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Serbia Plays Kosovo Partition Card

19 04 2007  Belgrade mulls plans to annex the mainly Serbian far north of the province if Kosovo declares independence.

By Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade (Balkan Insight, 19 April 07)

In a new attempt to defy the western-backed United Nations plan for Kosovo, Serbia appears to be considering the partition of the breakaway province.

Serbian officials - in Belgrade and Kosovo - and members of the politically influential Serbian Academy of Sciences have talked about the possibility of a change of the current borders of the disputed territory.

The idea is that if Kosovo proclaims independence, Serbia could annex the mainly Serbian far north around the town of Mitrovica.

Oliver Ivanovic, a Serb leader from northern Kosovo, said partition sounded very appealing to many of his constituents as an alternative to life under Pristina.

“If the Albanians [in Kosovo] declare independence, northern Kosovo will do the same,” he said this week.

Earlier this week, Martti Ahtisaari, who drafted the plan that envisions Kosovo’s “supervised” independence, warned against attempts to alter the plan, or widen the divide between the Serb-dominated north and the Albanian authorities in Pristina.

“If this goes [any] further, I think Kosovo becomes an unmanageable society,” said Ahtisaari in Helsinki.

The UN plan has the backing of the major western powers but has been rejected by Serbia and UN veto-holders Russia and China. They have indicated they will not endorse any solution that goes against Serbia’s wishes.

Russia and Serbia both say they want more talks on Kosovo, while the UN Security Council is sending a fact-finding mission in late April to Belgrade and Pristina following Russia’s suggestion.

With hopes of an agreement on Kosovo’s final status receding, Serbia is pondering the options and increasingly mentioning partition as a solution.

This is mainly because even diehards in Belgrade recognize the country has little hope of holding onto Kosovo as a whole.

Northern Kosovo is already in many ways a de facto part of Serbia. The three municipalities of Zubin Potok, Leposavic and Zvecan and the northern half of Mitrovica are overwhelmingly Serbian with a total population of 40,000. The area adjoins Serbia geographically and enjoys close financial, logistic, administrative and cultural ties to Belgrade.

While officially Belgrade still claims it will never accept any option that does not involve keeping the whole of Kosovo – and it has included the claim to Kosovo in Serbia’s new constitution – important Serbian circles are in practice considering partition.

Significantly, the Serbian Academy of Sciences, which frequently takes a key part in formulating the country’s strategy, recently published two books on Kosovo that contain prominent articles about partition.

One article has detailed the possible scenario of an exodus of Serbs from the enclaves in central and southern Kosovo, including maps of how partition might occur and how the Serbs trapped in the south could leave the enclaves.

Dragan Bujosevic, of the Belgrade weekly magazine NIN, told Balkan Insight that partition might be least-worst option for Serbia. “In that case Serbia would save face and appear at least as a partial winner,” he said.

Politicians have also hinted at this outcome. The former Yugoslav foreign minister, Goran Svilanovic, earlier this year said Serbia might seek a “correction” to Kosovo’s borders if the province gained independence.

This correction was widely taken to mean the inclusion of Kosovo’s Serbian northern districts into Serbia proper.

Sanda Raskovic-Ivic, head of the Serbian government’s Coordination Centre for Kosovo, has made the same point. “Why wouldn’t it be possible to change the borders of an independent Kosovo?” she asked.

James Lyon, Balkans analyst for the International Crisis Group, goes further. He recently claimed that everything the Serbian government had done in Kosovo since 1999 “has been aimed at partition”.

Partition plans were “a big dirty secret that everyone in Belgrade knows about but no one is willing to speak about it publicly”, he added.

During futile Kosovo talks held in Vienna last year, Belgrade suggested the “South Tyrol - Alto Adige” model as a possible basis for Kosovo.

The mountainous region of northern Italy was seized from Austria after the First World War and has a mainly German or Austrian population. After years of low-level conflict, Rome offered the area wide-ranging autonomy in 1972, which has since defused the conflict.

Belgrade proposed that Tyrol become a model for Kosovo’s relationship to Serbia, with the whole of Kosovo remaining a part of Serbia and enjoying a Tyrolean-style level of autonomy.

Although the Kosovars - unsurprisingly - rejected that idea entirely, the South Tyrol model has resurfaced in a different form recently.

Last week, Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer suggested applying it to northern Kosovo alone. This would mean the mainly Serbian area enjoying almost complete autonomy from the Kosovo government in Pristina.

However, Serb nationalists are no keener on that idea than the Albanians were about Serbia’s own Tyrolean concept. “But if this idea fails and it now has little backing from nationalist circles in Belgrade, we will try to go for partition,” said one senior Serbian official that asked not to be named.

Talk of territorial division has worried Kosovo Albanian politicians, some of whom fear that the future of their country will resemble that of Cyprus, the Mediterranean island partitioned on ethnic lines in 1974 with the support of Turkey.

Emrush Xhemajli, a parliamentary deputy from the Kosovo National Movement, told Balkan Insight that Serbia had “a unique chance to achieve final reconciliation with Kosovo [but] every plan for partitioning or dividing Kosovo will destroy this chance”.

Ulpiana Lama, a Kosovo government spokeswoman, said it was not up to Serbia to decide the country’s future in any case but the international community.

“The process over Kosovo’s status has not been initiated by Belgrade or by Pristina… it has been initiated and led by the UN,” she said.

“There can be no other processes for Kosovo but this one. Serbia should understand that, drop other alternative solutions for Kosovo and focus on European integration process.”

Many Belgrade-based analysts and diplomats also fear that talk of partition could spark Albanian attacks on the more isolated Serbian enclaves.

A separate but related worry is that it could also reignite the armed insurgency among ethnic Albanians in the restive Presevo Valley of southern Serbia, where many people see their future as lying in an independent Albanian-run Kosovo.

An operative with Serbia’s security agency told Balkan Insight that their findings indicated that “partition could spark conflict”.

The same agent added, “We don’t see it as leading to all-out war but to a period of prolonged regional instability and low level conflicts throughout Kosovo.”

Aleksandar Vasovic is BIRN Serbia editor. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.