Is Washington using Kosovo to push Serbia toward NATO?

Is Washington using Kosovo to push Serbia toward NATO?

"Serbia would in that case be 'surrounded' by NATO on all sides, but our country, as diplomat Zoran Milivojevic stressed, would be able to continue the current policy of neutrality even under such circumstances," the agency said on Friday.

Milivojevic recalled that Serbia also has agreements with the military alliance that allow full cooperation, but do not mean membership.

Milivojevic explained that Western power centers, primarily in Washington, are preparing Kosovo for the Partnership for Peace program so they could include Kosovo in its network in the Western Balkans, "after which Serbia, with Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, would become surrounded by members of the alliance."

"The fact that the U.S. Congress launched this topic and gave the signal to the administration to work on it, shows it is in the interests of NATO, the U.S. and (their) allies to include Kosovo, due to its geostrategic and geopolitical position," said Milivojevic.

He then noted that Montenegro "just signed a protocol on accession to NATO," and added that "only Serbia, which is militarily neutral, and Macedonia remain outside of NATO - whose entry into the alliance at this point is prevented by the dispute with Greece over its name - as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is 'blocked' by the Serb Republic."

"Such an environment means a certain political and other pressure on Serbia to join the organization, but Serbia can continue to have full cooperation with NATO without membership in the organization, like Austria and Finland, which are integrated into Euro-Atlantic structures, cooperate with NATO at the highest level, but are not members," said this diplomat.

According to Milivojevic, "Kosovo in NATO should not be a destabilizing factor, but the very fact it is being included with an unresolved status and against the will of Serbia represents some political and security risk and a political and security threat."

He pointed out that Serbia "should not have security problems because it is not in conflict with NATO, nor its member states, and, when it comes to NATO, there is no interest to bring Serbia's security into question."

The inclusion of Kosovo in NATO would make a new precedent, because Kosovo is not an internationally recognized state nor a UN member, but is under UN's protectorate, said Tanjug.

Milivojevic, however, believes it is "not unrealistic to expect some kind of formula that would include Kosovo artificially into Partnership for Peace, since this is about a broader strategy that has profound security and political meanings."

"We've already seen such a scenario in the case of FIFA and UEFA," Milivojevic said, adding, "it certainly should not be possible while (UNSC) Resolution 1244 is in force and while the status of Kosovo has not been resolved."

For Kosovo to become a member of NATO, it must first have its own army, i.e. transform the current security force into an army, said Belgrade Center for Security Policy NGO researcher Isidora Stakic.

"Obviously, the latest news tells us that NATO has given the green light for such a thing. It will definitely happen in the future, it has been talked about for several years," said she, adding that "the process of transferring KFOR's powers to the new army of Kosovo will take a certain period of time, that will not be short."

Therefore, Stakic believes that NATO will continue to be a major military actor in Kosovo and underlines that "the army of Kosovo, as such, will not pose a security threat to Serbia."

"The threat will be a sharpening of rhetoric which will follow and which will lead to new tensions, and they will slow down and hamper normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina, (cause) new ethnic tensions, a new impetus to nationalist rhetoric," said Stakic.

She added that, "according to some estimates," Kosovo's army "will be smaller than one brigade of the Serbian Army - and therefore will not pose a security threat to Serbia."

"Politicians are going to present it as a threat because such narratives do well among a large part of the population and it will be used to win political points and to win over a part of the electorate," said Stakic.

"A similar situation happened over a military agreement between the Albanian Army and the Kosovo Security Force, which was widely seen as a security threat for allegedly creating a 'Greater Albania', but did not have any basis in reality," Sekulic said.

SNS official Milovan Drecun, who chaired the Committee on Kosovo and Metohija in the previous composition of Serbia's National Assembly, sees another angle to it all, Tanjug said it its report..

He told the agency that Pristina's goal is to "divert the attention of the Albanian public in Kosovo and Metohija from the problems in the province, the difficult situation due to high unemployment, corruption, crime, a lack of any economic perspective, and the extremely low level of respect for human rights of non-Albanians, of Serbs in particular."

According to him, Pristina "constantly raises unexpected, unjustified and unrealistic demands before both Belgrade and the international community in order to run away from the problems and focus the attention of (ethnic) Albanians in another direction."

Drecun said ti was "particularly interesting" that Pristina thinks NATO will accept it into its ranks "when that alliance's officials keep saying that their forces are in KFOR on the basis of Resolution 1244, which in no case either recognizes, or foresees the creation of a state of Kosovo."

Tanjug said that in the wake of the move of the U.S. Congress regarding Pristina's Partnership for Peace membership, "Kosovo officials said the Kosovo Security Force was ready to be transformed into the Kosovo Armed Forces."

They also "point out that Kosovo's institutions shoudl decide to form the armed forces as soon as possible" and that their establishment was "one of the priorities of the current government, and will be completed by the end of this year."