Kosovo Strategy meets scornful response

Kosovo Strategy meets scornful response

In a document called "the platform", Belgrade proposed that Serbia and the United Nations sign a document granting Kosovo no more than broad autonomy within Serbia for the next 20 years.

While Serbia says it has offered as much as it can, most analysts believe the plan is too late to be realistic and is designed mainly with an internal Serbian audience in mind, in order to shift the blame elsewhere if the international community then imposes a solution that Serbs do not like.

Vojislav Koštunica , Serbia 's prime minister, also said on June 1 that new elections should take place in Serbia before the final status of Kosovo is decided. Many see this as an attempt by the government to duck direct responsibility for the possible loss of Kosovo, particularly after the recent split with Montenegro , which voted in favour of independence in the recent referendum.

Kosovo has been a UN protectorate since June 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign ended with the withdrawal of Serbian troops and officials from the territory. Direct talks between Serbia and Kosovo on resolving final status started in February and are likely to intensify later in 2006. Slobodan Samardžić, a top adviser to Koštunica, said on May 31 that the platform, which the Serbian government had adopted back in January, aimed to avoid extreme solutions.

"One extreme is [a return to] the province's status from 1989 to 1999, and another is independence," he said. "Between them is a large space in which Kosovo's specific status can be negotiated, which entails wide autonomy that would be internationally guaranteed."

Samardžić's recollection of the era between 1989 and 1999 referred to the time when Kosovo's autonomy was suppressed under Slobodan Milosević, then Serbia 's president. Under his rule, the territory was governed in repressive style from Belgrade. In 1998 a conflict broke out between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, which escalated and eventually triggered NATO intervention.

Leon Kojen, advisor to Serbia 's president, Boris Tadić, said the platform aimed to reconcile Serbian sovereignty with the local population's desire for self-rule. He said it would allow Belgrade to keep control of a number of key powers, including "foreign affairs, border control, protection of human rights in the final instance, monetary policy, customs policy, the protection of Serbian religious and cultural heritage, as well as special border inspection tasks".

Kojen added that the platform had not addressed defence, though this was a crucial competence, as the government favoured complete demilitarisation in Kosovo. "There would be no military forces in Kosovo and Metohija, neither Serbian nor Albanian," said Kojen.

"Albanians are offered the political maximum that an ethnic community can get within one state. [But] Kosovo Albanians would have to respect the main elements of Serbia 's state sovereignty." Unsurprisingly, Kosovo Albanian leaders flatly rejected the proposal as a crude diversion from their aim of complete independence from Serbia .

Muhamet Haliti, advisor to Kosovo's president, Fatmir Sejdiu, said it showed the governing circles in Belgrade lived in a fantasy world. "The political elite continues to please itself with diplomatic maneuvers out of an imaginary belief that it is still possible to keep nominal sovereignty over Kosovo," he said. Most analysts, even in Serbia , agreed with the Kosovars' dismissive stance.

Nenad Djurdjevic, of the Belgrade-based group, the Centre for Nonviolent Resistance, said Belgrade's strategy had come far too late in the day; the idea of postponing a final solution for 20 years should have been presented long before the talks started, he suggested. "This plan might have been possible to implement in 1999, but not today," Djurdjevic told Balkan Insight.

Đurđevic said the strategy also resembled "a colonial plan and [was] not a base for good relations between Serbs and Albanians". He described the proposal that the UN should remain in Kosovo for another 20 years as another mistake, given that the UN has already said it will soon leave Kosovo.

Tim Judah, a British analyst on the Balkans, said if the government had proposed the plan back in 1995 the international community might have put pressure on Albanians to accept it, but it was not possible now.

"The Serbian government seems to operate along the principles of what it would like to happen, not the real world," he told Balkan Insight. "For example, Koštunica said he would arrest [Bosnian war crimes suspect Ratko] Mladić, he did not believe Montenegro would become independent and he says Kosovo will not be independent.

"In other circumstances and at a different time this plan might have been OK but the world has moved on." International officials also gave Belgrade 's platform a cool welcome. In an interview for the Austrian daily Die Presse, Albert Rohan, deputy UN special envoy to the status talks, criticised Belgrade 's "unrealistic positions". Although Serbia outwardly maintains that its vision of Kosovo's future deserves respect, some analysts and politicians believe Belgrade is aware of the plan's faults.

Ranđel Nojkić, a Kosovo Serb politician from the Serbian List for Kosovo and Metohija, described the platform as an "irrational proposal, solely made for internal political use and not directed towards resolving the problem". "The very idea of having the Serbian police and army guarding Kosovo borders at this moment shows how unrealistic this strategy is," he told Balkan Insight. "It makes me believe Belgrade itself do not believe in its own proposal."

Nojkić said he thought Belgrade knew very well that its platform would not produce results but wanted "to remove the responsibility off its back for Kosovo's secession". Đurđević said the international community supported the idea of holding early polls in Serbia before the status talks ended, in the hope that a freshly elected democratic government might survive the shock of the loss of Kosovo easier at the start of its mandate.

However, he said this strategy could backfire, if, as was likely, Serbia's centrist forces then asked the international community to postpone any solution to Kosovo, "blackmailing them with the possible victory of the [hard-line nationalist Serbian] Radicals if Kosovo was lost during the election campaign".

Many ordinary Serbs already assume that the future of Kosovo is in the hands of international community rather than Serbia .

Siniša Dašić, 40, an economist, said, "Whether we like it or not, any plan that comes from Serbia now is senseless, as it is the international community that will impose [Kosovo's] status on us, rather than listen to what the Serbian government wants."

Tanja Matić is a regular contributor to Balkan Insight from Belgrade. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.