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EU should stand firm on Kosovo

Slowly, but not yet surely, Kosovo is moving towards independence. Whether this is a foolish claim or a soon to be confirmed fact is highly contested. But its shadow hangs over the meeting of Serbian and Albanian negotiators in New York to discuss the future of a territory that was the focus of Europe’s most recent war.

An effort to find an agreed solution failed earlier this year when Russia said it would veto a United Nations plan, worked out by the former Finland President, Martti Ahtisaari, to authorise conditional independence for Kosovo under European Union supervision. In the face of the threatened veto, the EU wobbled. French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed more negotiations, now under way, with a deadline of December 10.

The big unknown is what happens if, as almost everyone expects, there is still no agreement. Will the Kosovo Albanians declare independence unilaterally? Will the Serb-majority districts react with their own declaration of independence and ask to stay with Serbia? Will the United States and the EU recognise Kosovo’s move? How will Russia react? Will it recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the breakaway regions of Georgia characterised as “frozen conflicts” for even longer than the Kosovo stalemate has lasted?

Serbian politicians are playing a skilful game. Fronted by Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic and their pro-EU President, Boris Tadic, they have been working the corridors of the U.N. building this week, proclaiming the virtues of international law. They argue that U.N. Resolution 1244, which ended the Kosovo war, talked about preserving Yugoslavia’s (that is, Serbia’s) territorial integrity; proposed self-government, but not independence, for Kosovo; and kept the issue under U.N. jurisdiction. Recognising Kosovo without U.N. agreement will be a violation of Serbian sovereignty as bad as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s recourse to war in 1999.

To back their case, the Serbian government is offering to devolve unprecedented powers to Pristina. The Albanians could run virtually everything, short of foreign and defence policy. The Serbs also promise to change their constitution to give seats in various federal bodies to Kosovo’s Albanians. Behind the legal case is a moral plea: why punish the new modernising, pro-EU Serbia for the atrocities of the dead Slobodan Milosevic? They have even called for Serbia to be given candidate-member status in the EU club as a way of keeping Serbia’s radical nationalists at bay.

It is siren-voiced stuff, but the EU should not hesitate in rejecting these pleas. Let Cyprus be the warning to any latter-day Odysseus. Allowing Cyprus into the EU before a settlement of the island’s Greek/Turkish dispute is the biggest mistake the EU made this century. Brussels lost its bargaining power.

The Russian position is similar to the Serbs’ — combining the legal and the political. Vladimir Putin was uncompromising in a conversation with foreign Russia-watchers at his residence on the Black Sea a fortnight ago. As we pressed round him like passengers in an overcrowded lift, he told us: “Our position on Kosovo is better and more soundly based than yours. This has to be accepted, and you should not break the whole system of international law.”

Mr. Putin’s arguments are plausible, and designed to deter Washington from accepting, let alone encouraging, a Kosovo unilateral declaration of independence. Georgia, after all, is Mr. Bush’s best friend in the Caucasus, and Mr. Putin wants Westerners to know he can make things hard for Georgia if Washington makes things hard for Belgrade.

Does that mean Kosovo’s supporters should back off? Some in Europe will say yes, particularly in Slovakia and Romania, which are worried about secession-minded Hungarians, as well as in Spain with its Basques, and in Greece, which fears problems in Macedonia. The rest of Europe should stand firm, and tell Belgrade and Moscow that the train has left the station. The war in Kosovo was not about spurious claims of WMD. It was not intended to bring regime change in Belgrade. Its aim was a limited and legitimate attempt by a country’s regional neighbours to halt atrocities and reverse ethnic cleansing on a mass scale. It was also the first international effort to put the U.N.’s tentative new concept — the responsibility to protect — above that of national sovereignty.

A territory where 90 per cent of the population is repressed by overlords who speak another language and practise a different religion is not stable. To pretend that at this late stage Serbia can start to deal fairly with Kosovo’s Albanians flies in the face of all recent experience. Every safeguard was built into the Ahtisaari plan to defend Kosovo Serbs, including a continued presence of international police and troops, as well as protection for monasteries and cultural sites. Under their short-sighted leadership, this generation of Serbs may not recognise that Kosovo is lost; but their successors will do so once the EU has steadied its nerves and led the way. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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