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Kosovo poised to declare independence

— PHOTO: AP

ETHNIC DIVIDE: Kosovars walk with an Albanian flag as they celebrate the province’s expected declaration of independence, in Pristina on Saturday.

Pristina: The 38 young men and women in matching tracksuits represent Kosovo’s hopes for the future, at least for its Albanian majority. As dense clouds of jackdaws swoop and wheel above them, they run in perfect formation, chanting their determination to defend the new nation about to be born.

“Bullets don’t scare us,” they shout. “A just war makes us even braver.”

These are the seeds of a modern security force that is supposed to be built on democratic values rather than ethnic ties, just like the embryonic state it is pledged to defend. But on the eve of independence, it is far from clear whether either will live up to the ideal.

“This is the question we are trying to answer,” said Migjen Kelmendi, a publisher and broadcaster who has been involved in a long painstaking effort to construct a new national identity. “Should we be a society of values, or of blood, belonging and biology?”

Whatever the answer, the new nation is set to declare its existence to the world on Sunday or on Monday morning at the latest, and be rapidly recognised by its international supporters, including of the European Union and the United States.

It is the last act in the long, bloody unravelling of Yugoslavia that began 17 years ago, that triggered a NATO intervention in 1999 to protect Kosovo’s majority Albanian population from Serb forces and led to the establishment of a U.N. protectorate in the province.

The final amputation, however, is unlikely to bring much tranquillity. Kosovo is only a province, not a republic like the other post-Yugoslav states, and the legal grounds for its secession from Serbia are hotly contested. Belgrade and Moscow have vowed to ensure Kosovo’s birth is a painful one and will try to strangle it in its cradle. Serbia has threatened to enforce an embargo and Russia says it will veto Kosovo acquiring a seat at the U.N.

More than half the Serb population lives south of Mitrovica, scattered in smaller enclaves, some of which could be just as big a headache for the Pristina government and its backers.

In the Lipjan area, near the centre of Kosovo, 10,000 Serbs live uneasily alongside a similar number of Albanians. The municipality is, in theory, the sort of multi-ethnic paradigm the new country is meant to be, led by an Albanian mayor and a Serb deputy.

The mayor, Shukri Buja, insists he works hand in glove with the Serbs, and claims they are not bothered by the war mementos he keeps in his office from his days as an Albanian guerrilla. “They liberated not just us but the Kosovo Serbs too,” Mr. Buja said.

A few steps down the corridor, however, his Serb colleagues told a different story. “We’ve complained to the deputy mayor, to the U.N., to everyone, about all these pictures and things,” said Lidija Ivanovic, who is in charge of minority affairs. “We don’t want to be constantly reminded of the war.”

Taking down the war relics and putting up a new flag would make life easier for Serbs in the municipality, she said, but it would not be enough to make her a Kosovan. “I can’t imagine that,” Ms. Ivanovic said, because I will always see myself as a Serb.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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