presence indefinitely is really key to any lasting agreement with the Albanians.
Female Voice 1: Yes, hi. I am Eileen Capedia [phonetic]. I consult for the UNDP early warning system in the Balkans. My question is really about incentives in this process that is about to start now, because both Joshua and Janusz very confidently referred here to the fast-track membership offered to Serbia. Well, who offered this fast-track membership? Which European leaders, when, with what mandate, from whom? We’ve been trying for months now and I know ICG is also trying to push the issue of change in visas for part of these countries.
In my view, the unemployment problem for places like Macedonia and Kosovo can only be solved in the moment that they will be given equal status or similar status with what Romania and Bulgaria received three or four years ago. And for these two countries, remittances have constituted the number one capital helping their economy’s recovery and there is no other way for these tiny Balkan states to go in. No one is going to invest there. Remittances are far higher than foreign investment.
Well, there’s considerable reluctance to address even this. I mean, don’t you imagine this means complete freedom of movement? It doesn’t; it means a three month status with a lot of limitations. For instance, last year in Romania a half million people were denied exit from the country under this so-called visa-free regime. But still, there is considerable reluctance to even open this question. I’m a bit afraid that Americans do not embark on this process in good faith offering something that is not theirs to offer; this fast-track membership for Serbia.
Thank you.
Radek Sikorski: How about work visas to the United States? [laughter] What’s the State Department view of this?
Joshua Black: I think it’s a legitimate point, which is that this is not a carrot for Washington to offer. In this process we’ve had, frank conversations with our European colleagues have said that you need to be thinking creatively, especially after the failed referendum, to come up with ideas and new ways of making the promise of the European perspective become reality. There’s no doubt that is going to be a challenge.
Now, we’ve talked about accelerating the whole region’s path towards Europe. I think especially on the war crimes issue, Croatia and Serbia have seen what lack of cooperation on the war crimes issue does in terms of their pace of integration with Europe. There are negative consequences. I think that will be an element of this also.
On the freedom of movement and certain economic issues, I think it’s good that these issues are addressed, and thanks for raising them to keep these front and center. In my opinion, Kosovo’s leaders overestimate the effect that a decision on their status would have in sparking the economy.
As has been said, status will be a beginning and not an end. Kosovo has an extremely young population. I believe it’s the youngest in Europe. I got there and I feel like an elder statesman. It is a young community, frustrated with serious problems with education, wages are artificially high, and it is off the major transit corridors in Europe. There is a lot going against it. I hope that these issues will not be forgotten as we focus on the sovereignty questions, which quite frankly are emotional with a lot of symbolic issues involved. It’s those nuts and bolts things, including the deepening EU relationship on things like travel, which we will need to be looking at in the process.
Radek Sikorski: The New Atlantic Initiative was very impressed during its fact-finding mission to Kosovo by the briefing it received from the Polish/Ukrainian/Lithuanian battalion, so it’s my great pleasure to recognize General Sikorski – no relation.
General Sikorski: I’m looking at Kosovo as a major security issue. The panelists did not really address this Kosovo problem. My problem is, are we proactive enough to approach Kosovo as a major security risk? We have KFOR; the best one we could have. I didn’t hear anything from what you were saying about any military threats or risks. If we do not have military risks, perhaps we should change a portion of the people. Perhaps we should invest money in better ways to solve security issues.
Would you comment on this please? Thank you.
Radek Sikorski: Well, just as Joshua thought the Kosovo population was very young and he felt like an elder statesman, I felt like a teenager when I walked into the American base in Kosovo, which seems to consist mostly of old-age pensioners [laughter]. The question is, indeed, is NATO and the West in general sacrificing some of its credibility in Kosovo? Part of the failure of the March 2004 events was that troops from some of the NATO countries, which shall remain nameless, did not protect the sites and peoples in their charge. That is simply unacceptable. Would other panelists like to comment?
John Norris: I think it is a legitimate security concern for NATO at this point. I think we have learned, rather painfully over the last decade, that not dealing with security threats up front in a proactive fashion has had an exorbitant cost for all of the Atlantic communities. If we look at what the members of the European community, United States, and Canada spent on humanitarian relief, reconstruction in Bosnia and Croatia, and what we’ll spend in Serbia and Kosovo, it’s a tremendous loss of investment, a tremendous loss of life, and a tremendous loss of opportunities.
I think I would be a little more tolerant and a little more willing to accept a deployment that we don’t see as an immediate security threat, if we don’t see armies coming over the border. I also think it’s important that we understand it’s a new generation of security threats. It isn’t that standing armies are the great threat; it’s the criminality, gun-running, human trafficking, it’s the potential for all kinds of nefarious activities to go forward.
And again, I think that’s an area where we should be making much more aggressive efforts to reform the KPC; to sort out intelligence ministries. Not only do all the NATO countries run their own intelligence operations in Kosovo, but all the political parties have a standing intelligence apparati, and I think that’s a real problem; they’re all prone to some of the worst kind of behavior.
We do need to be aggressive about identifying the real security risks, and then having the guts and the intestinal fortitude, whether they are the March riots, or whether its patterns of criminality – and again, this isn’t just an Albanian issue. If anybody doubts the ability of the Serbs and Albanians to work together, we only need to look at criminal networks to understand these are people who can work together and have worked together for years. Even under Tito, which was a very repressive regime, there was not only an effective police state but there was still an effective web of criminal activities that outlasted even some aggressive enforcement efforts. I think we do need to be assertive both about the challenges and responding to them.
Joshua Black: I just want to address two points on KFOR. The March 2004 violence was deeply embarrassing. The KFOR response was not there; it was deeply flawed. If you want to read one of the best descriptions of it, it was ICG that did an excellent report that wrote systematically about why KFOR was limited and how it was limited. In the wake of that though, there have been serious discussions about how to restructure and reform KFOR.
We’re undergoing a period now where we’re restructuring KFOR to move away from the multinational brigade model, to look at a more flexible task force structure, which has a higher “tooth to tail” ratio. It would make troops more deployable so that they can get out there, and more flexible in Kosovo.
My second point has to do with those old-age pensioners at the U.S. base. It’s true; for several years now, we’ve used reservists, California National Guard, and we have Texas National Guard on the way. I’ll tell you that those old-age pensioners are reservists who had real careers and tend to have refined judgment, and a lot of skills that they bring to it. As I’ve seen KFOR change over the years, sometimes when you have people with careers as teachers or engineers, they bring certain skills to it, and a certain judgment that maybe a nineteen-year old won’t bring. I can say that the U.S. KFOR in particular had really shined in recent years because they do bring all of these talented capabilities to the table.
Janusz Bagajski: I’d just quickly like to add on the security side. Various people have mentioned various elements of what I think is potentially a very explosive brew, which is a young population with high unemployment, falling remittances from the EU, potential of non-access to the EU, lack of a legitimate state in which anyone would imagine to invest or start businesses in, and lack of job prospects or opportunities for training and modern technology.
I think all of this combined together plus already the existence of criminal organizations and other non-state actors, where are young people going to go? The danger is that the nature of the problem we see now in terms of security is going to grow even further with the recruitment of more young people, if they have no other prospects. Nobody is saying that we offer EU membership, but I think the EU needs to be encouraged to think creatively and specifically on what to do with Kosovo in the future. Otherwise, Europe is going to be faced with an even bigger problem than the United States. That’s for sure.
Radek Sikorski: Let’s just be hard-headed about this question about EU membership because we’ve mentioned in passing the failure of the constitution, but what really has happened is that in order to try to pass the constitution, France has changed its own constitution, which now requires any membership path of ratification after 2007 to be subject to a French referendum.
That means no enlargement - full stop. The people of France would not have voted in favor of Polish or Czech membership in the EU, had it been put to them, let alone will they vote for Balkan membership. We can count on the fact that they don’t avidly read the French constitution avidly in the Balkans, and therefore, they will believe that we have this carrot of membership. What will they do when they realize that actually we are just bluffing?
Obrad Kesic: Obrad Kesic, TSM Global Consultants. I’m glad you made that comment because listening to the panel, I had the sense that I was listening to what they call in the Balkans, trying to come up with a bill without the shopkeeper. What we hear is something about compromise, but in fact, Serbia is being asked to do something that no other state in Europe will do – whether it is Spain or France, or whoever. That is to voluntarily give up territory.
The incentive is now being promised by the Americans primarily, and the Americans have no ability to deliver the incentive, which is rapid integration. When you talk about conditional independence, it’s really like talking about being a little pregnant; it’s impossible to have conditional independence. I think you can have it as slogan, but once you give independence, you’ve given it. What are you going to do – take it away in six months when things don’t go the way you expect them to go?
I think the argument that’s being made by the panel is actually an argument that reinforces the concept that if you’re a minority in a country, arm yourself, be determined to succeed in building an independent state, and you’ll succeed. What you’re arguing right now is because you don’t want to confront young unemployed, nationalistic Albanians who want their own state in Kosovo. Let’s be honest about this.
John Norris: I’d like to respond to that one specifically. Yes, Serbia is being asked to do something we’re not asking Spain or France to do. Last time I checked, Spain and France had not ethnically cleansed 800,000 of their own citizens out of their territory in a violent, house to house campaign that followed a series of three other violent civil wars that took place in their territory. I don’t believe Spain or France codified an agreement that was then subsequently ratified by the United Nations in terms of Security Council 1244, that said there would be a final status process that would take into account the Rambouillet Accords.
To say that this is simply something that we’re imposing or something that simply happened to visit upon Belgrade, I think is to ignore an awful lot of history that’s taken place. And I think a lot of Serb politicians, if you get them behind closed doors, recognize and will tell you straight-up that they would be better off without Kosovo, and that they’re having a hard time stepping up to the plate and giving an honest assessment to their fellow citizens, in part because it’s still a very emotional political issue.
I think the writing is on the wall, and I agree that conditional independence is not easy to take away. This is certainly not an ideal circumstance, but I think we need to be very honest about how we arrived at the current situation.
Radek Sikorski: Helga.
Helga Flores-Trejo: Exactly because of everything that is being described in Kosovo – the insecurity, unemployment, organized crime and so on, I wonder if Belgrade wants to deal with that. Seriously, Belgrade doesn’t want that either. I think to be serious about it, we are asking that not only Serbia and Kosovo need to do something, but also the EU. This is not going to work if there’s not a credible EU accession process.
At this point, I believe if I was a country and somebody from the EU came and said they’d give me accession tomorrow, I would have my doubts; I agree. On the other hand, there’s just no way around it. I don’t think there’s any other way. And to mention NATO, certainly for Serbia, the partnership for peace and accession to NATO might work rather quickly. That would also be a good development.
Female Voice #2: Your comment about Serbian leadership not stepping up to the plate and explaining to their population about what they have or what they can achieve. The same thing is happening in Kosovo. In Pristina, you don’t have the Albanian leaders stepping up to the plate and saying they’re going to be in a dialogue, and there is going to be a compromise. You cannot just blurt out independence and it will happen. If that is happening at the same time the international community has a clear vision of what they’re going to accept and not accept in the negotiations, you have the two main parties – Belgrade and Pristina – at the extreme ends of the discussion. How are you going to have a discussion?
Joshua Black: I think President Ahtisaari has his work cut out for him. I think an awful lot of his time is going to be spent behind closed doors, not in face-to-face negotiations that involve the Serbs and Albanians across the table from each other. I think he’s going to spend an awful lot of time shuttling around, working very intensively with Kosovar Albanian politicians sitting in one room and driving home what is acceptable, what kind of message needs to be sent out, and making progress on negotiations like that.
