'They're always being told it's three months away'

Mark Tran
Thursday December 6, 2007

For a small, landlocked territory with just 2 million people, Kosovo has proved an enormous diplomatic puzzle for western policymakers - a puzzle that is about to get even more complicated.
On Monday, mediators from the EU, Russia and the US will submit their report to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, on their efforts to resolve Kosovo's status. After almost two years of fruitless talks, the troika will report the obvious: they cannot square the circle of Kosovo's demand for independence and Serbia's formula of "more than autonomy and less than independence".

Belgrade has been trying to frighten the west with doomsday scenarios for the western Balkans should Kosovo declare unilateral independence. It warns Kosovo could be partitioned as Serbs in the north of the province break away to align themselves with Belgrade, steeling Bosnian Serbs to do the same and seek independence for a Republika Srpska in the fragile state of Bosnia.

All this may be a bluff on Belgrade's part, but a vigorous lobbying effort in European capitals by the Serbs seems to have had the desired effect, and western diplomats have become increasingly nervous of an independent Kosovo.

Serbia has ruled out overt military action, but says it will take economic measures such as cutting off electricity to a territory already suffering from regular power cuts, and imposing an economic blockade. The latter may not be very effective as goods will still be able to come into Kosovo through its borders with Montenegro and Albania. A blockade is a double-edged sword as well, because Serbia benefits from its economic ties with Kosovo.

More worrying is the threat of violence in Kosovo itself. The former US ambassador to Belgrade, William Montgomery, writing recently in the Belgrade paper Danas, warned that, in such circumstances, at least some "volunteers" - a euphemism for paramilitaries - from Serbia proper would go to "help" the Kosovo Serbs.

Belgrade pursued a similar course of action when it dispatched paramilitary thugs to Bosnia and Croatia between 1990 and 1995. Hardliners in Belgrade seem determined to make mischief in Kosovo, even if it hurts Serbia's chances of EU membership.

For once, Nato is taking a proactive stance. At Friday's meeting of Nato foreign ministers in Brussels, the US will seek a firm pledge from the alliance to maintain peacekeeping troops at the current level of 16,000 and take a tough stand against any sort of unrest.

In 2004, Nato peacekeepers were caught off-guard by riots that led to the deaths of 19 people, hundreds of injuries and the sacking of Serb churches. The Nato-led Kosovo force, Kfor, will certainly have to react with more spine this time in the case of unrest.

In the same year, a German police report said German troops hid in their barracks like "frightened rabbits". Even ahead of the Nato meeting, Nato commanders have taken the precaution of moving US and French units to northern Kosovo, 17km from the Serbian border, just in case of unrest.

In the long term however, as the former UN envoy for Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, concluded, Kosovo's status has to be resolved. The Ahtisaari plan - which would have replaced Kosovo's "quasi-state" status under UN security council resolution 1244 - envisaged supervised independence in an initial phase.

If all had gone swimmingly, as the US had confidently - but mistakenly - predicted, the UN security council would have approved the Ahtisaari blueprint and Kosvoo would now be on the path to independence. Russia, however, threw a spanner into the works and threatened to veto the plan at the UN security council.

Although the US has been loudest in its backing for Kosovo's independence, the heavy lifting will have to be done by a divided EU. Some countries with separatist problems of their own, such as Spain, Greece and Slovakia, are none too thrilled with Kosovo threatening to declare independence.

Most, however, seem to be siding with Britain's pro-independence stance. Analysts say at least 20 members of the EU now seem prepared to join the US in recognising a unilateral declaration of independence by the Kosovo Albanians.

The EU appears to have succeeded in persuading Hasim Thaci, the former guerrilla leader who was elected prime minister of Kosovo last month, to delay any declaration of independence until February or March, in return for recognition from most EU members.

That is certainly what the Kosovo Albanians are being led to believe. Sceptics, however, say the Albanians are once again being strung along with the promise of independence. "They're always being told it's three months away," said one observer.

In the meantime, the EU will take over from the UN as the dominant civilian administration in the province and assume a more hands-on role, focusing on the rule of law, police and judicial reform and combating corruption and human trafficking. A big challenge for the EU is to coordinate the plethora of aid organisations in Kosovo - conservative assessments put the number of NGOs registered in Kosovo at 4,000.

The problem is, impatience and frustration will boil over if Kosovo's Albanians think they have been hoodwinked about independence once too often. Trading one set of international bureaucrats for another is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs, and it will not be too long before the EU will become the focus of the resentment of a restive population.

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,,2222899,00.html