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Comment: Kosovo - is Time a Healer?

31 10 2007  The US draft document on freezing Kosovo’s status until 2020, could - if adopted - open the way to a mutually-acceptable solution.

By Dragan Bujosevic in Belgrade

Despite initial denials, as this is how things always work, I find it rather easy to believe the State Department is pondering whether to delay a decision on Kosovo’s final status for a period of 12 years.

Taken aback by Russia’s support for Serbia’s defiance as well as by the European Union’s indifference, the US government quickly had to reassess the feasibility of its plan to grant quick independence to Kosovo.

Early this year, just before UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari’s plan was outlined to Belgrade, I spoke to a senior US diplomat who wanted to know one thing and one thing only: if Belgrade would accept Kosovo’s division.

While holding the Ahtisaari plan in his hand, he wondered why Dobrica Cosic, a prominent Serb writer and one of the champions of the initiative to carve up Kosovo, no longer wanted to see him.

Cosic, along with Serbia’s top officials, prominent public figures and the public, had been infuriated by Ahtisaari’s plan that envisaged internationally-supervised independence for Kosovo.

It’s always good to have a “plan B” and, even better, a trouble-free exit strategy. Granting Kosovo independence one way or the other would cause an avalanche of problems, a fact acknowledged even by the most inflexible advocates of the quick fix, who nonetheless keep ranting that they will declare Kosovo independent by January at the latest.

What do you do when you can’t solve a problem? Ask for more time, I suppose. Every nation in the world has the saying that time is a healer.

Serbia’s negotiators have repeatedly said this in one way or another in the broader sense – going beyond the call that the current talks on Kosovo’s future should not be linked to a definitive deadline.

Leon Kojen, the former number two in Serbia’s team that tussled with Ahtisaari, said once he believed that if we were at a point in time 25 years from now, talks between Serbs and Albanians on Kosovo would be a lot different from what they are today.

It makes sense to assume that Serbian society as well as the emerging society being shaped by the Albanian majority in Kosovo, will be based on different postulates from what we have now. That is simply because they will need a different set of priorities that are not based on the current “blood and land” battle cry, clouding all the horizons of the future.

Kojen’s remarks on the timescale were echoed by Serbia’s Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic who said recently that a problem that apparently can’t be resolved today, could be settled at some point in the future.

Kosovo’s Albanians replied by saying it was crystal clear to them that Belgrade would be unwilling to recognise Kosovo’s independence even in 25 years’ time.

It occurs to me that the authorities in Belgrade and Pristina both have a rather sensible concept of time.

Hence it appears that neither camp would find it too difficult to persuade their respective supporters that delaying the decision on Kosovo’s final status meant victory.
Belgrade has vested its negotiating powers in Russia. Pristina has put the fate of Kosovo Albanians in the hands of the Americans. Now both camps have to follow their mentors’ instructions.

Any declaration of Kosovo’s independence is invalid without US backing, and a unilateral move by the Albanians would almost certainly plunge them into conflict with the international administration in what has been a UN protectorate since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999.

Persuading Belgrade and Pristina to accept a possible US initiative to delay the final status decision would appear to be much easier than to say with any degree of certainty whether 12 years is enough to end the Serbo-Albanian antagonism, fanned over the years by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the US alike.

There are realists both in Belgrade and Pristina.

Delaying the decision on Kosovo’s status would allow Belgrade to deal with other key issues, by shelving one that is essentially irrational and devoid of any immediate political benefit for anyone.

Even the firmly nationalist Serbian Radical Party placed Kosovo as the third most important issue on its agenda during the campaign before the elections held in January this year, not as its top priority, as one might have expected.

Realists in Belgrade know the return of Serb rule in Kosovo is not an option. Serbia’s political elite, even the Radicals, know the vague illusion of sovereignty over its southern province is less than a fig leaf but they are also aware their voters will become more pragmatic over the next 12 years.

Realists in Pristina, on the other hand, know the decision on Kosovo’s future status lies in the hands of the international community, whatever the term “international community” means in reality.

I am sceptical as to how much money will be poured into Kosovo over the next 12 years. However, even a small figure by global standards would mean a lot to the economically-devastated UN protectorate because progress changes everything in any given community, no matter how backward it may be.

In other words, Kosovo Albanian society will change radically over the next 12 years. Meanwhile, Kosovo Serbs and Albanians will certainly benefit by using that money to improve ties between the two communities.

Delaying a decision on Kosovo’s final status appears to be a chance to come up with a better solution than any option available at present. It remains an open question, however, whether 12 years is enough, as it wasn’t enough to resolve either the Middle East conflict or the one in Cyprus.

The complexity of the situation is perhaps best epitomised by what the Cypriot President recently told his Serbian opposite number, Boris Tadic, in New York: “Don’t worry, Cyprus will not recognise Kosovo’s independence even if someone in Serbia does.”

Dragan Bujosevic is a columnist with Belgrade's NIN weekly. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.