Serbs Gripe About "Unrepresentative" Negotiators

Serbs Gripe About "Unrepresentative" Negotiators

Kosovo has been a UN protectorate since summer 1999, when NATO’s air campaign forced Serbia to withdraw from the territory. It has formally remained a part of Serbia ever since the UN took control, but power lies increasingly in the hands of the local Albanian majority, who demand full independence.

Talks between Belgrade and Pristina on final status started in Vienna on March 20 with the mediation of Albert Roan from the UN but have made little progress so far. But what also annoys Kosovo Serbs is the fact the negotiating team is heavily weighted in favour politicians from Serbia proper, and that the handful of Kosovo Serb delegates are all from the north of the territory.

The team’s chief negotiators are Serbia’s prime minister, Vojislav Koštunica, the republic's president, Boris Tadić, and the foreign minister of Serbia and Montenegro, Vuk Drasković. The team includes two Kosovo Serb representatives, Marko Jaksić, head of the local branch of the Democratic Party of Serbia, DSS, and his counterpart from the Democratic Party, DS, Goran Bogdanović. These two represent the approximately 142,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians still living in Kosovo. Milan Ivanović, president of the Serb National Council, SNV, based in Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, says the team are doing what they can.

“If all political parties in Serbia, those in power as well as the opposition, extended genuine support for our cause, I am quite sure the Serbian team in Vienna would be successful,” he said. But Rada Trajković, vice-president of the Kosovo-Metohija SNV board and a member of the DSS, is far less satisfied, especially with the level of communication.

“People whose fate is being decided are kept in the dark,” she said. “We haven’t got enough information. It would be useful if we could at least have general consultations with the team.” Trajković said it was extraordinary that some members of Serbia’s final status team had never even been to Kosovo.

The team was scolded for not including Serbs from the isolated southern enclaves, whose position is far less safe than that of the Serbs in Mitrovica and the northern areas, which join directly onto Serbia. Jaksić and Bogdanović both come from northern Kosovo, where conditions are much better than in the enclaves, not least because they enjoy freedom of movement to Serbia. Many other Kosovo Serbs regard those areas as practically part of Serbia and feel the inhabitants know little of the hardships they experience in the enclaves. Oliver Ivanović, leader of a Kosovo Serb coalition that rallies the DS, the Serbian Renewal Movement, SPO, and the Social Democrats, although also based in Mitrovica, agrees with many of the complaints directed at the team. Ivanović said he had repeatedly urged the team to visit Kosovo to learn more about the situation on the ground and was unhappy this has still not taken place.

“From the start of the process, we demanded to see more representatives from central areas who are most qualified to address the problems experienced by the population there,” he said. “We also asked the negotiating team several times to visit the central enclaves and speak to the people whose future they are negotiating about.”

Ivanović said he did not believe the Serbian team had prepared itself properly for the negotiations, claiming most members of the team were only briefed on the situation shortly before they left for Vienna. The Serbian team has made Kosovo Serbs even more unsettled by putting forward a vague and unspecific plan for Kosovo’s autonomy, without releasing the full text. The fine details of the Serbian decentralisation plan have never been made public, leaving many Kosovo Serbs feeling marginalised.

Some Serbian Orthodox Church officials in Kosovo also voice dissatisfaction with the progress of the negotiations, for much the same reasons as the others. A cleric from Visoki Dečani monastery, in isolated western Kosovo, said the composition of the Serbian team corresponded much more closely to the balance of political power in the Serbian parliament than it did to the needs of the Kosovo Serbs.

Fr Nektarije said he was unhappy that party political allegiance had apparently been such a decisive factor in selecting members of the delegation. “There should have been more experts on the team, especially those qualified to address issues concerning property and law,” he said. “Land is a crucial matter, because a [Serbian] state has existed here for quite some time.” The priest was unhappy that the church, as an important long-term Serbian institution in Kosovo, was not included more directly in the negotiations.

“The team did not have to include a representative of the church but it should nevertheless have been a part of the negotiating process,” he said.

Ljiljana Milić, of Božur, a non-governmental organisation from the village of Babin Most, near Pristina, also said the Serbian team had not spent enough time in Kosovo, or established lines of communication with local Serbs. “Serbs paid a price for not taking part in the 2004 elections in Kosovo, because they were unable to elect their own legitimate representatives,” she said. “So now their interests are being put forward by self-appointed political representatives.”

Jelena, aged 30, from the village of Ugljari, said she was not satisfied with either the work or with the composition of the Serbian team. Most of its members, she maintained, had only a very vague picture of the situation in central Kosovo and other enclaves, “The interests of Serbs in central Kosovo are not at all represented in the team." She complained that no one appeared to have put forward the demand of Serbs in central Kosovo for a separate municipality in Kosovo Polje, on the outskirts of Priština, to help resolve the fate of the thousands of Serbs who used to live in the capital.

Some Kosovo Serbs maintain that the Vienna talks are irrelevant, because the big powers have already made their own decision behind closed doors. “There is no need for the Vienna negotiations,” said one displaced Serb from the village of Ajvalija. “Kosovo’s fate will be determined by the great powers whether we like it or not.”

Tijana Arsić is journalist working for KIM Radio in Caglavica. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication. This article was published with the support of the British embassy in Belgrade, as part of BIRN's Minority Media Training and Reporting Project.