With the world focused on Iraq, North Korea and a possible clash with Iran over nuclear weapons, Kosovo has fallen off the radar screen. That inattention will end soon -- a decision about the province's fate is at hand.
The US and its European friends have repeatedly stated their intention to make the difficult decision before the end of the year on whether to separate Kosovo from Serbia. This decision -- crucial to the future of an unstable region -- will test Western determination and unity.
UN-brokered negotiations this year in Vienna showed that an agreed settlement between Serbia and Kosovo on "final status" will not happen. Talks continue, but -- as UN negotiator and former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari diplomatically told the Security Council -- they are effectively dead.
No Serbian leader will agree to Kosovo's independence because nationalism remains the dominant political force in the country. Indeed, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, an apostle of Serbian nationalism, has been trying in every way to undermine Kosovo's interim government. He is rushing to hold a national referendum this month on a new constitution without serious parliamentary debate or the usual public education.
The main purpose of his new constitution is its preamble, which enshrines Kosovo as an inalienable part of Serbia.
Kosovo's ethnic Albanians have proclaimed that they will not accept any tie to Serbia, no matter how tenuous. Throughout the 1990s, they virtually opted out of Serbian-run Kosovo by creating parallel institutions. Their forced mass exodus in 1999 and NATO's subsequent intervention, which ended Serbia's rule and established a quasi-state under UN administration, has made anything other than independence intolerable.
Some time over the next month or two, the Balkan Contact Group -- the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Russia -- will consider Ahtisaari's recommendations on Kosovo's final status and possibly propose a solution to the Security Council, which must make the final decision. In public, all Contact Group members have tried to leave the question of Kosovo's final status open, but informally the US and some of its allies have told the two parties that they will propose independence this year.
Some members of the Security Council -- particularly Russia and China -- are opposed to or skeptical of an imposed settlement. Few governments favor dividing up another country's territory, however compelling the circumstances. Whether the Security Council will approve independence largely depends on averting a Russian veto, which will require considerable diplomatic effort.
The nature of the independence bestowed is also important. An independent Kosovo must be secured and its minorities protected. Northern Kosovo, now largely under Belgrade's control, must not be partitioned off in all but name. In the interest of reducing the blow to Serbia, the Security Council must avoid granting independence in ways that are so contorted that the new state cannot function effectively.
If the Security Council fails to reach a decision on final status, it will produce a grave situation -- Kosovo would declare independence unilaterally, and all nations would have to make up their minds whether or not to recognize the new state. If that happens, it is likely that the Serbs of North Kosovo would declare their own independence. At a minimum, Serbia would campaign strongly against recognition.
In fact, Serbia's government is already trying to persuade the West to postpone a decision until mid-next year. It claims that if Kosovo is granted independence, the ultranationalist Radical Party will come to power in the next elections, and believes that holding elections as early as this year will cause the Contact Group to delay a proposal to the Security Council.
Moreover, the government has encouraged the leaders of Bosnia's Republika Srpska to threaten to hold their own referendum on separation from a still fragile Bosnia. And they continue to push -- unsuccessfully -- for Ahtisaari's removal in order to prolong the Vienna talks.
The timing of the constitutional referendum appears to be a part of this delaying strategy. Some hope that postponement will stimulate violence in Kosovo and further encourage Western reconsideration of independence.
That tactic may be working. Many EU countries are worried about the implications of taking away a country's territory, as well as the impact of Kosovo's independence on Serbian democracy. Given Serbia's political instability, they question the harm of a short-term postponement -- albeit mostly self-inflicted. But delay only offers more room for Kostunica to find ways to make a Security Council decision more difficult.
The West must ignore Belgrade's siren song. Serbian politics will be chaotic and unstable for the foreseeable future, and Serbian politicians will attempt to present this as an excuse to avoid facing the loss of Kosovo. Likewise, there will be problems establishing ties between Serbia and Kosovo under any circumstances.
But failure to proceed definitively now on Kosovo's final status will produce a worse Balkan situation -- one that blocks Serbia's move toward the West and membership in the EU, condemns Kosovo's ethnic minorities to dangerous ambiguity and imperils fragile states like Bosnia and Macedonia.
No realistic solution exists for Kosovo but independence. If Serbia wants to join the West, it must not forsake that opportunity by trapping itself in its nationalist past.
Morton Abramowitz, a former US assistant secretary of state, is senior fellow at the Century Foundation in Washington. James Lyon is special Balkans adviser for the International Crisis Group think tank in Belgrade. Copyright: Project Syndicate
On Sept. 3 in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rolled out a parade of new weapons in PLA service that threaten Taiwan — some of that Taiwan is addressing with added and new military investments and some of which it cannot, having to rely on the initiative of allies like the United States. The CCP’s goal of replacing US leadership on the global stage was advanced by the military parade, but also by China hosting in Tianjin an August 31-Sept. 1 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which since 2001 has specialized
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
A report by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on Tuesday last week warned that China is operating illegal oil drilling inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha, 東沙群島), marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. The report said that, starting in July, state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp installed 12 permanent or semi-permanent oil rig structures and dozens of associated ships deep inside Taiwan’s EEZ about 48km from the restricted waters of Pratas Island in the northeast of the South China Sea, islands that are home to a Taiwanese garrison. The rigs not only typify
RSS