that don´t mean very much, you a ren´t realizing the lower importance of that "vote" ...it´s initiated by a pro-albanian lobbyist, and it´s goal was to create cheerful mood among the Albanians, I guess, what seems to have worked according to those childish reactions here.
boys, keep in mind it´s a unanimous vote by all memberstates of the EU what would be a reason for you to behave like you already do.
and furthermore there is the UNSC...
it seems like you are so desperate, that you are simply ignoring those facts...
and finally to Joe,
you don´t seem to realize it,but the "only global superpower" how you put it, is highly dependent on Russia and China in the really important matters ( Iran, Korea etc. ),
and it´s power is declining, as every sound observer is noticing it in the last years.
WOW, now serbs pack up, the ding-a-ling-parliament had a say.
what about the equaly important opinion of the boy-scouts and the postal officers???
LOL
no honestly, i´m pretty satisfied! it means nothing, it may open the eyes of the 30% serb voters that smash their voice by voting for pro-eu-parties and therefor it may save serbia from eu.
and there will be others to decide about south-serbia.
but i kinda loved the bluff about "eu-unity". where´s the 2 billion euros for the first year of southserbian occupation???what a unity!
Nebojsa you are right. All the world (except serbs like you) are blind and can't see what has and is suffering serbian minority in Kosovo. The international community is giving us Independence because we kosovars are "proofed criminals" and because we have inside us a terrible desire to "Kill others".
Please Nebojsa can you be a little more serious, because reading your post someone can think that we killed ourself to threat international community to intervene. Can you point a war during the history in which Albanians have been occupiers.
I can see Pijetro's point. It's entirely a matter of perception however. In reality, instead of being hurt, Serbia is better off without Kosovo.
I know that most Albanians don't care about what Serbs think and couldn't care less even if Serbs were *really* humiliated. After all, up until now Albanians have been the humiliated ones. The thinking is that Serbia needs to try its own medicine.
I hope cooler minds prevail in the future and as Albanians we won't send military police to shell Serb houses. The most important thing however, is creation of a healthy state and an efficient military to deter any Serb misadventure.
More recent events would have added a couple of new entries: "Kosova, autonomy of: must be restored." "Kosova, independence of: dangerous and destabilizing; would lead to new Balkan war." These two received ideas are constantly affirmed by our politicians and diplomats; the moe they are repeated, the less often anyone pauses to question their truth. How could a policy assumption be wrong, when the foreign ministry of every major power in the West is agreed about it? The Bosnian experience suggests that the answer to that question is: very easily. Some serious thinking is needed about the possibility of independence as a long-term solution for Kosovo. If, as I believe, the foreign policy establishment has got this issue completely wrong, the consequences, in terms of Balkan instability and costly Western involvement -- to say nothing of the lives of thousands of the local inhabitants -- could be severe.
Already, the West's insistence that autonomy is the only solution has generated problems, both for Western diplomacy and for the Kosovo Albanians. Despite the self-congratulatory spin that Western governments put on Richard Holbrooke's October agreement with Slobodan Milosevic, it is clear that major concessions were made to the Yugoslav president. (Perhaps the most important was the abondonment of plans to have NATO-controlled observers backed up by NATO firepower; instead, the unarmed observers are controlled by the OSCE, a notoriously toothless, amorphous, and politically manipulable body.)
Holbrooke was in fact in a very weak negotiating position. The message his political masters were sending to Milosevic was: "We shall attack your forces in Kosovo, going to war, in effect, on behalf of the Albanians against you -- and then, when we have defeated your army, we shall turn around to the Albanains and tell them to go back under your rule, with a little regional autonomy to keep them happy." Milosevic must have known that this was illogical, and therefore he must also have known that the threat of military action could be heavily discounted.
Now that the deal has gone through, however, the illogicality is simply transferred to the West's dealings with the Kosovo Albanians. For more than six months American diplomats were preoccupied with getting the Albanians to form a united negotiating front. After the Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement was signed, the diplomats' aim has been to persuade those Albanians to negotiate for autonomy, and nothing more. But since the vast majority of Albanians in Kosovo want independence (having voted massively for it in an unofficial referendum as long ago as 1991), any local politician who signs up to mere autonomy now will be discredited, and perhaps even targeted in the first stirrings of a potential civil war. By insisting on a commitment to autonomy, Western diplomats will polarize Kosovan politics and undermine precisely those moderate Kosovo Albanian politicians whose role they most need to strengthen. It looks like a new application of the principle of "divide and rule": the West gets to divide the Kosovo Albanians, and Milosevcic gets to rule them.
The way out of these immediate problems, and the way toward a genuine, long-term settlement, lies in rethinking, from first principles, the accepted arguments on autonomy and independence. These can be divided broadly into two categories: arguments about the intrinsic justifiability of independence, and arguments about its consequences. Let us take the intrinsic arguments first.
The main claim here is that Kosovo simply has no right, in constitutional or international law, to independence. The outside world has recognized (in, for examople, the wording of Security Council Resolution 1199) that Kosovo forms part of the territory of a sovereign Yugoslav state; and as the diplomats never tire of repeating, the West is not in favor of changes to international borders. But these objections are precisely the ones that were made in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia demanded independence. Eventually Western governments recognized those countries, having discovered that this involved not so much a change of borders as a change in the staus of existing borders; the lines on the map remained the same, but their status was upgraded from republican to national.
Could Kosovo qualify for the same treatment? The answer, in terms of consitutional and international law, is that it could -- and, indeed, that it should have been offered independence when the old Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-92. Under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 Kosovo was equivalent in most ways to Slovenia, Croatia, and the other republics. True, its position -- as an "autonomous province" -- was not identical to theirs; in theory, it had dual status, being defined both as a component of the republic of Serbia and as a component of the federal Yugoslavia. But in practice it exercised the same powers as a republic, having its own parliament, high courts, central bank, police service, and territorial defense force; it was formally defined (from 1968 onwards) as part of the federal system, and it was represented directly -- not via the Republic of Serbia -- at the federal level. By all normal criteria of constitutional analysis, Kosovo was primarily a federal unit, and only very secondarily a component of Serbia.
In 1991 the European Community set up a committee of jurists, the Badminter Commmission, to advise it on the break-up of Yugoslavia. The commission's key finding was that the whole federal system was in a process of "dissolution." In other words, what happened when Slovenia and Croatia became independent was not secession, not the falling away of a few branches from a continuing trunk; rather, the whole federal state dissolved into its constituent units. (The present-day "Yugoslavia" is not the continuation of the old Yugoslavia, but a new state, formed by the coming together of two units, Serbia and Montenegro.) Unfortunately, the Badminter Commission never said which units were the constituent ones, and Western governments simply made a policy decision to regard only the six republics as such -- thus treating Kosovo as a wholly owned subsidiary of Serbia. Possibly they were influenced by the fact that, by this stage, Milosevic had already stripped away Kosovo's autonomous powers. But if Serbia's right to rule Kosovo is to be based on the mere fact that Milosevic had downgraded its status just efore the break-up of Yugoslavia, it will rest on very shaky foundations, as the relevent constitutional changes were pushed through under extreme duress, with tanks in the streets and war planes roaring overhead.
The other intrinsic argument against independence for Kosovo is historical, not legal. Most Western diplomats seem to believe that Kosovo is an essential part of historic Serbian state territory, so that to remove it would be as bizarre as separating Yorkshire from England. This argument too is false.
Kosovo was not, as Serbs claim, the "birthplace" or "cradle" of the Serb nation, and it came under Serb rule for only the last part of the medieval period. Since then it has been excluded from any Serb or Yugoslav state for more than 400 out of the last 500 years. It was conquered (but not legally annexed) by Serbia in 1912, against the wishes of the local Albanian majority population, and it became part of a Yugoslav kingdom (not a Serbian one) after 1918. In other words, out iof the entire span of modern history, Kosovo has been ruled by Belgrade for less than a single lifetime.
Of course it is true that the national mythology of Serbia -- a mythology developed largely by nineteenth-century ideologists -- sets great store by the historic importance of Kosovo, thanks to the famous battle of 1389 and the presence of some important medieval monasteries, including the Patriarchate. But modern political geography cannot be determined by old battlefields, however symbolically charged they may be by the defeats incurred at them; if that were so, France would claim Waterloo, and Germany Stalingrad. Similarly, if modern borders had to bow to religious history, Kiev would be part of Russia and Istanbul part of Greece. Any independence deal for Kosovo would naturally have to include guarantees on the protection of cultural and religious sites; but that is a separate issue, and not such a hard one to resolve.
Aside from those intrinsic arguments, the Western diplomats also argue against independence for Kosovo on the grounds that it would set risky precedents or have dangerous consequences. A common claim is that if Kosovo gained independence, the Serb-ruled half of Bosnia, Republika Srpska, would also be entitled to break away from Bosnia. As Warren Zimmerman recently noted in these pages, "U.S. officials are particularly worried that Western acceptance of an independent 'Kosova' would destroy the Dayton agreement on Bosnia, which is based on integration, not separation" (Summer 1998).
But those offcials are making a completely false parallel between the two cases. As explained above, Kosovo's independent statehood would be based on the fact that it -- just like Bosnia -- had been a unit of the old federal Yugoslavia; Republika Srpska never was such a unit, and indeed was granted legal status for the first time only in 1995, on the strict condition that it remain part of the sovereign Bosnian state. For most of modern history the territory of Republika Srpska has been an integral part of a Bosnian entity, whereas Kosovo has been legally attached to a Serbian entity only for the last fifty-three years.
The other arguments involving precedents or consequences is about Macedonia, which has its own large Albanian minority. It is said that independence for Kosovo would encourage the Macedonian Albanians to carve off a territory of their own from the Macedonian state. In fact, the leading Albanian politicians in Macedonia make no linkage between independence for Kosovo, which they support, and a carve-up of Macedonia, which they do not want. One obvious reason why they do not want it is that more than 200,000 Albanians live in the capital, Skopje, which would certainly be left in the Slav half of any partitioned Macedonia.
But there is a different and real danger. A long, simmering confict in Kosovo would gradually radicalize the Albanians of Macedonia, as their young men crossed the mountains to fight. Some of them would return home imbued with the wild rhetoric of "Greater Albania", which certainly exists in some branches of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Such radicalization would undermine the responsible political leadership that represents the Macedonian Albanians today; eventually, fighting could develop in Macedonia too. And the cause of this radicalization process -- a long, simemring conflict in Kosovo -- is precisely what Western policy guarantees when it denies to the Kosovars the one thing, independence, for which they are still determined to fight. Thus Western policy, which aims above all at preventing the destabilization of Macedonia, will create precisely the outcome it most fears.
What, THEN, can be done? Independence cannot come immediately to Kosovo; that would be too much of a shock to Serb pride, and would provoke a violent response. In the very long term, however, Kosovo will certainly be separated from Serbia; even some Serb nationalists concede this, when they compare birth rates and calculate that Albanians will outnumber Serbs in the whole of Serbia by the mid-twenty-first century. The solution, then, must lie in the medium-term -- something along the lines of the settlement that ended the war in Chechnya, with a long interim period of autonomy leading finally to full self-determination. Conditionality could be built into such an agreement: to qualify for the eventual move to independence the autonomous Kosovo would have to satisfy key conditions, such as respecting the rights of the Serb minority and abandoning any territorial ambitions outside the present Kosovan borders. Such a solution would restore authority to the moderate Albanian political leaders, drawing supprt back toward them and away from the hardliners in the Kosovo Liberation Army. The continuation of the West's present policy on the other hand, far from solving Kosovo's problems, will only make them and those of the whole Balkan region -- far more lethally insoluble in the future.
The main claim here is that Kosovo simply has no right, in constitutional or international law, to independence. The outside world has recognized (in, for examople, the wording of Security Council Resolution 1199) that Kosovo forms part of the territory of a sovereign Yugoslav state; and as the diplomats never tire of repeating, the West is not in favor of changes to international borders. But these objections are precisely the ones that were made in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia demanded independence. Eventually Western governments recognized those countries, having discovered that this involved not so much a change of borders as a change in the staus of existing borders; the lines on the map remained the same, but their status was upgraded from republican to national.
Could Kosovo qualify for the same treatment? The answer, in terms of consitutional and international law, is that it could -- and, indeed, that it should have been offered independence when the old Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-92. Under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 Kosovo was equivalent in most ways to Slovenia, Croatia, and the other republics. True, its position -- as an "autonomous province" -- was not identical to theirs; in theory, it had dual status, being defined both as a component of the republic of Serbia and as a component of the federal Yugoslavia. But in practice it exercised the same powers as a republic, having its own parliament, high courts, central bank, police service, and territorial defense force; it was formally defined (from 1968 onwards) as part of the federal system, and it was represented directly -- not via the Republic of Serbia -- at the federal level. By all normal criteria of constitutional analysis, Kosovo was primarily a federal unit, and only very secondarily a component of Serbia.
EU wants the final say well, i say Kosovo be prepared for the final say and also they want to faciliate the visa policy is that for Serbs as well? Finally i hope they are ready for the flood gates to open so when they partition Serbia all of the young people will leave kosovo looking for jobs in the Western EU countries and i am sure you will like the new labor force when umemployment is already high the countries at the moment. Good luck EU when you try to impose rules on Kosovo or Kosova when they tell no we are independent and don't have to listen to you and if you don't do as we want we will fight you.
Despite fierce opposition from Belgrade and Moscow, the UN-designated "mediator" for Kosovo, former Finnish president and ICG board member Martti Ahtisaari submitted his proposal this week to the UN Security Council. Ahtisaari told Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that "supervised independence" was the "only viable option" for the Serbian province, occupied since June 1999 by NATO and administered by a UN mission and a "provisional" ethnic Albanian government.
Washington has declared its ironclad support to Ahtisaari's proposal, rejecting out of hand any further negotiations. According to NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Alliance also fully supports Ahtisaari.
After a 78-day illegal war, followed by almost eight years of violent occupation, the Empire is finally making a move to separate Kosovo from Serbia. The decision is in line with its systematic violations of international law, NATO and UN charter, the U.S. Constitution, and even the very UN resolution that created a precarious legal cover for the occupation.
What is even worse, the reasoning invoked to justify this criminal act is cynical and duplicitous, bearing no relationship to truth or logic.
Jurist, a well-known publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, carried a guest column this week, in which Prof. Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University claimed an independent Kosovo would be a "humanitarian disaster" for the remaining Serbs. D'Amato described Kosovo as having a "Serb-hating majority," and wrote that "a Kosovar-dominated (sic) independent government will lose no time in confiscating the property and rights of the Serbian minority. Some 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo could lose everything they own and maybe their lives."
Of particular interest is this observation, concerning the legality of Ahtisaari's proposal:
"If we remove the diplomatic euphemisms from Mr. Ahtisaari's report, we find that he is essentially arguing that UNMIK has conquered Kosovo! Territory-grabbing by conquest has been illegal since the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, yet somehow the United Nations has done it, according to Mr. Ahtisaari. However, there is nothing in the UN Charter that gives the UN the power to oust an existing government by force, replace it with a United Nations mission created especially for the occasion, and then dissolve the mission and hand sovereignty over the territory to someone else. Acquisition of territory by conquest is simply illegal, whether a state does it or an international organization does it."
Sounds clear enough.
However, D'Amato continues the article by claiming that partition would be a preferred solution, and explains why; to establish at least some legitimacy for the Albanian (or "Kosovar," as he erroneously puts it) cause, he turns to a "human rights argument." Since, he claims, the Albanians were victims of an "unremitting campaign of suppression" by Milosevic, and "crimes against humanity" by the Yugoslav army and police, "the brutality of the Milosevic incursions into Kosovo may be argued as disqualifying Serbia from ever again governing the Kosovars."
This "victim argument" has long been used as justification for NATO's bombing, the subsequent expulsion and persecution of Serbs ("revenge attacks") and others by Albanians, and indeed for claiming the "right" to independence. Supporters of independence have repeatedly claimed that Serbia has somehow "forfeited" its sovereignty through actions in Kosovo in 1999 and before.
As NATO bombs began raining on Serbia and Montenegro in March of 1999, media in NATO countries began manufacturing atrocity stories from the mold perfected just a few years earlier in Bosnia. Refugees, ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres, rape camps – everything was there. In addition to propaganda injected into the mainstream media by U.S. and other NATO governments, there was also KLA propaganda directly fed to gullible reporters.
Even today, veteran propagandists dutifully repeat the claim that Serb "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians led to the NATO attack. Nothing can be further from the truth. NATO launched the attack in March 1999 after failing to coerce Serbia into accepting an occupation force, during the false negotiations in France. The official justification for the bombing was to force Belgrade to sign the "agreement" presented by the U.S. envoys in Rambouillet. Alleged atrocities are all said to have happened subsequent to the start of the bombing. Indeed, the ICTY indictment against Slobodan Milosevic included only one alleged crime dated prior to March 23, and that was the faux massacre at Racak.
By late 1999, it was obvious that the death toll in Kosovo was much less than the alleged 100,000 – or even the more commonly used 10,000, often falsely qualified as Albanian civilians (That number was actually a wild claim by UK Foreign Minister Geoff Hoon, who sought to justify the bombing.) The total number of bodies exhumed by ICTY's investigators was 2,108, of all ethnicities and with varying causes of death. It is unclear whether that death toll included the numerous Albanians killed by the KLA, the KLA's own substantial casualties, or those of the Yugoslav Army. In any case, horror stories presented as facts in a State Department "report" were later proven false. For example, the "Trepca mines" story was debunked by Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. True, several other mass graves were discovered in the province since 1999. However, the victims buried there were Serbs, so the discoveries quickly faded from memory.
Although many Kosovo Albanians suffered terribly during the KLA insurrection and the NATO bombing, their claim that "Serb atrocities" have earned them the right to independence holds very little water.
However, neither the Albanians nor their Western sponsors actually believe the "atrocity argument" on principle. For if they did, and it was universally applicable, they would have forfeited all right to Kosovo themselves!
We could start from the beginning: NATO's war itself was illegal and illegitimate. In the course of the war, NATO pilots targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Alliance naturally claims those were "unfortunate mistakes" and that bombs were dropped "in good faith," yet Gen. Michael Short publicly stated that the campaign was designed to force Belgrade to surrender by terrorizing civilians.
Korisa, Grdelica, Aleksinac, Surdulica – these were just some of the NATO atrocities during the "humanitarian" war of 1999.
Once the government in Belgrade agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and allow the UN to occupy the province (in practice, it was NATO occupation), Albanian separatists began terrorizing Kosovo. Violence against Serbs has been amply documented, in photographs, in print, and on film. It is important to note that Serbs were not the sole victims of Albanian attacks; Roma and other communities in Kosovo have also been exposed to violence, intimidation, extortion and murder.
Here are just some of the more gruesome incidents of anti-Serb violence:
- July 1999: fourteen Serb farmers massacred in the fields near Staro Gracko (graphic photos); http://www.kosovo.net/gracko_victims.html
- October 1999: Valentin Krumov, UN official from Bulgaria, slain for "speaking Serbian";
- February 2000: bus carrying Serbs to a cemetery service hit by a missile;
- February 2001: roadside bomb blows up another bus;
- June 2003: brutal slaying of a Serb family in Obilic;
- August 2003: Serb children swimming in the river near Gorazdevac machine-gunned down;
- March 2004: massive pogrom throughout the province targets Serbs; 8 dead, 4500 expelled, several villages razed.
All this was accompanied by systematic destruction of Serbian Orthodox churches, chapels, monasteries and cemeteries.
Albanian separatists and NATO leaders claim that Serbia's violent suppression of the terrorist KLA in 1998-99 merited not only an illegal aggression in response, but also forfeited Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo. Yet the Albanians have not "forfeited" their right to Kosovo because of systematic terrorism under NATO occupation – they are being rewarded for it by independence!
Further proof that the "atrocity argument" was made up for the specific purpose of fabricating a reason to separate the occupied province from Serbia and make it into an Albanian state is the absolute absence of any such argument in the case of Croatia, which once had a considerable Serb population.
No "humanitarian" interventionist has ever claimed that atrocities of the Ustasha regime between 1941-1945, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs perished (Croat and Nazi estimates were over half a million!), somehow disqualified Croatia from sovereignty over territories with majority Serb population that rebelled in 1991? Nor have any of them claimed that Croatia "forfeited" its sovereignty after the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in 1995, following a brutal Croat military incursion that ended the Serb rebellion and "reintegrated" the disputed territories. So how is Kosovo different?
When Croatia engaged in suppression of a Serb rebellion, it was an ally of the United States and NATO, enjoying their full support – military, political, intelligence and diplomatic. When Serbia tried to suppress the Albanian rebellion three years later, the U.S./NATO support was there again – on the side of the Albanians! This is why the same logic does not apply to Krajina and Kosovo, Croatia and Serbia, or even the Serbs and the Albanians. There is no logic here, no principle, no coherent concept of right or wrong – beyond the naked argument of force: whomsoever the Empire supports is a righteous victim, and its enemy an irredeemable villain.
Empire's pattern of aggression has by now torn the fragile tapestry of international law to shreds. The UN has already lost so much credibility and respect in the world, unable to stop the abuses by the Washington-run "international community," the Ahtisaari Show is but a final nail in its coffin. Over the past fifteen years, many lines have been crossed. Appeasement of NATO and Albanian aggression in Kosovo might just be that last step over the edge, and into the abyss from which what remains of Western civilization may never return.
Serbia aid will go directly to the Serbs not through any UN created maze. No Serb will even join the UN created positions. It's ridiculous that you even assume that Serbs in Kosovo will recognize the UN instituions.
Guess what? I am not living in one of those "chosen" countries. I am EXTREMELY lucky and proud to live in the USA, the only superpower of the world, who spends billions to defend freedom and democracy in the world.
Kosovo will never be independent. This will go to the security council and it will be vetoed by Russia and possibly China as well. Serbs will never accept someone illegally stealing 15% of their land. What we will have after the veto is a stalemate. What we will see then is a total economic blockade of Kosovo by Serbia, full control of norther Kosovo by Serbia, absolutely NO investment in Kosovo from anywhere, and lots of investment in Serbia since it will be stable with a much more educated population. So there you have it, Albanians will remain the backwater of Europe, without independence, while Serbia advances.
To Serbs: Forget international laws and acts. You (your elected government) are the one who are violating international law and agreements by not delivering to ICTY worlds most famous Serbs, Mladic and Kardazic, responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Bosnia. You can not plead international law when it is in your interest and completely ignore it when it is not, like you are doing now by not delivering Mladic and Karadzic. Besides international law (self determination resolution) in the Kosovo case favour Albanians and no matter from what angle you see it, independence is the solution which will bring peace and stability to Balkans.
If Serbs were convinced they would get Kosovo back, then they would have acted differently during these 8 years. Punished those thousands of Serbs who killed in 99 % of the cases innocent Albanians, respected the way Albanians call Kosovo, worked against Albanophobia in Serbia and not sponsored like they do now, tried to create any alliance with any Albanian, started to treat Albanians like humans. But you have chosen everything or nothing and you will get nothing.
Some Serbs are saying Serbia is never going to recognize an independent Kosovo. OK it is in Kosovo Serbs interest. If Serbia does not recognize Kosovo then they will not be able to cooperate with Serb dominated municipalities in Kosovo and the biggest losers will be Serbia and Kosovo Serbs. Serbian parliament MUST recognize the independent state of Kosovo (Kosova) if they want the Ahtisaari part of the plan concerning minorities to be implemented.
I hope many will visit Kosovo next year. Kosovo needs tourists and everyone, also Serbs are welcome. You will see the gap between the reality on the ground and the way Serbian press and some Serbs present Kosovo. I feel most Serbs here are badly informed about Kosovo since almost no Serbian newspaper or TV have correspondents in Kosovo. They( not B92) use three lines from a Reuters/AP report and the rest of the article is fiction.
Adi wrote:
"let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors"
My biggest concern would be long term outlook...
Try and imagine a badly hurt and degraded Serbia, with the next generation of people looking to Kosovo as a land taken away unfairly (agree or disagree, that's not my point)...
Couple this with Nationalism, Religion and Economy, and it's a recipe for disaster for future generations...
It truly needs to get nipped in the bud..
How?
I don't know......
But this isn't going to be a good start..
Perhaps i'm wrong..
To reasonable serbs, RAISE YOUR VOICE? the new relationship era between two nations is about to begin. for the sake of future generations, let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors.
cheers,
(adi, Thursday, 29 March, 2007, 16:50)
I agree let Serbia and Kosovo and every country on Earth join together as one country based on love.
I don't remember Serbia being represented in the European Parliament, so it is curious that the EU should want to illegally dismember a country not in the EU. As for "supervised independence", that is a sick joke because KFOR and UNMIK have been ineffective since 1999 and need to know where their trigger fingers are the next time another church or house is burned down by a mob - KFOR polishing their rifles and saluting their officers and kidding themselves they have brought security for everyone is not true. Also, Ceku needs arresting and putting on trial if UNMIK or the EU want credibility. We can continue to point to the mafia/terrorists of the KLA and Ceku's association with them and his 'dirty work' in 1995. How much of a mafioso or war criminal does someone have to be for KFOR to arrest them for trial?
Instead of playing games with illegally trying to dismember a country, the EU should find it's backbone and arrest Ceku for a start.
After Kosovo's independence Pandora's box you are tallking about could become true: they are still a lot of ethnic and religious minorities in Vojvodina and Serbia as second-class citizens. Sometime in the future they could declare "enough of serb oppression, we want to secede".
So Serbia could shrink further. I think the job of the map-makers is not finished for a while.
its a pre-cooked fast food from EU guy atisari so no wonder. but the thing is it is not unanimous so there are those who are against. UNSC is not EU guys so dont be happy yet.
this is Europe:slowly, step by steps, a lot of discussions and talks, but at the end surly there is one possible solution a supervised independence, which like with Austria after the WWII leads to full independence in a few years!We will be celebrating and that very soon!cheers everyone who's been patient and knew that Kosovo will be Independent sooner or later!!!
promising news! this gives people hope that there will not be unrest in the region. meaning that even the countries that dont necessarily agree with the Atihsarris proposal the most they will do is abstain. hopefully the same will happen at the UNSC next month. people then will get on with their lives, Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo will finally live side by side like good neighbors without being coerced to object oneanother by outside influences (like the one from serbia)...
god bless
Spunky
"The own-initiative report by Joost Lagendijk (Greens/EFA, Netherlands), adopted by an overwhelming majority (490 in favor to 80 against with 87 abstentions)..."
The first noteworthy point is that they let the Greens do the dirty work. Let us hope those 490 supporters are prepared. It would be interesting to note which members/parties opposed.
So essentially, Kosovo will not set an international precendent because the EU says it won't. Wow. I guess we can all go home since the EU Parliament, that voice of firm, resolute, collective resolve, has spoken, and when it speaks, it speaks in Mandates. Who are they kidding? If Kosovo is to not become a precedent, independence must be given at such a high price, and at such a sacrifice for actual self-determination it should turn Kosovo into a veritable EU dependency. Kosovo must be seen as a benwefit to all its citizens, not the spoils of war for a victorious Albanian guerrilla campaign.
Talk is cheap. Actions are everything, and if Europe didn't learn anything since Chaimberlain thought Hitler's promise not to invade any other country after Munich was written on paper, I fear the Pandora's Box Lavrov predicted will come true. But hey, that's their problem not mine.
To reasonable serbs, RAISE YOUR VOICE? the new relationship era between two nations is about to begin. for the sake of future generations, let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors.
As an independent, neutral observer, I must admit that Serbia is now backed only by Russia, at least in Europe.
And if I was Serbian I would not trust Russia at all.
Since when does EU have a foreign policy? Remember EU was created to prevent war in Europe but in this case I see they are behaving totally opposite. Try and re-draw Serbia's borders and you will have a war on your hands! That is the truth.
The law is on the side of the serbs. Remember that when you start analysing what went wrong.
Well, well the position of the European Parliement is pretty clear and I am missing the comments from the Serbs.
Where are there? Are they consulting with Putin and the russian Duma and maybe Slovakia?..."dear slav friends help, help....SOS...this is Belgrade calling"
Well, well the position of the European Parliement is pretty clear and I am missing the comments from the Serbs.
Where are there? Are they consulting with Putin and the russian Duma and maybe Slovakia?..."dear slav friends help, help....SOS...this is Belgrade calling"
promising news! this gives people hope that there will not be unrest in the region. meaning that even the countries that dont necessarily agree with the Atihsarris proposal the most they will do is abstain. hopefully the same will happen at the UNSC next month. people then will get on with their lives, Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo will finally live side by side like good neighbors without being coerced to object oneanother by outside influences (like the one from serbia)...
god bless
Spunky
"The own-initiative report by Joost Lagendijk (Greens/EFA, Netherlands), adopted by an overwhelming majority (490 in favor to 80 against with 87 abstentions)..."
The first noteworthy point is that they let the Greens do the dirty work. Let us hope those 490 supporters are prepared. It would be interesting to note which members/parties opposed.
As an independent, neutral observer, I must admit that Serbia is now backed only by Russia, at least in Europe.
And if I was Serbian I would not trust Russia at all.
its a pre-cooked fast food from EU guy atisari so no wonder. but the thing is it is not unanimous so there are those who are against. UNSC is not EU guys so dont be happy yet.
To reasonable serbs, RAISE YOUR VOICE? the new relationship era between two nations is about to begin. for the sake of future generations, let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors.
Since when does EU have a foreign policy? Remember EU was created to prevent war in Europe but in this case I see they are behaving totally opposite. Try and re-draw Serbia's borders and you will have a war on your hands! That is the truth.
The law is on the side of the serbs. Remember that when you start analysing what went wrong.
So essentially, Kosovo will not set an international precendent because the EU says it won't. Wow. I guess we can all go home since the EU Parliament, that voice of firm, resolute, collective resolve, has spoken, and when it speaks, it speaks in Mandates. Who are they kidding? If Kosovo is to not become a precedent, independence must be given at such a high price, and at such a sacrifice for actual self-determination it should turn Kosovo into a veritable EU dependency. Kosovo must be seen as a benwefit to all its citizens, not the spoils of war for a victorious Albanian guerrilla campaign.
Talk is cheap. Actions are everything, and if Europe didn't learn anything since Chaimberlain thought Hitler's promise not to invade any other country after Munich was written on paper, I fear the Pandora's Box Lavrov predicted will come true. But hey, that's their problem not mine.
this is Europe:slowly, step by steps, a lot of discussions and talks, but at the end surly there is one possible solution a supervised independence, which like with Austria after the WWII leads to full independence in a few years!We will be celebrating and that very soon!cheers everyone who's been patient and knew that Kosovo will be Independent sooner or later!!!
To reasonable serbs, RAISE YOUR VOICE? the new relationship era between two nations is about to begin. for the sake of future generations, let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors.
cheers,
(adi, Thursday, 29 March, 2007, 16:50)
I agree let Serbia and Kosovo and every country on Earth join together as one country based on love.
After Kosovo's independence Pandora's box you are tallking about could become true: they are still a lot of ethnic and religious minorities in Vojvodina and Serbia as second-class citizens. Sometime in the future they could declare "enough of serb oppression, we want to secede".
So Serbia could shrink further. I think the job of the map-makers is not finished for a while.
I don't remember Serbia being represented in the European Parliament, so it is curious that the EU should want to illegally dismember a country not in the EU. As for "supervised independence", that is a sick joke because KFOR and UNMIK have been ineffective since 1999 and need to know where their trigger fingers are the next time another church or house is burned down by a mob - KFOR polishing their rifles and saluting their officers and kidding themselves they have brought security for everyone is not true. Also, Ceku needs arresting and putting on trial if UNMIK or the EU want credibility. We can continue to point to the mafia/terrorists of the KLA and Ceku's association with them and his 'dirty work' in 1995. How much of a mafioso or war criminal does someone have to be for KFOR to arrest them for trial?
Instead of playing games with illegally trying to dismember a country, the EU should find it's backbone and arrest Ceku for a start.
Adi wrote:
"let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors"
My biggest concern would be long term outlook...
Try and imagine a badly hurt and degraded Serbia, with the next generation of people looking to Kosovo as a land taken away unfairly (agree or disagree, that's not my point)...
Couple this with Nationalism, Religion and Economy, and it's a recipe for disaster for future generations...
It truly needs to get nipped in the bud..
How?
I don't know......
But this isn't going to be a good start..
Perhaps i'm wrong..
To Serbs: Forget international laws and acts. You (your elected government) are the one who are violating international law and agreements by not delivering to ICTY worlds most famous Serbs, Mladic and Kardazic, responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Bosnia. You can not plead international law when it is in your interest and completely ignore it when it is not, like you are doing now by not delivering Mladic and Karadzic. Besides international law (self determination resolution) in the Kosovo case favour Albanians and no matter from what angle you see it, independence is the solution which will bring peace and stability to Balkans.
If Serbs were convinced they would get Kosovo back, then they would have acted differently during these 8 years. Punished those thousands of Serbs who killed in 99 % of the cases innocent Albanians, respected the way Albanians call Kosovo, worked against Albanophobia in Serbia and not sponsored like they do now, tried to create any alliance with any Albanian, started to treat Albanians like humans. But you have chosen everything or nothing and you will get nothing.
Some Serbs are saying Serbia is never going to recognize an independent Kosovo. OK it is in Kosovo Serbs interest. If Serbia does not recognize Kosovo then they will not be able to cooperate with Serb dominated municipalities in Kosovo and the biggest losers will be Serbia and Kosovo Serbs. Serbian parliament MUST recognize the independent state of Kosovo (Kosova) if they want the Ahtisaari part of the plan concerning minorities to be implemented.
I hope many will visit Kosovo next year. Kosovo needs tourists and everyone, also Serbs are welcome. You will see the gap between the reality on the ground and the way Serbian press and some Serbs present Kosovo. I feel most Serbs here are badly informed about Kosovo since almost no Serbian newspaper or TV have correspondents in Kosovo. They( not B92) use three lines from a Reuters/AP report and the rest of the article is fiction.
Kosovo will never be independent. This will go to the security council and it will be vetoed by Russia and possibly China as well. Serbs will never accept someone illegally stealing 15% of their land. What we will have after the veto is a stalemate. What we will see then is a total economic blockade of Kosovo by Serbia, full control of norther Kosovo by Serbia, absolutely NO investment in Kosovo from anywhere, and lots of investment in Serbia since it will be stable with a much more educated population. So there you have it, Albanians will remain the backwater of Europe, without independence, while Serbia advances.
Guess what? I am not living in one of those "chosen" countries. I am EXTREMELY lucky and proud to live in the USA, the only superpower of the world, who spends billions to defend freedom and democracy in the world.
Serbia aid will go directly to the Serbs not through any UN created maze. No Serb will even join the UN created positions. It's ridiculous that you even assume that Serbs in Kosovo will recognize the UN instituions.
Despite fierce opposition from Belgrade and Moscow, the UN-designated "mediator" for Kosovo, former Finnish president and ICG board member Martti Ahtisaari submitted his proposal this week to the UN Security Council. Ahtisaari told Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that "supervised independence" was the "only viable option" for the Serbian province, occupied since June 1999 by NATO and administered by a UN mission and a "provisional" ethnic Albanian government.
Washington has declared its ironclad support to Ahtisaari's proposal, rejecting out of hand any further negotiations. According to NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Alliance also fully supports Ahtisaari.
After a 78-day illegal war, followed by almost eight years of violent occupation, the Empire is finally making a move to separate Kosovo from Serbia. The decision is in line with its systematic violations of international law, NATO and UN charter, the U.S. Constitution, and even the very UN resolution that created a precarious legal cover for the occupation.
What is even worse, the reasoning invoked to justify this criminal act is cynical and duplicitous, bearing no relationship to truth or logic.
Jurist, a well-known publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, carried a guest column this week, in which Prof. Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University claimed an independent Kosovo would be a "humanitarian disaster" for the remaining Serbs. D'Amato described Kosovo as having a "Serb-hating majority," and wrote that "a Kosovar-dominated (sic) independent government will lose no time in confiscating the property and rights of the Serbian minority. Some 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo could lose everything they own and maybe their lives."
Of particular interest is this observation, concerning the legality of Ahtisaari's proposal:
"If we remove the diplomatic euphemisms from Mr. Ahtisaari's report, we find that he is essentially arguing that UNMIK has conquered Kosovo! Territory-grabbing by conquest has been illegal since the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, yet somehow the United Nations has done it, according to Mr. Ahtisaari. However, there is nothing in the UN Charter that gives the UN the power to oust an existing government by force, replace it with a United Nations mission created especially for the occasion, and then dissolve the mission and hand sovereignty over the territory to someone else. Acquisition of territory by conquest is simply illegal, whether a state does it or an international organization does it."
Sounds clear enough.
However, D'Amato continues the article by claiming that partition would be a preferred solution, and explains why; to establish at least some legitimacy for the Albanian (or "Kosovar," as he erroneously puts it) cause, he turns to a "human rights argument." Since, he claims, the Albanians were victims of an "unremitting campaign of suppression" by Milosevic, and "crimes against humanity" by the Yugoslav army and police, "the brutality of the Milosevic incursions into Kosovo may be argued as disqualifying Serbia from ever again governing the Kosovars."
This "victim argument" has long been used as justification for NATO's bombing, the subsequent expulsion and persecution of Serbs ("revenge attacks") and others by Albanians, and indeed for claiming the "right" to independence. Supporters of independence have repeatedly claimed that Serbia has somehow "forfeited" its sovereignty through actions in Kosovo in 1999 and before.
As NATO bombs began raining on Serbia and Montenegro in March of 1999, media in NATO countries began manufacturing atrocity stories from the mold perfected just a few years earlier in Bosnia. Refugees, ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres, rape camps – everything was there. In addition to propaganda injected into the mainstream media by U.S. and other NATO governments, there was also KLA propaganda directly fed to gullible reporters.
Even today, veteran propagandists dutifully repeat the claim that Serb "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians led to the NATO attack. Nothing can be further from the truth. NATO launched the attack in March 1999 after failing to coerce Serbia into accepting an occupation force, during the false negotiations in France. The official justification for the bombing was to force Belgrade to sign the "agreement" presented by the U.S. envoys in Rambouillet. Alleged atrocities are all said to have happened subsequent to the start of the bombing. Indeed, the ICTY indictment against Slobodan Milosevic included only one alleged crime dated prior to March 23, and that was the faux massacre at Racak.
By late 1999, it was obvious that the death toll in Kosovo was much less than the alleged 100,000 – or even the more commonly used 10,000, often falsely qualified as Albanian civilians (That number was actually a wild claim by UK Foreign Minister Geoff Hoon, who sought to justify the bombing.) The total number of bodies exhumed by ICTY's investigators was 2,108, of all ethnicities and with varying causes of death. It is unclear whether that death toll included the numerous Albanians killed by the KLA, the KLA's own substantial casualties, or those of the Yugoslav Army. In any case, horror stories presented as facts in a State Department "report" were later proven false. For example, the "Trepca mines" story was debunked by Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. True, several other mass graves were discovered in the province since 1999. However, the victims buried there were Serbs, so the discoveries quickly faded from memory.
Although many Kosovo Albanians suffered terribly during the KLA insurrection and the NATO bombing, their claim that "Serb atrocities" have earned them the right to independence holds very little water.
However, neither the Albanians nor their Western sponsors actually believe the "atrocity argument" on principle. For if they did, and it was universally applicable, they would have forfeited all right to Kosovo themselves!
We could start from the beginning: NATO's war itself was illegal and illegitimate. In the course of the war, NATO pilots targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Alliance naturally claims those were "unfortunate mistakes" and that bombs were dropped "in good faith," yet Gen. Michael Short publicly stated that the campaign was designed to force Belgrade to surrender by terrorizing civilians.
Korisa, Grdelica, Aleksinac, Surdulica – these were just some of the NATO atrocities during the "humanitarian" war of 1999.
Once the government in Belgrade agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and allow the UN to occupy the province (in practice, it was NATO occupation), Albanian separatists began terrorizing Kosovo. Violence against Serbs has been amply documented, in photographs, in print, and on film. It is important to note that Serbs were not the sole victims of Albanian attacks; Roma and other communities in Kosovo have also been exposed to violence, intimidation, extortion and murder.
Here are just some of the more gruesome incidents of anti-Serb violence:
- July 1999: fourteen Serb farmers massacred in the fields near Staro Gracko (graphic photos); http://www.kosovo.net/gracko_victims.html
- October 1999: Valentin Krumov, UN official from Bulgaria, slain for "speaking Serbian";
- February 2000: bus carrying Serbs to a cemetery service hit by a missile;
- February 2001: roadside bomb blows up another bus;
- June 2003: brutal slaying of a Serb family in Obilic;
- August 2003: Serb children swimming in the river near Gorazdevac machine-gunned down;
- March 2004: massive pogrom throughout the province targets Serbs; 8 dead, 4500 expelled, several villages razed.
All this was accompanied by systematic destruction of Serbian Orthodox churches, chapels, monasteries and cemeteries.
Albanian separatists and NATO leaders claim that Serbia's violent suppression of the terrorist KLA in 1998-99 merited not only an illegal aggression in response, but also forfeited Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo. Yet the Albanians have not "forfeited" their right to Kosovo because of systematic terrorism under NATO occupation – they are being rewarded for it by independence!
Further proof that the "atrocity argument" was made up for the specific purpose of fabricating a reason to separate the occupied province from Serbia and make it into an Albanian state is the absolute absence of any such argument in the case of Croatia, which once had a considerable Serb population.
No "humanitarian" interventionist has ever claimed that atrocities of the Ustasha regime between 1941-1945, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs perished (Croat and Nazi estimates were over half a million!), somehow disqualified Croatia from sovereignty over territories with majority Serb population that rebelled in 1991? Nor have any of them claimed that Croatia "forfeited" its sovereignty after the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in 1995, following a brutal Croat military incursion that ended the Serb rebellion and "reintegrated" the disputed territories. So how is Kosovo different?
When Croatia engaged in suppression of a Serb rebellion, it was an ally of the United States and NATO, enjoying their full support – military, political, intelligence and diplomatic. When Serbia tried to suppress the Albanian rebellion three years later, the U.S./NATO support was there again – on the side of the Albanians! This is why the same logic does not apply to Krajina and Kosovo, Croatia and Serbia, or even the Serbs and the Albanians. There is no logic here, no principle, no coherent concept of right or wrong – beyond the naked argument of force: whomsoever the Empire supports is a righteous victim, and its enemy an irredeemable villain.
Empire's pattern of aggression has by now torn the fragile tapestry of international law to shreds. The UN has already lost so much credibility and respect in the world, unable to stop the abuses by the Washington-run "international community," the Ahtisaari Show is but a final nail in its coffin. Over the past fifteen years, many lines have been crossed. Appeasement of NATO and Albanian aggression in Kosovo might just be that last step over the edge, and into the abyss from which what remains of Western civilization may never return.
EU wants the final say well, i say Kosovo be prepared for the final say and also they want to faciliate the visa policy is that for Serbs as well? Finally i hope they are ready for the flood gates to open so when they partition Serbia all of the young people will leave kosovo looking for jobs in the Western EU countries and i am sure you will like the new labor force when umemployment is already high the countries at the moment. Good luck EU when you try to impose rules on Kosovo or Kosova when they tell no we are independent and don't have to listen to you and if you don't do as we want we will fight you.
The main claim here is that Kosovo simply has no right, in constitutional or international law, to independence. The outside world has recognized (in, for examople, the wording of Security Council Resolution 1199) that Kosovo forms part of the territory of a sovereign Yugoslav state; and as the diplomats never tire of repeating, the West is not in favor of changes to international borders. But these objections are precisely the ones that were made in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia demanded independence. Eventually Western governments recognized those countries, having discovered that this involved not so much a change of borders as a change in the staus of existing borders; the lines on the map remained the same, but their status was upgraded from republican to national.
Could Kosovo qualify for the same treatment? The answer, in terms of consitutional and international law, is that it could -- and, indeed, that it should have been offered independence when the old Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-92. Under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 Kosovo was equivalent in most ways to Slovenia, Croatia, and the other republics. True, its position -- as an "autonomous province" -- was not identical to theirs; in theory, it had dual status, being defined both as a component of the republic of Serbia and as a component of the federal Yugoslavia. But in practice it exercised the same powers as a republic, having its own parliament, high courts, central bank, police service, and territorial defense force; it was formally defined (from 1968 onwards) as part of the federal system, and it was represented directly -- not via the Republic of Serbia -- at the federal level. By all normal criteria of constitutional analysis, Kosovo was primarily a federal unit, and only very secondarily a component of Serbia.
More recent events would have added a couple of new entries: "Kosova, autonomy of: must be restored." "Kosova, independence of: dangerous and destabilizing; would lead to new Balkan war." These two received ideas are constantly affirmed by our politicians and diplomats; the moe they are repeated, the less often anyone pauses to question their truth. How could a policy assumption be wrong, when the foreign ministry of every major power in the West is agreed about it? The Bosnian experience suggests that the answer to that question is: very easily. Some serious thinking is needed about the possibility of independence as a long-term solution for Kosovo. If, as I believe, the foreign policy establishment has got this issue completely wrong, the consequences, in terms of Balkan instability and costly Western involvement -- to say nothing of the lives of thousands of the local inhabitants -- could be severe.
Already, the West's insistence that autonomy is the only solution has generated problems, both for Western diplomacy and for the Kosovo Albanians. Despite the self-congratulatory spin that Western governments put on Richard Holbrooke's October agreement with Slobodan Milosevic, it is clear that major concessions were made to the Yugoslav president. (Perhaps the most important was the abondonment of plans to have NATO-controlled observers backed up by NATO firepower; instead, the unarmed observers are controlled by the OSCE, a notoriously toothless, amorphous, and politically manipulable body.)
Holbrooke was in fact in a very weak negotiating position. The message his political masters were sending to Milosevic was: "We shall attack your forces in Kosovo, going to war, in effect, on behalf of the Albanians against you -- and then, when we have defeated your army, we shall turn around to the Albanains and tell them to go back under your rule, with a little regional autonomy to keep them happy." Milosevic must have known that this was illogical, and therefore he must also have known that the threat of military action could be heavily discounted.
Now that the deal has gone through, however, the illogicality is simply transferred to the West's dealings with the Kosovo Albanians. For more than six months American diplomats were preoccupied with getting the Albanians to form a united negotiating front. After the Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement was signed, the diplomats' aim has been to persuade those Albanians to negotiate for autonomy, and nothing more. But since the vast majority of Albanians in Kosovo want independence (having voted massively for it in an unofficial referendum as long ago as 1991), any local politician who signs up to mere autonomy now will be discredited, and perhaps even targeted in the first stirrings of a potential civil war. By insisting on a commitment to autonomy, Western diplomats will polarize Kosovan politics and undermine precisely those moderate Kosovo Albanian politicians whose role they most need to strengthen. It looks like a new application of the principle of "divide and rule": the West gets to divide the Kosovo Albanians, and Milosevcic gets to rule them.
The way out of these immediate problems, and the way toward a genuine, long-term settlement, lies in rethinking, from first principles, the accepted arguments on autonomy and independence. These can be divided broadly into two categories: arguments about the intrinsic justifiability of independence, and arguments about its consequences. Let us take the intrinsic arguments first.
The main claim here is that Kosovo simply has no right, in constitutional or international law, to independence. The outside world has recognized (in, for examople, the wording of Security Council Resolution 1199) that Kosovo forms part of the territory of a sovereign Yugoslav state; and as the diplomats never tire of repeating, the West is not in favor of changes to international borders. But these objections are precisely the ones that were made in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia demanded independence. Eventually Western governments recognized those countries, having discovered that this involved not so much a change of borders as a change in the staus of existing borders; the lines on the map remained the same, but their status was upgraded from republican to national.
Could Kosovo qualify for the same treatment? The answer, in terms of consitutional and international law, is that it could -- and, indeed, that it should have been offered independence when the old Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-92. Under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 Kosovo was equivalent in most ways to Slovenia, Croatia, and the other republics. True, its position -- as an "autonomous province" -- was not identical to theirs; in theory, it had dual status, being defined both as a component of the republic of Serbia and as a component of the federal Yugoslavia. But in practice it exercised the same powers as a republic, having its own parliament, high courts, central bank, police service, and territorial defense force; it was formally defined (from 1968 onwards) as part of the federal system, and it was represented directly -- not via the Republic of Serbia -- at the federal level. By all normal criteria of constitutional analysis, Kosovo was primarily a federal unit, and only very secondarily a component of Serbia.
In 1991 the European Community set up a committee of jurists, the Badminter Commmission, to advise it on the break-up of Yugoslavia. The commission's key finding was that the whole federal system was in a process of "dissolution." In other words, what happened when Slovenia and Croatia became independent was not secession, not the falling away of a few branches from a continuing trunk; rather, the whole federal state dissolved into its constituent units. (The present-day "Yugoslavia" is not the continuation of the old Yugoslavia, but a new state, formed by the coming together of two units, Serbia and Montenegro.) Unfortunately, the Badminter Commission never said which units were the constituent ones, and Western governments simply made a policy decision to regard only the six republics as such -- thus treating Kosovo as a wholly owned subsidiary of Serbia. Possibly they were influenced by the fact that, by this stage, Milosevic had already stripped away Kosovo's autonomous powers. But if Serbia's right to rule Kosovo is to be based on the mere fact that Milosevic had downgraded its status just efore the break-up of Yugoslavia, it will rest on very shaky foundations, as the relevent constitutional changes were pushed through under extreme duress, with tanks in the streets and war planes roaring overhead.
The other intrinsic argument against independence for Kosovo is historical, not legal. Most Western diplomats seem to believe that Kosovo is an essential part of historic Serbian state territory, so that to remove it would be as bizarre as separating Yorkshire from England. This argument too is false.
Kosovo was not, as Serbs claim, the "birthplace" or "cradle" of the Serb nation, and it came under Serb rule for only the last part of the medieval period. Since then it has been excluded from any Serb or Yugoslav state for more than 400 out of the last 500 years. It was conquered (but not legally annexed) by Serbia in 1912, against the wishes of the local Albanian majority population, and it became part of a Yugoslav kingdom (not a Serbian one) after 1918. In other words, out iof the entire span of modern history, Kosovo has been ruled by Belgrade for less than a single lifetime.
Of course it is true that the national mythology of Serbia -- a mythology developed largely by nineteenth-century ideologists -- sets great store by the historic importance of Kosovo, thanks to the famous battle of 1389 and the presence of some important medieval monasteries, including the Patriarchate. But modern political geography cannot be determined by old battlefields, however symbolically charged they may be by the defeats incurred at them; if that were so, France would claim Waterloo, and Germany Stalingrad. Similarly, if modern borders had to bow to religious history, Kiev would be part of Russia and Istanbul part of Greece. Any independence deal for Kosovo would naturally have to include guarantees on the protection of cultural and religious sites; but that is a separate issue, and not such a hard one to resolve.
Aside from those intrinsic arguments, the Western diplomats also argue against independence for Kosovo on the grounds that it would set risky precedents or have dangerous consequences. A common claim is that if Kosovo gained independence, the Serb-ruled half of Bosnia, Republika Srpska, would also be entitled to break away from Bosnia. As Warren Zimmerman recently noted in these pages, "U.S. officials are particularly worried that Western acceptance of an independent 'Kosova' would destroy the Dayton agreement on Bosnia, which is based on integration, not separation" (Summer 1998).
But those offcials are making a completely false parallel between the two cases. As explained above, Kosovo's independent statehood would be based on the fact that it -- just like Bosnia -- had been a unit of the old federal Yugoslavia; Republika Srpska never was such a unit, and indeed was granted legal status for the first time only in 1995, on the strict condition that it remain part of the sovereign Bosnian state. For most of modern history the territory of Republika Srpska has been an integral part of a Bosnian entity, whereas Kosovo has been legally attached to a Serbian entity only for the last fifty-three years.
The other arguments involving precedents or consequences is about Macedonia, which has its own large Albanian minority. It is said that independence for Kosovo would encourage the Macedonian Albanians to carve off a territory of their own from the Macedonian state. In fact, the leading Albanian politicians in Macedonia make no linkage between independence for Kosovo, which they support, and a carve-up of Macedonia, which they do not want. One obvious reason why they do not want it is that more than 200,000 Albanians live in the capital, Skopje, which would certainly be left in the Slav half of any partitioned Macedonia.
But there is a different and real danger. A long, simmering confict in Kosovo would gradually radicalize the Albanians of Macedonia, as their young men crossed the mountains to fight. Some of them would return home imbued with the wild rhetoric of "Greater Albania", which certainly exists in some branches of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Such radicalization would undermine the responsible political leadership that represents the Macedonian Albanians today; eventually, fighting could develop in Macedonia too. And the cause of this radicalization process -- a long, simemring conflict in Kosovo -- is precisely what Western policy guarantees when it denies to the Kosovars the one thing, independence, for which they are still determined to fight. Thus Western policy, which aims above all at preventing the destabilization of Macedonia, will create precisely the outcome it most fears.
What, THEN, can be done? Independence cannot come immediately to Kosovo; that would be too much of a shock to Serb pride, and would provoke a violent response. In the very long term, however, Kosovo will certainly be separated from Serbia; even some Serb nationalists concede this, when they compare birth rates and calculate that Albanians will outnumber Serbs in the whole of Serbia by the mid-twenty-first century. The solution, then, must lie in the medium-term -- something along the lines of the settlement that ended the war in Chechnya, with a long interim period of autonomy leading finally to full self-determination. Conditionality could be built into such an agreement: to qualify for the eventual move to independence the autonomous Kosovo would have to satisfy key conditions, such as respecting the rights of the Serb minority and abandoning any territorial ambitions outside the present Kosovan borders. Such a solution would restore authority to the moderate Albanian political leaders, drawing supprt back toward them and away from the hardliners in the Kosovo Liberation Army. The continuation of the West's present policy on the other hand, far from solving Kosovo's problems, will only make them and those of the whole Balkan region -- far more lethally insoluble in the future.
I can see Pijetro's point. It's entirely a matter of perception however. In reality, instead of being hurt, Serbia is better off without Kosovo.
I know that most Albanians don't care about what Serbs think and couldn't care less even if Serbs were *really* humiliated. After all, up until now Albanians have been the humiliated ones. The thinking is that Serbia needs to try its own medicine.
I hope cooler minds prevail in the future and as Albanians we won't send military police to shell Serb houses. The most important thing however, is creation of a healthy state and an efficient military to deter any Serb misadventure.
Nebojsa you are right. All the world (except serbs like you) are blind and can't see what has and is suffering serbian minority in Kosovo. The international community is giving us Independence because we kosovars are "proofed criminals" and because we have inside us a terrible desire to "Kill others".
Please Nebojsa can you be a little more serious, because reading your post someone can think that we killed ourself to threat international community to intervene. Can you point a war during the history in which Albanians have been occupiers.
WOW, now serbs pack up, the ding-a-ling-parliament had a say.
what about the equaly important opinion of the boy-scouts and the postal officers???
LOL
no honestly, i´m pretty satisfied! it means nothing, it may open the eyes of the 30% serb voters that smash their voice by voting for pro-eu-parties and therefor it may save serbia from eu.
and there will be others to decide about south-serbia.
but i kinda loved the bluff about "eu-unity". where´s the 2 billion euros for the first year of southserbian occupation???what a unity!
that don´t mean very much, you a ren´t realizing the lower importance of that "vote" ...it´s initiated by a pro-albanian lobbyist, and it´s goal was to create cheerful mood among the Albanians, I guess, what seems to have worked according to those childish reactions here.
boys, keep in mind it´s a unanimous vote by all memberstates of the EU what would be a reason for you to behave like you already do.
and furthermore there is the UNSC...
it seems like you are so desperate, that you are simply ignoring those facts...
and finally to Joe,
you don´t seem to realize it,but the "only global superpower" how you put it, is highly dependent on Russia and China in the really important matters ( Iran, Korea etc. ),
and it´s power is declining, as every sound observer is noticing it in the last years.
Well, well the position of the European Parliement is pretty clear and I am missing the comments from the Serbs.
Where are there? Are they consulting with Putin and the russian Duma and maybe Slovakia?..."dear slav friends help, help....SOS...this is Belgrade calling"
promising news! this gives people hope that there will not be unrest in the region. meaning that even the countries that dont necessarily agree with the Atihsarris proposal the most they will do is abstain. hopefully the same will happen at the UNSC next month. people then will get on with their lives, Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo will finally live side by side like good neighbors without being coerced to object oneanother by outside influences (like the one from serbia)...
god bless
Spunky
"The own-initiative report by Joost Lagendijk (Greens/EFA, Netherlands), adopted by an overwhelming majority (490 in favor to 80 against with 87 abstentions)..."
The first noteworthy point is that they let the Greens do the dirty work. Let us hope those 490 supporters are prepared. It would be interesting to note which members/parties opposed.
As an independent, neutral observer, I must admit that Serbia is now backed only by Russia, at least in Europe.
And if I was Serbian I would not trust Russia at all.
its a pre-cooked fast food from EU guy atisari so no wonder. but the thing is it is not unanimous so there are those who are against. UNSC is not EU guys so dont be happy yet.
To reasonable serbs, RAISE YOUR VOICE? the new relationship era between two nations is about to begin. for the sake of future generations, let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors.
Since when does EU have a foreign policy? Remember EU was created to prevent war in Europe but in this case I see they are behaving totally opposite. Try and re-draw Serbia's borders and you will have a war on your hands! That is the truth.
The law is on the side of the serbs. Remember that when you start analysing what went wrong.
So essentially, Kosovo will not set an international precendent because the EU says it won't. Wow. I guess we can all go home since the EU Parliament, that voice of firm, resolute, collective resolve, has spoken, and when it speaks, it speaks in Mandates. Who are they kidding? If Kosovo is to not become a precedent, independence must be given at such a high price, and at such a sacrifice for actual self-determination it should turn Kosovo into a veritable EU dependency. Kosovo must be seen as a benwefit to all its citizens, not the spoils of war for a victorious Albanian guerrilla campaign.
Talk is cheap. Actions are everything, and if Europe didn't learn anything since Chaimberlain thought Hitler's promise not to invade any other country after Munich was written on paper, I fear the Pandora's Box Lavrov predicted will come true. But hey, that's their problem not mine.
this is Europe:slowly, step by steps, a lot of discussions and talks, but at the end surly there is one possible solution a supervised independence, which like with Austria after the WWII leads to full independence in a few years!We will be celebrating and that very soon!cheers everyone who's been patient and knew that Kosovo will be Independent sooner or later!!!
To reasonable serbs, RAISE YOUR VOICE? the new relationship era between two nations is about to begin. for the sake of future generations, let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors.
cheers,
(adi, Thursday, 29 March, 2007, 16:50)
I agree let Serbia and Kosovo and every country on Earth join together as one country based on love.
After Kosovo's independence Pandora's box you are tallking about could become true: they are still a lot of ethnic and religious minorities in Vojvodina and Serbia as second-class citizens. Sometime in the future they could declare "enough of serb oppression, we want to secede".
So Serbia could shrink further. I think the job of the map-makers is not finished for a while.
I don't remember Serbia being represented in the European Parliament, so it is curious that the EU should want to illegally dismember a country not in the EU. As for "supervised independence", that is a sick joke because KFOR and UNMIK have been ineffective since 1999 and need to know where their trigger fingers are the next time another church or house is burned down by a mob - KFOR polishing their rifles and saluting their officers and kidding themselves they have brought security for everyone is not true. Also, Ceku needs arresting and putting on trial if UNMIK or the EU want credibility. We can continue to point to the mafia/terrorists of the KLA and Ceku's association with them and his 'dirty work' in 1995. How much of a mafioso or war criminal does someone have to be for KFOR to arrest them for trial?
Instead of playing games with illegally trying to dismember a country, the EU should find it's backbone and arrest Ceku for a start.
Adi wrote:
"let's forget the past and let's build prosperous and healthy relationship, as neighbors"
My biggest concern would be long term outlook...
Try and imagine a badly hurt and degraded Serbia, with the next generation of people looking to Kosovo as a land taken away unfairly (agree or disagree, that's not my point)...
Couple this with Nationalism, Religion and Economy, and it's a recipe for disaster for future generations...
It truly needs to get nipped in the bud..
How?
I don't know......
But this isn't going to be a good start..
Perhaps i'm wrong..
To Serbs: Forget international laws and acts. You (your elected government) are the one who are violating international law and agreements by not delivering to ICTY worlds most famous Serbs, Mladic and Kardazic, responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Bosnia. You can not plead international law when it is in your interest and completely ignore it when it is not, like you are doing now by not delivering Mladic and Karadzic. Besides international law (self determination resolution) in the Kosovo case favour Albanians and no matter from what angle you see it, independence is the solution which will bring peace and stability to Balkans.
If Serbs were convinced they would get Kosovo back, then they would have acted differently during these 8 years. Punished those thousands of Serbs who killed in 99 % of the cases innocent Albanians, respected the way Albanians call Kosovo, worked against Albanophobia in Serbia and not sponsored like they do now, tried to create any alliance with any Albanian, started to treat Albanians like humans. But you have chosen everything or nothing and you will get nothing.
Some Serbs are saying Serbia is never going to recognize an independent Kosovo. OK it is in Kosovo Serbs interest. If Serbia does not recognize Kosovo then they will not be able to cooperate with Serb dominated municipalities in Kosovo and the biggest losers will be Serbia and Kosovo Serbs. Serbian parliament MUST recognize the independent state of Kosovo (Kosova) if they want the Ahtisaari part of the plan concerning minorities to be implemented.
I hope many will visit Kosovo next year. Kosovo needs tourists and everyone, also Serbs are welcome. You will see the gap between the reality on the ground and the way Serbian press and some Serbs present Kosovo. I feel most Serbs here are badly informed about Kosovo since almost no Serbian newspaper or TV have correspondents in Kosovo. They( not B92) use three lines from a Reuters/AP report and the rest of the article is fiction.
Kosovo will never be independent. This will go to the security council and it will be vetoed by Russia and possibly China as well. Serbs will never accept someone illegally stealing 15% of their land. What we will have after the veto is a stalemate. What we will see then is a total economic blockade of Kosovo by Serbia, full control of norther Kosovo by Serbia, absolutely NO investment in Kosovo from anywhere, and lots of investment in Serbia since it will be stable with a much more educated population. So there you have it, Albanians will remain the backwater of Europe, without independence, while Serbia advances.
Guess what? I am not living in one of those "chosen" countries. I am EXTREMELY lucky and proud to live in the USA, the only superpower of the world, who spends billions to defend freedom and democracy in the world.
Serbia aid will go directly to the Serbs not through any UN created maze. No Serb will even join the UN created positions. It's ridiculous that you even assume that Serbs in Kosovo will recognize the UN instituions.
Despite fierce opposition from Belgrade and Moscow, the UN-designated "mediator" for Kosovo, former Finnish president and ICG board member Martti Ahtisaari submitted his proposal this week to the UN Security Council. Ahtisaari told Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that "supervised independence" was the "only viable option" for the Serbian province, occupied since June 1999 by NATO and administered by a UN mission and a "provisional" ethnic Albanian government.
Washington has declared its ironclad support to Ahtisaari's proposal, rejecting out of hand any further negotiations. According to NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Alliance also fully supports Ahtisaari.
After a 78-day illegal war, followed by almost eight years of violent occupation, the Empire is finally making a move to separate Kosovo from Serbia. The decision is in line with its systematic violations of international law, NATO and UN charter, the U.S. Constitution, and even the very UN resolution that created a precarious legal cover for the occupation.
What is even worse, the reasoning invoked to justify this criminal act is cynical and duplicitous, bearing no relationship to truth or logic.
Jurist, a well-known publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, carried a guest column this week, in which Prof. Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University claimed an independent Kosovo would be a "humanitarian disaster" for the remaining Serbs. D'Amato described Kosovo as having a "Serb-hating majority," and wrote that "a Kosovar-dominated (sic) independent government will lose no time in confiscating the property and rights of the Serbian minority. Some 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo could lose everything they own and maybe their lives."
Of particular interest is this observation, concerning the legality of Ahtisaari's proposal:
"If we remove the diplomatic euphemisms from Mr. Ahtisaari's report, we find that he is essentially arguing that UNMIK has conquered Kosovo! Territory-grabbing by conquest has been illegal since the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, yet somehow the United Nations has done it, according to Mr. Ahtisaari. However, there is nothing in the UN Charter that gives the UN the power to oust an existing government by force, replace it with a United Nations mission created especially for the occasion, and then dissolve the mission and hand sovereignty over the territory to someone else. Acquisition of territory by conquest is simply illegal, whether a state does it or an international organization does it."
Sounds clear enough.
However, D'Amato continues the article by claiming that partition would be a preferred solution, and explains why; to establish at least some legitimacy for the Albanian (or "Kosovar," as he erroneously puts it) cause, he turns to a "human rights argument." Since, he claims, the Albanians were victims of an "unremitting campaign of suppression" by Milosevic, and "crimes against humanity" by the Yugoslav army and police, "the brutality of the Milosevic incursions into Kosovo may be argued as disqualifying Serbia from ever again governing the Kosovars."
This "victim argument" has long been used as justification for NATO's bombing, the subsequent expulsion and persecution of Serbs ("revenge attacks") and others by Albanians, and indeed for claiming the "right" to independence. Supporters of independence have repeatedly claimed that Serbia has somehow "forfeited" its sovereignty through actions in Kosovo in 1999 and before.
As NATO bombs began raining on Serbia and Montenegro in March of 1999, media in NATO countries began manufacturing atrocity stories from the mold perfected just a few years earlier in Bosnia. Refugees, ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres, rape camps – everything was there. In addition to propaganda injected into the mainstream media by U.S. and other NATO governments, there was also KLA propaganda directly fed to gullible reporters.
Even today, veteran propagandists dutifully repeat the claim that Serb "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians led to the NATO attack. Nothing can be further from the truth. NATO launched the attack in March 1999 after failing to coerce Serbia into accepting an occupation force, during the false negotiations in France. The official justification for the bombing was to force Belgrade to sign the "agreement" presented by the U.S. envoys in Rambouillet. Alleged atrocities are all said to have happened subsequent to the start of the bombing. Indeed, the ICTY indictment against Slobodan Milosevic included only one alleged crime dated prior to March 23, and that was the faux massacre at Racak.
By late 1999, it was obvious that the death toll in Kosovo was much less than the alleged 100,000 – or even the more commonly used 10,000, often falsely qualified as Albanian civilians (That number was actually a wild claim by UK Foreign Minister Geoff Hoon, who sought to justify the bombing.) The total number of bodies exhumed by ICTY's investigators was 2,108, of all ethnicities and with varying causes of death. It is unclear whether that death toll included the numerous Albanians killed by the KLA, the KLA's own substantial casualties, or those of the Yugoslav Army. In any case, horror stories presented as facts in a State Department "report" were later proven false. For example, the "Trepca mines" story was debunked by Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. True, several other mass graves were discovered in the province since 1999. However, the victims buried there were Serbs, so the discoveries quickly faded from memory.
Although many Kosovo Albanians suffered terribly during the KLA insurrection and the NATO bombing, their claim that "Serb atrocities" have earned them the right to independence holds very little water.
However, neither the Albanians nor their Western sponsors actually believe the "atrocity argument" on principle. For if they did, and it was universally applicable, they would have forfeited all right to Kosovo themselves!
We could start from the beginning: NATO's war itself was illegal and illegitimate. In the course of the war, NATO pilots targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Alliance naturally claims those were "unfortunate mistakes" and that bombs were dropped "in good faith," yet Gen. Michael Short publicly stated that the campaign was designed to force Belgrade to surrender by terrorizing civilians.
Korisa, Grdelica, Aleksinac, Surdulica – these were just some of the NATO atrocities during the "humanitarian" war of 1999.
Once the government in Belgrade agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and allow the UN to occupy the province (in practice, it was NATO occupation), Albanian separatists began terrorizing Kosovo. Violence against Serbs has been amply documented, in photographs, in print, and on film. It is important to note that Serbs were not the sole victims of Albanian attacks; Roma and other communities in Kosovo have also been exposed to violence, intimidation, extortion and murder.
Here are just some of the more gruesome incidents of anti-Serb violence:
- July 1999: fourteen Serb farmers massacred in the fields near Staro Gracko (graphic photos); http://www.kosovo.net/gracko_victims.html
- October 1999: Valentin Krumov, UN official from Bulgaria, slain for "speaking Serbian";
- February 2000: bus carrying Serbs to a cemetery service hit by a missile;
- February 2001: roadside bomb blows up another bus;
- June 2003: brutal slaying of a Serb family in Obilic;
- August 2003: Serb children swimming in the river near Gorazdevac machine-gunned down;
- March 2004: massive pogrom throughout the province targets Serbs; 8 dead, 4500 expelled, several villages razed.
All this was accompanied by systematic destruction of Serbian Orthodox churches, chapels, monasteries and cemeteries.
Albanian separatists and NATO leaders claim that Serbia's violent suppression of the terrorist KLA in 1998-99 merited not only an illegal aggression in response, but also forfeited Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo. Yet the Albanians have not "forfeited" their right to Kosovo because of systematic terrorism under NATO occupation – they are being rewarded for it by independence!
Further proof that the "atrocity argument" was made up for the specific purpose of fabricating a reason to separate the occupied province from Serbia and make it into an Albanian state is the absolute absence of any such argument in the case of Croatia, which once had a considerable Serb population.
No "humanitarian" interventionist has ever claimed that atrocities of the Ustasha regime between 1941-1945, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs perished (Croat and Nazi estimates were over half a million!), somehow disqualified Croatia from sovereignty over territories with majority Serb population that rebelled in 1991? Nor have any of them claimed that Croatia "forfeited" its sovereignty after the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in 1995, following a brutal Croat military incursion that ended the Serb rebellion and "reintegrated" the disputed territories. So how is Kosovo different?
When Croatia engaged in suppression of a Serb rebellion, it was an ally of the United States and NATO, enjoying their full support – military, political, intelligence and diplomatic. When Serbia tried to suppress the Albanian rebellion three years later, the U.S./NATO support was there again – on the side of the Albanians! This is why the same logic does not apply to Krajina and Kosovo, Croatia and Serbia, or even the Serbs and the Albanians. There is no logic here, no principle, no coherent concept of right or wrong – beyond the naked argument of force: whomsoever the Empire supports is a righteous victim, and its enemy an irredeemable villain.
Empire's pattern of aggression has by now torn the fragile tapestry of international law to shreds. The UN has already lost so much credibility and respect in the world, unable to stop the abuses by the Washington-run "international community," the Ahtisaari Show is but a final nail in its coffin. Over the past fifteen years, many lines have been crossed. Appeasement of NATO and Albanian aggression in Kosovo might just be that last step over the edge, and into the abyss from which what remains of Western civilization may never return.
EU wants the final say well, i say Kosovo be prepared for the final say and also they want to faciliate the visa policy is that for Serbs as well? Finally i hope they are ready for the flood gates to open so when they partition Serbia all of the young people will leave kosovo looking for jobs in the Western EU countries and i am sure you will like the new labor force when umemployment is already high the countries at the moment. Good luck EU when you try to impose rules on Kosovo or Kosova when they tell no we are independent and don't have to listen to you and if you don't do as we want we will fight you.
The main claim here is that Kosovo simply has no right, in constitutional or international law, to independence. The outside world has recognized (in, for examople, the wording of Security Council Resolution 1199) that Kosovo forms part of the territory of a sovereign Yugoslav state; and as the diplomats never tire of repeating, the West is not in favor of changes to international borders. But these objections are precisely the ones that were made in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia demanded independence. Eventually Western governments recognized those countries, having discovered that this involved not so much a change of borders as a change in the staus of existing borders; the lines on the map remained the same, but their status was upgraded from republican to national.
Could Kosovo qualify for the same treatment? The answer, in terms of consitutional and international law, is that it could -- and, indeed, that it should have been offered independence when the old Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-92. Under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 Kosovo was equivalent in most ways to Slovenia, Croatia, and the other republics. True, its position -- as an "autonomous province" -- was not identical to theirs; in theory, it had dual status, being defined both as a component of the republic of Serbia and as a component of the federal Yugoslavia. But in practice it exercised the same powers as a republic, having its own parliament, high courts, central bank, police service, and territorial defense force; it was formally defined (from 1968 onwards) as part of the federal system, and it was represented directly -- not via the Republic of Serbia -- at the federal level. By all normal criteria of constitutional analysis, Kosovo was primarily a federal unit, and only very secondarily a component of Serbia.
More recent events would have added a couple of new entries: "Kosova, autonomy of: must be restored." "Kosova, independence of: dangerous and destabilizing; would lead to new Balkan war." These two received ideas are constantly affirmed by our politicians and diplomats; the moe they are repeated, the less often anyone pauses to question their truth. How could a policy assumption be wrong, when the foreign ministry of every major power in the West is agreed about it? The Bosnian experience suggests that the answer to that question is: very easily. Some serious thinking is needed about the possibility of independence as a long-term solution for Kosovo. If, as I believe, the foreign policy establishment has got this issue completely wrong, the consequences, in terms of Balkan instability and costly Western involvement -- to say nothing of the lives of thousands of the local inhabitants -- could be severe.
Already, the West's insistence that autonomy is the only solution has generated problems, both for Western diplomacy and for the Kosovo Albanians. Despite the self-congratulatory spin that Western governments put on Richard Holbrooke's October agreement with Slobodan Milosevic, it is clear that major concessions were made to the Yugoslav president. (Perhaps the most important was the abondonment of plans to have NATO-controlled observers backed up by NATO firepower; instead, the unarmed observers are controlled by the OSCE, a notoriously toothless, amorphous, and politically manipulable body.)
Holbrooke was in fact in a very weak negotiating position. The message his political masters were sending to Milosevic was: "We shall attack your forces in Kosovo, going to war, in effect, on behalf of the Albanians against you -- and then, when we have defeated your army, we shall turn around to the Albanains and tell them to go back under your rule, with a little regional autonomy to keep them happy." Milosevic must have known that this was illogical, and therefore he must also have known that the threat of military action could be heavily discounted.
Now that the deal has gone through, however, the illogicality is simply transferred to the West's dealings with the Kosovo Albanians. For more than six months American diplomats were preoccupied with getting the Albanians to form a united negotiating front. After the Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement was signed, the diplomats' aim has been to persuade those Albanians to negotiate for autonomy, and nothing more. But since the vast majority of Albanians in Kosovo want independence (having voted massively for it in an unofficial referendum as long ago as 1991), any local politician who signs up to mere autonomy now will be discredited, and perhaps even targeted in the first stirrings of a potential civil war. By insisting on a commitment to autonomy, Western diplomats will polarize Kosovan politics and undermine precisely those moderate Kosovo Albanian politicians whose role they most need to strengthen. It looks like a new application of the principle of "divide and rule": the West gets to divide the Kosovo Albanians, and Milosevcic gets to rule them.
The way out of these immediate problems, and the way toward a genuine, long-term settlement, lies in rethinking, from first principles, the accepted arguments on autonomy and independence. These can be divided broadly into two categories: arguments about the intrinsic justifiability of independence, and arguments about its consequences. Let us take the intrinsic arguments first.
The main claim here is that Kosovo simply has no right, in constitutional or international law, to independence. The outside world has recognized (in, for examople, the wording of Security Council Resolution 1199) that Kosovo forms part of the territory of a sovereign Yugoslav state; and as the diplomats never tire of repeating, the West is not in favor of changes to international borders. But these objections are precisely the ones that were made in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia demanded independence. Eventually Western governments recognized those countries, having discovered that this involved not so much a change of borders as a change in the staus of existing borders; the lines on the map remained the same, but their status was upgraded from republican to national.
Could Kosovo qualify for the same treatment? The answer, in terms of consitutional and international law, is that it could -- and, indeed, that it should have been offered independence when the old Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-92. Under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 Kosovo was equivalent in most ways to Slovenia, Croatia, and the other republics. True, its position -- as an "autonomous province" -- was not identical to theirs; in theory, it had dual status, being defined both as a component of the republic of Serbia and as a component of the federal Yugoslavia. But in practice it exercised the same powers as a republic, having its own parliament, high courts, central bank, police service, and territorial defense force; it was formally defined (from 1968 onwards) as part of the federal system, and it was represented directly -- not via the Republic of Serbia -- at the federal level. By all normal criteria of constitutional analysis, Kosovo was primarily a federal unit, and only very secondarily a component of Serbia.
In 1991 the European Community set up a committee of jurists, the Badminter Commmission, to advise it on the break-up of Yugoslavia. The commission's key finding was that the whole federal system was in a process of "dissolution." In other words, what happened when Slovenia and Croatia became independent was not secession, not the falling away of a few branches from a continuing trunk; rather, the whole federal state dissolved into its constituent units. (The present-day "Yugoslavia" is not the continuation of the old Yugoslavia, but a new state, formed by the coming together of two units, Serbia and Montenegro.) Unfortunately, the Badminter Commission never said which units were the constituent ones, and Western governments simply made a policy decision to regard only the six republics as such -- thus treating Kosovo as a wholly owned subsidiary of Serbia. Possibly they were influenced by the fact that, by this stage, Milosevic had already stripped away Kosovo's autonomous powers. But if Serbia's right to rule Kosovo is to be based on the mere fact that Milosevic had downgraded its status just efore the break-up of Yugoslavia, it will rest on very shaky foundations, as the relevent constitutional changes were pushed through under extreme duress, with tanks in the streets and war planes roaring overhead.
The other intrinsic argument against independence for Kosovo is historical, not legal. Most Western diplomats seem to believe that Kosovo is an essential part of historic Serbian state territory, so that to remove it would be as bizarre as separating Yorkshire from England. This argument too is false.
Kosovo was not, as Serbs claim, the "birthplace" or "cradle" of the Serb nation, and it came under Serb rule for only the last part of the medieval period. Since then it has been excluded from any Serb or Yugoslav state for more than 400 out of the last 500 years. It was conquered (but not legally annexed) by Serbia in 1912, against the wishes of the local Albanian majority population, and it became part of a Yugoslav kingdom (not a Serbian one) after 1918. In other words, out iof the entire span of modern history, Kosovo has been ruled by Belgrade for less than a single lifetime.
Of course it is true that the national mythology of Serbia -- a mythology developed largely by nineteenth-century ideologists -- sets great store by the historic importance of Kosovo, thanks to the famous battle of 1389 and the presence of some important medieval monasteries, including the Patriarchate. But modern political geography cannot be determined by old battlefields, however symbolically charged they may be by the defeats incurred at them; if that were so, France would claim Waterloo, and Germany Stalingrad. Similarly, if modern borders had to bow to religious history, Kiev would be part of Russia and Istanbul part of Greece. Any independence deal for Kosovo would naturally have to include guarantees on the protection of cultural and religious sites; but that is a separate issue, and not such a hard one to resolve.
Aside from those intrinsic arguments, the Western diplomats also argue against independence for Kosovo on the grounds that it would set risky precedents or have dangerous consequences. A common claim is that if Kosovo gained independence, the Serb-ruled half of Bosnia, Republika Srpska, would also be entitled to break away from Bosnia. As Warren Zimmerman recently noted in these pages, "U.S. officials are particularly worried that Western acceptance of an independent 'Kosova' would destroy the Dayton agreement on Bosnia, which is based on integration, not separation" (Summer 1998).
But those offcials are making a completely false parallel between the two cases. As explained above, Kosovo's independent statehood would be based on the fact that it -- just like Bosnia -- had been a unit of the old federal Yugoslavia; Republika Srpska never was such a unit, and indeed was granted legal status for the first time only in 1995, on the strict condition that it remain part of the sovereign Bosnian state. For most of modern history the territory of Republika Srpska has been an integral part of a Bosnian entity, whereas Kosovo has been legally attached to a Serbian entity only for the last fifty-three years.
The other arguments involving precedents or consequences is about Macedonia, which has its own large Albanian minority. It is said that independence for Kosovo would encourage the Macedonian Albanians to carve off a territory of their own from the Macedonian state. In fact, the leading Albanian politicians in Macedonia make no linkage between independence for Kosovo, which they support, and a carve-up of Macedonia, which they do not want. One obvious reason why they do not want it is that more than 200,000 Albanians live in the capital, Skopje, which would certainly be left in the Slav half of any partitioned Macedonia.
But there is a different and real danger. A long, simmering confict in Kosovo would gradually radicalize the Albanians of Macedonia, as their young men crossed the mountains to fight. Some of them would return home imbued with the wild rhetoric of "Greater Albania", which certainly exists in some branches of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Such radicalization would undermine the responsible political leadership that represents the Macedonian Albanians today; eventually, fighting could develop in Macedonia too. And the cause of this radicalization process -- a long, simemring conflict in Kosovo -- is precisely what Western policy guarantees when it denies to the Kosovars the one thing, independence, for which they are still determined to fight. Thus Western policy, which aims above all at preventing the destabilization of Macedonia, will create precisely the outcome it most fears.
What, THEN, can be done? Independence cannot come immediately to Kosovo; that would be too much of a shock to Serb pride, and would provoke a violent response. In the very long term, however, Kosovo will certainly be separated from Serbia; even some Serb nationalists concede this, when they compare birth rates and calculate that Albanians will outnumber Serbs in the whole of Serbia by the mid-twenty-first century. The solution, then, must lie in the medium-term -- something along the lines of the settlement that ended the war in Chechnya, with a long interim period of autonomy leading finally to full self-determination. Conditionality could be built into such an agreement: to qualify for the eventual move to independence the autonomous Kosovo would have to satisfy key conditions, such as respecting the rights of the Serb minority and abandoning any territorial ambitions outside the present Kosovan borders. Such a solution would restore authority to the moderate Albanian political leaders, drawing supprt back toward them and away from the hardliners in the Kosovo Liberation Army. The continuation of the West's present policy on the other hand, far from solving Kosovo's problems, will only make them and those of the whole Balkan region -- far more lethally insoluble in the future.
I can see Pijetro's point. It's entirely a matter of perception however. In reality, instead of being hurt, Serbia is better off without Kosovo.
I know that most Albanians don't care about what Serbs think and couldn't care less even if Serbs were *really* humiliated. After all, up until now Albanians have been the humiliated ones. The thinking is that Serbia needs to try its own medicine.
I hope cooler minds prevail in the future and as Albanians we won't send military police to shell Serb houses. The most important thing however, is creation of a healthy state and an efficient military to deter any Serb misadventure.
Nebojsa you are right. All the world (except serbs like you) are blind and can't see what has and is suffering serbian minority in Kosovo. The international community is giving us Independence because we kosovars are "proofed criminals" and because we have inside us a terrible desire to "Kill others".
Please Nebojsa can you be a little more serious, because reading your post someone can think that we killed ourself to threat international community to intervene. Can you point a war during the history in which Albanians have been occupiers.
WOW, now serbs pack up, the ding-a-ling-parliament had a say.
what about the equaly important opinion of the boy-scouts and the postal officers???
LOL
no honestly, i´m pretty satisfied! it means nothing, it may open the eyes of the 30% serb voters that smash their voice by voting for pro-eu-parties and therefor it may save serbia from eu.
and there will be others to decide about south-serbia.
but i kinda loved the bluff about "eu-unity". where´s the 2 billion euros for the first year of southserbian occupation???what a unity!
that don´t mean very much, you a ren´t realizing the lower importance of that "vote" ...it´s initiated by a pro-albanian lobbyist, and it´s goal was to create cheerful mood among the Albanians, I guess, what seems to have worked according to those childish reactions here.
boys, keep in mind it´s a unanimous vote by all memberstates of the EU what would be a reason for you to behave like you already do.
and furthermore there is the UNSC...
it seems like you are so desperate, that you are simply ignoring those facts...
and finally to Joe,
you don´t seem to realize it,but the "only global superpower" how you put it, is highly dependent on Russia and China in the really important matters ( Iran, Korea etc. ),
and it´s power is declining, as every sound observer is noticing it in the last years.
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