Serbia and Montenegro politics: Kosovo on the brink

Source: EIU ViewsWire Serbia and Montenegro Date: April 08, 2004 Number: 301 Issue: EIU Viewswire 8 Apr 2004 Edition Name: EIU ViewsWire Page: 1

April 9, 2004

COUNTRY BRIEFING

FROM THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT

A fragile calm has been restored in Kosovo following the mid-March violence, which the international community is eager not to reward by accelerating moves to determine the province's final status. Yet the territory has made little progress since 1999; this, added to socio-economic and political frustrations, suggests that premeditated violence, with a clear political objective, may recur.

On March 17th-18th a major upsurge in violence in Kosovo left 19 people dead and more than 900 injured, prompting the most widespread media coverage of the province since the 1999 war. The worst of the violence subsided relatively quickly after NATO sent extra troops to bolster its Kosovo Force (KFOR), but the following week two UN police officers were killed and two KFOR soldiers wounded. The recent developments have highlighted both the fragility of inter-ethnic relations in the province and the uncertainty over its final status.

The main violence, which clearly took the UN and NATO by surprise, involved attacks by Kosovo Albanian extremists against enclaves that are home to some of the province's 100,000 remaining Serbs. UN figures indicate that the attackers destroyed or badly damaged 800 houses, 150 vehicles, and 29 Orthodox churches and monasteries. The destruction of religious buildings suggests that the attacks were aimed not only at the Serb minority, but also at the symbols of Serbian culture in general. Some 3,600 people, most of them ethnic Serbs, were driven from their homes.

The violence in Kosovo triggered some reprisals in Serbia; mobs burnt mosques in Belgrade and Nis, while about 4,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the US Embassy in Belgrade before police dispersed them. However, even the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) condemned the burning of the mosques, and there was no serious suggestion that Serbia and Montenegro should send troops to the province.

Premeditated attacks

The immediate cause of the violence in Kosovo was a local media report on March 16th that three Albanian boys had drowned in the river Ibar near the divided town of Mitrovica, which has a sizeable Serb minority. The crucial (unsubstantiated) allegation was that the boys had been chased into the river by Serb teenagers with dogs.

Rather than being a spontaneous protest, much of the anti-Serb violence seemed to be well-organised. Gregory Johnson, the NATO commander for south-east Europe, described it as "ethnic cleansing" _ a phrase recalling the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s _ and UNMIK police arrested 163 people allegedly involved in organising and carrying out the attacks. This raises an uncomfortable question: why did ethnic Albanian extremists opt for violence, little more than a year away from possible talks on the "final status" of the province? That formulation is seen by some as code for the independence demanded by Kosovo Albanians. While many politicians in Serbia privately accept that the province can almost certainly not be recovered, formally Kosovo is a part of Serbia and Montenegro, albeit under UN control pending a resolution on final status.

Forcing the pace

The most likely explanation is that the extremists saw progress towards independence as being threatened by several recent developments _ most notably the installation of a new Serbian government with a more hardline stance towards Kosovo than its predecessor. In early March Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, angered Kosovo Albanian extremists and moderates alike (as well as UNMIK) by proposing a "cantonisation" of the province, in which ethnic Serbs would have extensive autonomy. This led to fears among Albanian extremists that the province might be partitioned rather than become independent (Mr Kostunica has since spoken of "decentralisation", which he claims does not prejudice any final status arrangements).

Another worry for the extremists was the resumption on March 4th of talks between working groups of Serbian and Kosovo Albanian officials regarding co-operation in the energy sector. The maintenance of a dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina (on energy, transport, refugees and missing persons) is one of eight standards that the UN says Kosovo must meet before the province's final status can be considered. Many Kosovo Albanians believe that these talks could lock them into some sort of relationship with Belgrade, and make it harder for the province to become independent.

The overriding goal of the extremists was to demonstrate that there is no prospect of long-term stability and peace in the province unless Kosovo gains independence. By "cleansing" the enclaves populated by ethnic Serbs, therefore, the perpetrators of the violence hoped to present the outside world with a new reality on the ground and speed up moves towards independence.

Where next?

The actions by extremist Kosovo Albanians may well have the opposite effect to that which they intended, however. The immediate priority for the UN, NATO, EU and the major western powers is to stabilise the province and try to prevent further unrest (as well as examining what went wrong in the first place). The prospect of final status talks starting by mid-2005 looks increasingly unlikely, since the international community will not want to leave itself open to the accusation that it is rewarding or legitimising violence.

Moreover, Serbia may gain some credit for its relatively measured response to the disturbances, and since the violence a number of western commentators have advocated a partition of Kosovo, giving the northern region to Serbia. The Kosovo Albanian authorities, meanwhile, are likely to come under stronger pressure to meet the various democratic standards that the UN says they must satisfy before final status talks can begin. Neither Serbia nor the UN are seemingly in any great rush for Kosovo's final status to be determined, on the grounds that any resolution is likely to cause more trouble than the status quo.

So where does this leave Kosovo? Are further outbreaks of violence a serious threat? Kosovo's international administrators must hope that a combination of more KFOR troops on the ground, the arrest of some extremist Kosovo Albanians, and a degree of political savvy on the part of Kosovo Albanian leaders _ recognising that violence will undermine their cause _ will be sufficient to quell more outbreaks of violence.

Yet it is also possible that further international stalling will only strengthen the determination of extremists to force independence through violent action. While the province's Kosovo Albanian population has remained stable at about 1.8m since 1999, the UNHCR estimates that the number of Serbs has fallen from 300,000 to 100,000. From the radicals' perspective, the job of creating the conditions for an independent, Albanian Kosovo is already more than halfway complete. So the extremists may conclude that the most appropriate course of action now is to increase the violence, thus forcing the hand of an otherwise reluctant international community.

Nor is Kosovo making much progress towards normality in other areas. The unresolved status of the territory has, naturally, deterred investors. But it is also true that there has been little progress in building a working economy from native resources. Kosovo is still overwhelmingly dependent on foreign aid handouts and suffers vastly high levels of unemployment. Overall, therefore, Kosovo has made only slow progress since 1999 and not every gain seems irreversible. A socio-economic crisis, added to the Kosovo Albanian majority's unfulfilled political ambitions, has made for a volatile mix. In this situation, nobody can rely on the March violence being an isolated incident on the path to a better future for all Kosovo's people.