Top Quotes: “Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know” — Tim Judah
Introduction
“In 1999, during the Kosovo war, some 850,000 people fled or were ethnically cleansed — forced to abandon their homes — from the territory.”
Albanians
“Macedonians and Albanians used to live in closer proximity to one another and in more mixed communities than they do today. For more than two decades a process of ethnic separation has continued apace, so that, for example, Albanians now live mostly in the northern part of Skopje and Macedonians in the south.”
“To the north of Macedonia, but in the area contiguous with the arc of Albanian settlement and hard on the border of Kosovo and Serbia, lies another region inhabited by Albanians. This part of south Serbia is loosely referred to as the Presevo Valley, though actually Albanians live in three municipalities here: Presevo/Presheva, Bujanovac/ Bujanoc, and Medvedja/Medvegja, the latter of which is not really in the valley. According to the 2002 census, some 61,647 Albanians live in Serbia (not including Kosovo), of whom some 57,600 live in these municipalities. Albanians constitute 89 percent of Presevo’s population, 54.6 percent of Bujanovac’s people, and 36 percent of those of Medvedja.
Albanians often refer to this area as Eastern Kosovo and make reference to the fact that until the borders were drawn after the Second World War, traditionally much of it was considered part of Kosovo. In 1959 the small region of Leak/Leshak, which until then had been in Serbia proper, was added to northern Kosovo. The main reason for the Presevo border being drawn where it was, was to ensure that the main road and rail links from Belgrade to Skopje and Thessalonika, which pass through the Presevo Valley, should always be under Serbian control. By contrast, the point of adding a Serbian-inhabited region to the north of Kosovo was to make sure there were more Serbs in the province. Apart from the Presevo Valley there are also a few thousand ethnic Albanians who have long lived elsewhere in Serbia, where they tend to keep a low profile.
According to the 2003 census, the number of Albanians in Montenegro, which declared independence in June 2006, is 31,163, which represents 5.03 percent of a total population of 620,145. Albanians in Montenegro have long been far better integrated into its society than Albanians in other parts of the former Yugoslavia.”
“In the wake of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Kosovo and the other Albanian-inhabited lands in Montenegro and Macedonia were lost to the Serbs and Montenegrins. After that, Albanians were destined to live in different countries, and this would mark them in very different ways.”
Serbs
“Throughout history the map of Serbia has grown, shrunk, disappeared, and reappeared — several times. Sometimes Kosovo has been part of Serbia, sometimes not. Let’s look at the last hundred years: In 1912 Serbian forces retook Kosovo from the Ottomans. In 1915 they lost it, only to return it again in 1918. But then Serbia itself disappeared from the map, dissolved into the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which in 1929 was officially renamed Yugoslavia, the land of the South Slavs. In 1941 this state was wiped out by the Nazis and Mussolini’s Italy. Most, but not all, of Kosovo became part of a Fascist Italian Greater Albania while Serbia re-emerged, albeit as an occupied quisling state.
After the war Yugoslavia was re-created, this time as a federation of six republics of which Serbia was the largest, and Kosovo was destined to be its province. When that Yugoslavia was destroyed, drowned in blood in the wars of the 1990s, the Yugoslav name lingered until 2003, when it was replaced by the so-called state-union of Serbia and Montenegro, which in turn dissolved when the latter declared independence in June 2006. Finally, Serbia had returned to the map as independent state, but not by choice. All of its partners in the Yugoslav adventure, which began in 1918 and was tried again in the wake of the Second World War by the communist, Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito, had abandoned it.”
“For much of the Ottoman period towns in Serbia and Bosnia were Turkish and Muslim-dominated, with Christians living as peasants in the surrounding countryside. As Serbia began to emerge from Ottoman domination, beginning with the first Serbian uprising of 1804, then as a principality still owing loyalty to the sultan, and then, after 1878, as a recognized and fully independent state, Serbs were increasingly attracted to live there and indeed given land and encouraged to migrate from the still Ottoman-dominated parts such as Kosovo. Going the other way were Muslims, Turks, and Albanians, who either chose to leave or were forced to flee, as in the case of the Albanians from the areas around Nis and Valjevo, which Serbia took in 1878. Many headed for Kosovo.”
“Today, according to Bozidar Delic, Serbias deputy prime minister in 2007, his country is losing 25,000 to 30,000 people a year, or 0.3 percent of its population. Serbia, he notes, is the fourth-oldest nation in the world, with an average age of 40.2. Although the birth rate has risen slightly since the fall in 2000 of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s wartime leader, Serbia is still at the bottom of the list of European countries, with fewer than one child per marriage, that is, far less than the 2.1 required.
Serbia is not alone in this, however. This is a general problem in all of the former Yugoslav states, except for one: Kosovo, whose population is among the youngest in Europe. Oddly, the demographic question, one which posed the issue of Kosovo within an aging Serbia and in terms of whether it would be good for Serbia and the Serbs to retain this young, growing, and ferociously hostile population within their state was one that was asked, but only rarely.”
Origins of the Conflict
““Kosovo” itself comes from the Serbian word Kos, which means blackbird.”
“Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece all had states and armies to mobilize, unlike the Albanians, so it is hardly surprising that they were unable to successfully resist in Kosovo. Indeed, if it had not been for Great Power politicking, it is possible that there would have been no Albania at all. The result of the wars and the territorial dispensation of 1913 came about thanks both to arms and as a compromise between Austro-Hungary, which wanted an Albanian state – in part to deny Serbia access to the sea – and Russia, which wanted to help its Orthodox ally.”
“On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo. This was now the opportunity for the Dual Monarchy to crush Serbia and to realize its dreams of eventually taking Bosnia and even the other south Slav, or “Yugoslav,” lands from it. With war declared, the Austro-Hungarians attacked, but to their amazement they found themselves repulsed by little Serbia. By 1915, however, the tide had turned and Serbia was invaded by them, along with the Germans and Bulgarians. Kosovo was divided between the Austro-Hungarians and the Bulgarians. Before their arrival, however, extraordinary scenes were witnessed. The Serbian government, king, army, and many more decided to evacuate the country. The only way out was across Kosovo, so huge columns tramped across it on their way to Montenegro and Albania. Their aim was to reach the Albanian coast in order to be rescued by the Allies. Tens of thousands were captured by the invading armies, and thousands died in the snow of the mountains. Many also died, picked off by Albanians eager for revenge for the carnage visited upon them in the last few years by the Serbs.
Once the Serbian soldiers reached the Albanian coast they were taken, beginning in January 1916, by French, British, and Italian ships, first to Corfu. Many were to die there from disease. However, the survivors were eventually to take their place alongside the Allied armies on the Salonika (Thessalonika) Front. This act of heroisam was to stand Serbia in good stead. Its regutatiom was never higher, and Britain, for example, was to celebrate “Kossovo Day” in 1916, and the French collected finds to help the people of la Serbie martyre. Serbia was the little David standing up to the Austro-Hungarian Celiath. It is hardly surprising, given thai the Kosovo Albanians had lost their chance to umite with Albania and had been massacred by the Serbs in 1912 and 1913, that they should welcome the new inwaders. But of course, this was to leave them on the wrong side of history at the end of the war. There was some Kosovo Albanian resistance, especially against the Bulgarians, but in October 1918 Serbian troops, fighting alongside the French and Italians, returned.
On December 1, 1918, a new state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, was declared. Informally it was already called Yugoslavia. The kingdom, which took in Croatia, Dalmatia, Vojvodina, Slovenia, Montenegro, BosniaHercegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia, was dominated by Serbia, as its core was the existing Serbian state, army, and Karadjordievi monarchy: The biggest non-Slav minorities were Germans and Hungarians in the north, mostly in Vojvodina, and the Albanians, mostly in Kosovo.”
Yugoslavic Kosovo
“The first two decades of communist rule in Kosovo were particularly grim, especially as, in contrast to other parts of Yugoslavia, there was virtually no support for the new regime whatsoever. Kosovo Serbs and Montenegrins, 27.5 percent of the population according to the 1948 census, were suspect because they had shown much more support in Kosovo for the nationalist and royalist Chetniks as opposed to their enemies, the Partisans. Albanians, however, were doubly suspect. Few had supported the Partisans and, unlike the Serbs, they did not even want to be part of this state. Thus all of Kosovo’s institutions and especially the security services were dominated by Serbs and Montenegrins. Albanian villages were frequently raided for arms.”
“Today the 1970s are seen by Kosovo Albanians as a golden age. They were freer than they had ever been in Yugoslavia and better educated and in better health than they had ever been in the whole of their history. Of course this was not just a golden age for Kosovo, but for Yugoslavia too. Credits poured in from foreign banks, industry developed apace, especially in Slovenia and Croatia, and mass tourism, again especially in Croatia, brought much hard cash. And it was much of this money that built the Kosovo that still exists today, and much of the industry, which does not.
Education was one huge change. Now, for the first time in the 20th century, apart from during the two world wars, children could be educated in Albanian (though they had to learn Serbian too). In 1948, 73 percent of Albanians in Yugoslavia were illiterate. In 1979, 31.5 percent of people in Kosovo were illiterate. That was higher than anywhere else in Yugoslavia, but the majority of those people, Albanians and Serbs, would have been older. In terms of healthcare, similar huge progress was made. Vaccinations, as elsewhere of course, helped eradicate traditional diseases. This in turn led to a huge increase in population, as, for social and cultural reasons, Albanians continued to have large numbers of children and now far more of them survived. Kosovo Serbs, likewise, had far larger families than Serbs in general, but in terms of demographics this meant that the proportion of Serbs in Kosovo dropped, even if their numbers stayed roughly steady. Serbs were also emigrating.”
“In terms of politics the high point was 1974, when a new Yugoslav constitution redefined Kosovo’s place within the country. Kosovo remained a part of Serbia but was almost a full federal entity: It had its own national bank, parliament, government, and police, and thanks to increasing Albanianization and the greater numbers of qualified Albanians now able to do the jobs, Albanians were more or less in full control of Kosovo. Apart from its own assembly, its deputies sat in both the Yugoslav federal parliament and the Serbian one.
However, it rankled Albanians that Kosovo still did not have full equality with the republics. Some were arrested and jailed for their opposition to this de facto compromise between Pristina and Belgrade. These hardline groups were tiny, though, and represented few. At the same time the situation angered Serbs because while Kosovo Albanians sat in the Serbian parliament and thus had a say in the running of Serbia as a whole, the government of Serbia did not have a say in the running of Kosovo. For now, however, Tito was still alive and while he was still alive he was the ultimate arbiter and boss.
Tito died on May 4, 1980. From then on the system he had presided over since 1945 began to unravel, although that this was going to happen with such cataclysmic results was unimaginable at the time. For Kosovo the first major event in this transition from Tito to the destruction of Yugoslavia came less than a year after his death. Its consequences were to be fundamental in shaping the future history of Kosovo. On March 11, 1981, protests started at Pristina University. The spark was not political. The problem was that poor organization meant that students often had to queue for two hours to get a meal in the canteen. In the days that followed, voices were raised against members of the university administration. Then, members of tiny so-called Marxist-Leninist groups began to get involved. The atmosphere changed. Political demands — above all, that Kosovo should become a republic— began to be raised. Arrests began but these only fueled more protests. Slogans being shouted now included: “We are Albanians, not Yugoslavs!” and “We want a unified Albania!” Schoolchildren and workers now joined in.
The story ended with tanks on the street, special police forces deployed, and a state of emergency. Officially, 57 died in clashes but the real figure could have run into hundreds. Purges of Kosovo’s communist party started and a new period of repression set in, albeit one in which, until 1989, Albanians were still in charge. In the eight years following the demonstrations, more than half a million people were at one time either arrested or questioned.”
“Milosevic emerged from the building where the meeting was taking place and then uttered the words that would immortalize him: “No one should dare to beat you.” He returned to the building to listen to the grievances of ordinary Serbs and made a rousing speech demanding that they stand up to oppression and promising shame if the Serbs were to leave Kosovo. In terms of a communist state, and of Yugoslavia, this was electric. It was also staged. Four days before, Milosevie had already been in Kosovo to set up the whole event.
Milosevic, who until then had been a rather anonymous, gray, apparatchik, had read the situation in the country and the world well. Communism was dying, although this was far from apparent to the vast majority of people. Milosevic knew that by playing the nationalist card he could secure both supreme power in Serbia, and then hopefully Yugoslavia, and also survive the demise of communism. Some of this was to come true. By playing on the issue of the plight of the Kosovo Serbs Milosevic did indeed become extraordinarily popular among the Serbs. His intention was then to dominate Yugoslavia. This was where he miscalculated. He destroyed it instead. The actions he was to take over the next few years propelled him to extraordinary power and popularity, but by stripping Kosovo of its autonomy and using tanks to do so, he instilled fear elsewhere, which in turn fueled the rise of nationalism in other parts of the country.”
Independent Serbia
“He had just succeeded in having Kosovo’s two main leaders, Azem Vlassi and Kaqusha Jashari, removed and Albanian miners from Trepia/Trepça were protesting against this. But Milosevic pressure was relentless. In January Milosevic succeeded in installing his own “loyal Albanians,” as they were called.”
“The end of Kosovo’s autonomy was greeted with violent protests by Albanians, but eventually they were crushed. During the unrest thousands of police poured in from outside the province, and widespread repression, arrests, and imprisonments followed, coupled with hundreds of new laws and regulations that needed to be passed to integrate Kosovo back into Serbia.”
“Serbs were now in full control and all significant jobs in the administration and public service were taken by them. Serbs often grumbled though, especially as hyperinflation caught hold of wartime Serbia and their wages were reduced to nothing. The reason was that many Albanians, having been turfed out of their state jobs, had had to set up small businesses and so were often not as badly off as their state-employed Serbian neighbors. Serbs and Albanians led increasingly parallel lives. Rona Nishliu, who was born in Mitrovica in 1986, sums up something of the atmosphere of those years:
When I went to school, we Albanians went in the afternoon and Serbs went in the morning. We did not have any contacts with them and we could not use the gym or the laboratories. They were locked, so we did sport outside. We did have Serbian neighbors. People we said“hello” or “good afternoon” to, but I did not have any Serbian friends. Both my parents used to work for the Trepça mining complex but both were kicked out in 1989. After that my father ran a shop and my mother was at home.”
The Conflict
“Politically and strategically, two key events were to change everything in Kosovo. The first was the November 1995 Dayton peace agreement, which ended the Bosnian war. In the wake of this, most international sanctions against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that is, Serbia and Montenegro, were lifted, and the European Union recognized this state, which had been born in 1992, as the successor to the old Yugoslavia of six republics. This was a huge trauma for Kosovo’s Albanians. Dayton was about Bosnia yet it also marked the effective end of hostilities between Serbia and Croatia, too.
Kosovo was not an issue at Dayton, but for the LPK it was a moment to savor as it meant that they could argue that they had always been right that peaceful resistance would get their people nowhere. From that moment on, the tide began to turn in their favor.”
“The “Ponzi” schemes that the government had tolerated came to their natural, crashing end. In the chaos that followed, the government of President Sali Berisha lost control, the opposition Socialists mobilized their supporters, especially in the south, to rise up against him, and in the ensuing mayhem armories across Albania were simply abandoned by the military and security forces and looted. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of weapons were available, including and above all, Kalashnikov rifles, for as little as $5 each.”
“Overconfident, a KLA commander decided to seize an important coal mine. It was held for barely six days. The next month a unit attacked the Trepia mine and then the town of Orahovac/Rahovec, which had a mixed Albanian and Serbian population. Four days later, utterly devastated, it was back in Serbian hands. The counteroffensive now began in earnest. The Serbian police, backed up by the army, began to slice through KLA areas. Villages began to burn and tens of thousands fled. By August 3 the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, estimated that 200,000 Kosovars had been displaced. The KLA was proving it was no match for Serbian forces when they began to fight back. But Milosevie Serbian authorities were also proving how inept they were in terms of the war for international public opinion. As in Croatia and Bosnia, they were simply herding large numbers of terrified people straight into the arms of the foreign media.”
“On January 8 the KLA killed three Serbian policemen near the town of Stilje/Shtime/Shtime. Two days later, another was killed. The Serbs prepared an offensive against the KLA-held village of Racak/Reçak. When they had finished 45 people, including a 12-year-old boy and a woman, were found dead by a trench. It appeared that they had been executed after the Serbs took the village.”
Toward Independence
“The deal presented to the parties and finessed in Rambouillet proposed several things. The first was that the agreement would have a limited duration of three years. Some Serbian and Yugoslav forces could stay in Kosovo, especially on the borders. Kosovo would be an autonomous part of Serbia and security would be guaranteed by a NATO-led force, and the KLA would have to disarm.
Milosevic, counting perhaps on Russian support and divisions within NATO, rejected the plan. He did not want NATO troops in Kosovo and objected to a provision (which he never tried to negotiate away and which he might well have succeeded in doing had he wanted to) by which NATO troops would be able to move through the rest of Yugoslavia. The Kosovo Albanians, and especially the KLA, objected because the proposal did not give them independence. It did not rule it out, though.
The key paragraph read in part: Three years after the entry into force of the agreement an international meeting shall be convened to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of relevant authorities, each of the Party’s efforts regarding the implementation of this Agreement, and the Helsinki Final Act.
Madeleine Albright made clear to the Kosovars that she understood “will of the people” to mean a referendum, which, given the structure of Kosovo’s population, obviously meant independence. However, the Helsinki Final Act also talks of the territorial integrity of states. Thaçi was under huge pressure from the KLA on the ground and grandees such as Adem Demaçi not to sign. Albright’s memoirs on how she tackled the recalcitrant Thaçi are revealing in their brutal honesty:
I tried a variety of tactics. First I told Thaçi what a great potential leader he was. When that didn’t work, I said we were disappointed in him, that if he thought we would bomb the Serbs even if the Albanians rejected the agreement, he was wrong. We could never get NATO support for that. “On the other hand,” I said, “if you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until Serb forces are out and NATO can go in. You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves.”
For the Albanians the situation was saved by Surroi, who devised a formula by which they said they would sign the document — but only after consultations back home and in two weeks.
When the two sides returned to Paris on March 15 Thaçi announced that he was happy to sign. The Serbs, however, came back with an almost entirely new proposal. They had crossed out roughly half of the original, for example the bit about Kosovo’s future being decided by the “will of the people,” and had replaced these parts with their own ideas.
It was too late. Some 2,000 had already died in the conflict and, while, never mentioned explicitly, a ghost haunted the proceedings, or rather the leaders of all of the major Western powers. It was, as noted earlier, the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosniaks after the fall of Srebrenica. The guilt that this engendered was a major factor in propelling Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and the other Western leaders to take action now. If such a crime had happened before, there was no guarantee that it might not happen again. The fact that no explicit UN Security Council resolution endorsed the 78 days of bombing that were now to begin should be understood in that political context.
The bombing began on March 24. A few days earlier the UNHCR reported that there were already some 250,000 displaced within Kosovo because of the fighting. More Serbian forces were now moving into Kosovo, and as the KVM pulled out, another 25,000 were in flight from Drenica. One of the main reasons given by Western leaders for the intervention was to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.
Very soon it became clear that both sides had miscalculated. Western leaders had believed that the bombing would be short-lived. After all, it had taken only a few days of bombing to help propel the Serbs to Dayton in 1995. They believed the conflict would not last long. Milosevic therefore also thought he could take the risk. He also believed he would get serious help, including perhaps military help from Russia. He did not.
For the next 78 days Serbia, Kosovo, and some targets in Montenegro were subject to major aerial bombardment. Military targets were hit, targets that were perceived as having a “dual use,” as well as factories and other places where the Yugoslav army and security forces had withdrawn to hide equipment and facilities. The military proved themselves to be masters of dissimulation, making large numbers of fake targets — for example, tanks made out of plywood — which attracted fire. They also hid among civilians and in civilian areas. Within Kosovo the KLA was rapidly reduced to near impotence, although it held some small areas, including some on the border. Several massacres helped propel hundreds of thousands to flee. Serbian policy toward the Kosovo Albanians was confused, or, rather, varied to such an extent that it is hard to work out any pattern.
At the end of March, tens of thousands of Albanians from two districts of Pristina were rounded up and deported at gunpoint, by train, to Macedonia. Many more fled but after this there were no more clearances from Pristina. Albanians were expelled from Pec/Peja and the old town of Djakovica/Gjakova was torched and people deported. In some areas, people were assembled to leave and marched or driven around Kosovo before being sent home. In some rural areas people were effectively herded from scattered hamlets into smaller, more concentrated areas and then deported or simply abandoned. Serbian paramilitaries, many of whom consisted of men released from prison on the condition they serve, rampaged across the countryside killing, looting, and torching homes. By the time the bombing had ended, the UNHCR reported that 848,100 Albanians had fled the province. Of these, 444,600 were in Albania, 244,500 in Macedonia, 69,000 in Montenegro, and 91,057 in other countries. Including the hundreds of thousands displaced within Kosovo, some 1.45 million Kosovo Albanians were displaced.
One of Milosevic’s war aims appears to have been to take advantage of the bombing and to get rid of as many Albanians as possible from Kosovo. At the border many were stripped of their documents, which would have made it hard for them to return in the event of a ceasefire and Serbia remaining in control of the province. He also perhaps hoped to spread the conflict to Macedonia at the very least, by inflaming passions between the country’s own Albanians and Macedonians. This failed, not the least because NATO quickly moved to contain the situation by building camps for the refugees on the border. In terms of world support, the first few days of the conflict were bad for NATO, for Serbia was able to portray itself as an innocent victim of NATO aggression, merely trying to safeguard its territorial integrity. This argument was rapidly drowned out by the images of the hundreds of thousands of Albanians in flight.”
Transition
“Under the terms of the deal, which was to be enshrined in Security Council Resolution 1244, which was passed on June 10, Serbian forces were to withdraw from Kosovo and to be replaced by a NATO-led force and a UN administration. Some Serbian forces would be allowed to return later to maintain a presence at Serbian “patrimonial” sites and to maintain a presence at key border crossings. This would never happen, for KFOR, the NATO-led Kosovo force that was now moving in to Kosovo, would never deem the region safe enough for them to return. In the wake of the resolution, and as Serb forces pulled out of Kosovo and the administration there collapsed, Milosevie proclaimed that Serbia and Yugoslavia had won a magnificent victory. Russia was thwarted in its attempts to have its own sector in Kosovo. NATO troops entered on June 12, soon followed by hundreds of thousands of refugees eager to return home. The war is generally estimated to have cost some 10,000 livels in Kosovo.
In the general euphoria that followed, many did not see, or overlooked, the dreadful reprisals that took place against Serbs in particular but also against Roma and other non-Albanians. NATO troops were unprepared to deal with the murders and mayhem that accompanied their arrival in the province and the flight of tens of thousands of Serbs, accompanied by attacks on Orthodox churches. This was a particularly shameful episode.
In one incident alone, on July 23, 14 men harvesting in the fields in Staro Gracko/Gracko e Vjetër were murdered. Serb and Roma houses, and those of other non-Albanians, were burned. A report prepared by the OSCE noted (typically) that a “keynote feature” of immediate postconflict Prizen was house-burning.
In the town they have nearly exclusively been Kosovo Serbian properties burned with the obvious intention of preventing returns, but they have also been used to signal to the international community and the moderate part of the Kosovo Albanian population who is in control. The overall result is that far more damage has been caused in Prizen town after the war than during it…. By the end of October, nearly 300 houses have been burned in Prizen and the surrounding villages.
The result of this pressure on the Kosovo Serbs is clear: 97 percent of the pre-war population have left. The only really significant Kosovo Albanian to stand up and protest about this was Surroi, for which he earned death threats. In the next few months Serbs left virtually all towns in Kosovo and in most places elsewhere retreated into enclaves such as Gracanica/Graçanica, Strpce/Shterpea, and Gorazdevac/Gorazhdevc. For many years, but depending on where they lived, freedom of movement was difficult, but it became much easier in the latter years of the UN period.”
“Under the terms of Security Council Resolution 1244, jurisdiction in Kosovo passed to the UN, which in turn created the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). The resolution had been aimed at ending the bombing, so it was contradictory and, in keys parts, unclear. For example, it states clearly on the one hand that it reaffirms the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” (of which Serbia was, after 2006, its legal successor) but on the other also demands that full account be taken of the Rambouillet accords, which in turn speak of determining a final settlement “on the basis of the will of the people.”
In the meantime, however, it was clear(ish) on what UNMIK had to do: help rebuild Kosovo and provide it with a “transitional administration while establishing and overseeing the development of provisional democratic self-governing institutions to ensure conditions for a peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants of Kosovo.””
“At the moment of the declaration of independence in 2008, UNMIK appeared very much like a tired organization that had outlived its usefulness. Some staff had become tainted by corruption and it was uncertain what more UNMIK could do. However, despite criticism within Kosovo and from abroad, UNMIK managed to achieve a lot. In effect it fulfilled its mandate of helping to create Kosovo’s institutions and giving its people the means to live as much of an ordinary life as possible. Key accomplishments included the creation and training of the Kosovo Police Service (KPS), giving people documents such as UNMIK passports, and overseeing the creation of an assembly, a government, and so on. In June 1999 Kosovo had no police. By November 2007 it had 7,124 officers, of whom 6,082 were Albanians, 746 were Serbs, and 414 were from other groups. This was a success, although in the wake of independence KPS began to split along ethnic grounds.”
“In 1999 Kosovo was covered by the Serbian network, whose prefix is 063. The new Kosovo needed its own cell phone network but it was not going to use +381. Thus it managed to borrow the presumably underused prefix +377, which belongs to Monaco. For some years 063 persisted in much of the territory but was later forced to retreat to Serbian areas. Kosovo’s authorities regarded 063 as illegal, especially as the network paid no taxes in Kosovo, but as the Serbs relied on it, it survived. Any attempt to switch off its base stations was interpreted as an attack on Serbs. But the symbolism of the result was huge. If a Kosovo Albanian wanted to call his Serbian friend up the road, he was making an international call, that is, from Kosovo’s network to Serbias. In 2007 Kosovo got a second network, which was Slovene owned. Now Kosovo had another international code, that of Slovenia, but still none of it its own.”
“As for cars, UNMIK devised a number plate with the letters “KS” in the middle, which would be the same for Albanians and for Serbs, even if the latter used Cyrillic letters. The neutral plates helped Serbs especially, enabling them to drive around without fear. But Serbia refused to accept these and so you could not drive your car into Serbia with them. Instead you had to pay for temporary plates or — as many Serbs did — get both Serbian Kosovo plates and KS plates.”
“In the immediate aftermath of the war, French soldiers took control of Mitrovica. It had always been mixed but what happened now was that Serbs left the south and most, but not all Albanians, left, or rather did not return to the north, and so the town was quickly divided at the River Ibar/Ibër. From there to the Serbian border the region has traditionally been Serbian-inhabited, with few Albanians. At the northern end of the bridge dividing the town, Serbs sat in the Dolce Vita Café, keeping an eye out in case of trouble coming from the Albanian south. They were called the Bridge Watchers. On one side of the bridge everyone spoke Albanian, used euros, KS plates, and Kosovo cell phones, and looked to their leaders in Pristina. On the other, people spoke Serbian, used dinars (as well as euros), Serbian number plates, Serbian phone networks, and Serbian papers.”
Conclusion
““With a per capita income of €1,300,” noted an April 2008 report by the think tank the Kosovo Stability Initiative (IKS), “Kosovo is an island of poverty in Europe.”
With only 54 percent of the working age population economically active, Kosovo has the lowest labour force participation rate in Europe. Subsistence agriculture is still the largest employer; 85 percent of food produced in Kosovo never makes it to the market. 45 percent of the population in Kosovo lives below the poverty line, on less than €1.4 a day. Registered unemployment has been increasing relentlessly and an additional 30,000 youngsters press onto the labour market every year. Economic growth in the range of 3.1 percent, as forecast by the Ministry of Finance and Economy is nowhere near enough to begin absorbing the existing unemployed.
All of this is true but can be misleading unless understood in context. Kosovo looks and feels like a poor part of Europe — but not the Third World. Family solidarity is strong and the vast majority of families own their own homes. Remittances from family abroad are also a huge source of income, though how much that is remains unclear, given that much of that money has always come in people’s pockets and thus is impossible really to quantify. Nevertheless, IKS note that in 2002 the Ministry of Finance did make an attempt. They estimated that “of Kosovo’s total income of €1,570 million, €720 million came from cash remittances. At its peak, foreign assistance and private inflows in the form of savings and remittances accounted for nearly half of Kosovo’s GDP.” Gastar-beiter pensions are also a huge but unknown source of income for large numbers of people. Someone who had a relatively modest job for some 20 years in Switzerland, for example, could expect to receive a monthly income of €2,500. It is in this context that the above figure of 1.4 a day needs to be understood. If most people really only lived on that, then life would not just be hard for everyone but most people in Kosovo would be starving to death.”
“This division, and the ambivalence felt by at least Muslim Albanians toward the Ottoman Empire, meant, as we have already seen, that compared to their Orthodox neighbors, Serbs and Greeks especially, Albanians were late when it came to developing a modern national identity. Even more important, as the empire was gradually chipped away and finally collapsed, Albanians had no small state to mobilize to try and unite all of their compatriots in one country. The Albanian state that was proclaimed in 1912 encompassed only half or so of the Albanians of the Balkans.”
“Since the demise of communism, in neither Kosovo nor Albania have political parties advocating the union of the two ever made serious headway. A poll in Kosovo in 2005 found that while 90.2 percent supported an independent state, only 9.1 percent supported union with Albania. This suggests something Albanian nationalists hate: that over the last 20 years many, especially younger Albanians in Kosovo, have developed a new Kosovar identity.”
“The last two decades have seen the phenomenon of the winnowing out of the Macedonians and Macedonian Albanians. Areas that used to be mixed are ever less so, and thus Albanian areas are ever more compact. Mentally tuned to a larger Albanian world, especially thanks to television, the Internet, and the media in general, Albanians and Macedonians, while able to get on with one another, have less to do with each other than ever.”
“Albania did not even rank among the top ten countries from which it imported a total of €1.1 billion. In a potential pan-Albanian market of more than 6 million consumers, only insurance appears to have made any real headway. Likewise, Kosovo ranks very low as an Albanian trading partner, despite a 2003 bilateral and now regional free trade agreement. One of the main reasons for this is that neither Kosovo nor Albania actually produce very much, and certainly not much of interest to each other.”
“Western Sahara has been occupied by Morocco since 1975, despite a judgment from the UN’s International Court of Justice that it possessed the right of self-determination.”
“If Kosovo lay on the further reaches of the Black Sea, then policy makers in EU countries and the United States would be far less concerned by what happened there. Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s, has by comparison, been almost completely ignored by the EU.”
“Kosovo was not a republic, however, but after a period as an autonomous region in 1963 it was promoted to become an autonomous province like Vojvodina, Serbia’s northern region.
Yugoslavia, then, bears comparison with the other two communist federations that dissolved: Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. When both of them collapsed they did so along the lines of their constituent parts, that is to say the Czech and Slovak republics and the 15 Soviet republics. Unlike Czechoslovakia, many of the Soviet republics contained various autonomous regions and republics. Today, Russia contains 21 such republics, including Chechnya, Tatarstan, and North Ossetia-Alania.
In 1991, as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, the then European Community (now the European Union) asked Robert Badinter, a distinguished French constitutional lawyer, to head a commission to which it could turn for advice. Its most important conclusion was that Yugoslavia had dissolved into its republican parts, which could be recognized as new states. What this meant was that Serbs as a whole and as a nation did not have the right to self-determination, which would have meant redrawing the borders of the republics, which is of course exactly what the Serbs under Milosevic wanted to do. Badinter’s commission was not asked about Kosovo but, by implication, because it was part of Serbia, it did not have the right to statehood like Croatia, Bosnia, and the other parts of Yugoslavia. At the time Kosovo was quiet and what the Europeans and others concerned with managing the crisis wanted to avoid was drawing new frontiers. Kosovo Albanians argued that, in fact, although theirs was not a republic, it had all the same rights and thus, as they were not seeking to redraw their borders, they had a right to independence too.
This is the problem that has bedeviled Kosovo ever since. The Russians, for example argue that Kosovo’s independence might set a precedent for any separatist-minded unit of a former Soviet republic, not to mention other parts of the world. And they have a point. Why should Kosovars be allowed independence but not Chechens? For now, Chechnya is back under Russian control, but what about ten years hence? Pavel Felgenhauer, a leading Russian commentator, has argued that the threat of a disintegrating Russia — comparable to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 — is still today seen as a very real threat by the Kremlin and the Russian elite….The West is seen today by many in the Russian elite and public as a threatening force that is plotting to tear Russia apart and rob it of its natural resources. By supporting Serbia’s right to veto Kosovo’s secession… the Kremlin clearly believes that it is defending Russias undisputed right to sustain its territorial integrity by any means available.
Outside of Russia itself but within the area of the former Soviet Union, four places, or “frozen conflicts,” are often mentioned with respect to Kosovo and the precedent issue: Transnistria, which has broken away from Moldova; the Armenian populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has broken away from Azerbaijan; and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which have both declared independence from Georgia.
It is often argued that Kosovo is a unique case. This argument is just as commonly rejected. “If people in Kosovo can be granted full independence,” asked Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, “why then should we deny it to Abkhazia and South Ossetia?” On the face of it, he might have a good case, but then once you look at the places in question you see quite how different they are. Take Abkhazia, on the Black Sea. Before its conflict, which took place in the early 1990s, only 17.8 percent of its population was Abkhaz. Today, of some 200,000 people, they still only constitute 45 percent of its people, and more than 200,000 Georgian refugees from Abkhazia want to return home. The Abkhaz, who are in firm control of the government and of all levers of power, argue that to allow more to come back than they have already permitted would simply be to turn back the clock and to make them once more just a small minority in their own homeland. Ironically, while Russia supports Abkhazia, if not its full independence, and it has opposed Kosovo’s independence, that does not mean that the Abkhaz are against it. “Just because Russia does not want Kosovo to be recognized,” says Maxim Gunjia, the deputy foreign minister of Abkhazia, “it does not mean that we do not want it.”
The same is true in South Ossetia. “Those rules which work for Kosovo will work for South Ossetia,” says Alan Pliev, its deputy foreign minister, in Tskhinvali, the muddy, village-like capital of South Ossetia whose main thoroughfare is called “Stalin Street.” But South Ossetia has a tiny population — anywhere between 22,000, as the Georgians claim, and 70,000, according to the South Ossetians. It is hardly a candidate to be a viable state, especially as large swaths of it are held by the Georgians, but perhaps that is not the aim. South Ossetia is connected to Russia by a tunnel through the mountains. On the other side lies the autonomous republic of North Ossetia. “Our aim is unification with North Ossetia,” says Alan Pliev. “We don’t know if that would be as part of Russia or as a separate united Ossetian state.” Juri Dzittsojty, deputy speaker of parliament, says: “I would prefer there to be an independent and united Ossetia, but today it is not possible. It is safer to be with Russia. The main aim of the struggle is to be independent of Georgia.”
While the Russians and Serbs argue that Kosovo’s independence would be precedent setting, one thing that is noticeable is the extent to which Russia could be argued to have set a precedent for Kosovo. The Abkhaz and South Ossetians are officially Georgian citizens, but almost all have Russian passports and vote in Russian elections. Russia supports the separatists financially, too, and pays pensions in these territories, which also use the ruble.”
“The United States and most EU states recognized Kosovo, as had many other countries, but Russia, China, Brazil, India, and many others had not. Likewise, few Muslim countries recognized Kosovo, at least initially, which was a surprise given that most of its people are Muslims. Possibly the Albanians were viewed with suspicion in much of the Islamic world as, apart from being overwhelmingly secular, they are also ferociously pro-American, and in Kosovo especially there remains an enormous well of gratitude to the United States for having taken the lead in ending Serbian rule.”
