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IN DEPTH: Kosovo Ponders Voting Before Final Status

10 07 2007  With no date for resolving final status, argument for delaying elections until after independence is weakening.

By Krenar Gashi in Pristina

Kosovo looks increasingly likely to hold both municipal and parliamentary elections by the end of this year, despite the fact that the issue of final status may not be resolved.

Joachim Ruecker, head of the UN administration of the territory, UNMIK, is expected to announce elections after his visit to New York on Monday, where he briefed the Security Council on the situation.

Alexander Ivanko, UNMIK spokesperson, said Ruecker would make a final decision on elections after consultations with Kosovo politicians, probably at the end of this week.

Kosovo’s municipal authorities face a crisis of legitimacy. The elections that ought to have taken place last year were postponed by UNMIK, due to the fact that the process of final status resolution was still ongoing.

But recently formed political parties and opposition party are now demanding both local and national elections should take place, insisting there is no need to tie them to the business of final status.

Unity Team Loses Prestige:

Kosovo’s 30 local authorities in Kosovo were last constituted in 2002 with a mandate to serve for four years. New elections therefore should have taken place last autumn. But on 16 June, 2006, Soren Jessen-Petersen, then head of UNMIK, postponed the vote until Kosovo’s final status was resolved.

Peterson said the elections would be put on hold “for a period not exceeding twelve months” and would take place “not earlier than three months and no later than six months after the date of a decision by the United Nations Security Council regarding the determination of Kosovo’s future status”.

He added: “The decision to postpone the elections serves the best interests of all communities in Kosovo. The postponement will allow for the political focus on the status talks to be retained”.

However, the Security Council has since failed to agree on a resolution over Kosovo. Four project-resolutions backed by the US and the EU members of the council have been rejected by Russia, a permanent member of the council and an ally of Serbia.

Russia backs Serbia’s demand for more talks between Serbs and the Albanians - mainly with a view to kicking the whole issue into the long grass.

Although the mandate for Kosovo’s local authorities expired in June, their right to continue working was not seriously questioned until recently owing to the fact that all the main parties were working together in the so-called Unity Team, the inter-party body handling Kosovo’s final status negotiations in Vienna.

This team unites members of the governing parties, the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK and the Alliance for Future of Kosovo, AAK, alongside two opposition parties, the Kosovo Democratic Party of Hashim Thaci, PDK, and Veton Surroi’s ORA.

The team is headed by Kosovo’s President, Fatmir Sejdiu, of the LDK and also includes the Prime Minister, Agim Ceku, and the speaker of parliament, Kole Berisha.

As the Unity Team’s first mission was to represent Kosovo in the all-important negotiations with Serbia, they faced little criticism at first, except from a few radical groups such as Vetevendosje (Self-determination) a movement led by a former student leader, Albin Kurti, which opposed all negotiations with Serbia.

However, as the talks in Vienna got nowhere, the prestige of the Unity Team began to drop. The UN then asked a Special Envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, to draft his own proposal for Kosovo’s final status. Ahtisaari presented his proposal in March 2007, recommending a form of “independence supervised by the international community”. This outcome was accepted by Kosovo’s parliament.

But after it became clear that the Ahtisaari plan would not automatically resolve the issue of Kosovo’s future, support for the Unity Team faded further.

Disputes between the team had already surfaced, especially between the governing parties and Thaci’s PDK. In April, Thaci made harsh criticisms of the government coalition. “The PDK wants to get out of the Unity Team,” an LDK source told Balkan Insight.

The source claimed that Thaci aimed to become prime minister after the next elections. Certainly, the party makes no secret that it favours elections at all levels as soon as possible. “Elections are a separate issue from the [final] status,” party spokesperson Vlora Citaku said.

In the meantime, other parties have split and newcomers have appeared, all demanding changes to, or the resignation of, the Unity Team. Last December, the LDK suffered a split when the former speaker Nexhat Daci, formed the Democratic League of Dardania, LDD.

Behgjet Pacolli, a prominent businessman, has also formed a new party, the New Alliance for Kosovo, AKR, targeting mainly unemployed voters, who make up a large percentage of Kosovo’s population.

Speaking to Balkan Insight from his office in Switzerland, Pacolli demanded national elections for November.

“We have witnessed just how successful the government and the Unity Team has been,” Pacolli said, referring to the status delay. “The people of Kosovo are tired with endless, vague promises.”

Pacolli added: “Kosovo’s status and the elections are two issues that are not related to each other… Elections must happen. It’s a legitimate right of the people to elect their government.”

Lulzim Zeneli, the secretary of Daci’s Democratic League of Dardania, takes the same line. “If our institutions lose their legitimacy, we will lose people’s support even more, which we do not need at this stage,” he said.

Many analysts agree elections are increasingly urgent, especially at a local level. “Local government has had no legitimacy for over a year now and many municipalities are facing a crisis,” Burim Ejupi, an analyst from Pristina, told Balkan Insight. Baton Haxhiu, another analyst, wrote in his column in Express daily: “Elections should take place – yesterday.”

This growing pressure for elections has put the governing LDK in a difficult position. The party insists it is not against elections in principle but still maintains that resolving final status should come first.

“Sometimes we have to be ‘less democratic’ because of the high importance of the status [issue]”, Vehbi Miftari, LDK spokesperson, told Balkan Insight. Miftari said holding fresh elections before final status was settled would undermine the authority of the Unity Team and Kosovo’s institutions at a crucial time. The LDK presidency said in a statement that “no process, and not even elections, should be used as a pretext to drag the attention from the independence of the country”.

The junior member of the governing coalition, the AAK, is even more firmly against elections in the coming weeks. Besnik Tahiri, AAK spokesperson, told Balkan Insight: “At this particular moment, we believe elections would be contra-productive for Kosovo as they will drag attention away from the resolution of final status.”

Elections ‘A Diversion from Final Status?’

The AAK is not the only party that fears elections will be used to divert attention from the status issue. Many believe the international community may try to use fresh polls as a device to delay matters.

A Balkan Insight source in the Prime Minister’s office said elections might be a diversionary strategy of the international community.

“In case the status issue is not be resolved, the elections will be something that Albanians can deal with, so they can forget about the delay a while,” the source said.

Agron Bajrami, editor of the daily Koha Ditore, agrees. New polls will used to pacify Kosovo’s 2 million Albanians by giving them a temporary sedative, he wrote in an editorial on 6 July.

Ordinary people in Kosovo are divided over whether fresh elections are a necessary democratic procedure, or a bluff, designed to divert their attention from the big issue.

Ibrahim Murati, a student from Gjilan and potential first-time voter, said he feared elections would be used mainly to calm the situation. “In that case, young people like me and many others will not vote at all,” he said.

“We absolutely warn that elections must not be used for delays to the status decision, ”Veton Surroi of ORA said. The PDK, which supports elections, agrees. “We want both, elections and the status,” Vlora Citaku said.

The Serbian factor:

In all four organised elections in Kosovo, most Kosovo Serbs have boycotted the polls following instructions from the authorities in Serbia.

Oliver Ivanovic, of the more moderate Serbian List for Kosovo and Metohija, has also questioned this policy. He told Balkan Insight that he would again urge Serbs to participate and urged the bigger Serbian parties to do the same.

Ivanovic said he advocates Serbs taking part in new polls on the basis of a “clear economic perspective … as well as maintaining firm relations with Serbia while strengthening the positions in the provisional Kosovo institutions”.

“Serbia’s stance has a big influence on ordinary Kosovo Serbs”, he added, explaining that if Serbia advises Kosovo Serbs to vote, they would do so.

Slobodan Petrovic, president of the recently formed Independent Liberal Party in Kosovo, also wants Serbs in Kosovo to vote. “We want legitimate and relevant representatives of the Serbian community in Kosovo,” he told Balkan Insight.

However, many Serbs are expected to stick by their old policy of boycotting Kosovo’s local institutions. Predrag Antic, a Serb from Pristina now living in the Serbian enclave of Mitrovica, says fresh polls have nothing to offer the Serbs. Antic argued that such elections would only interest Serbs if the thousands of displaced Serbs in Kosovo were able to return to their abandoned homes first.

If There is an Election, How to Run it?

The parties that oppose elections say the political programmes will be much poorer if elections occur before the final status.

“There will be no time to make precise or serious pledges on economical development… or on social welfare,” Besnik Tahiri of the AAK said.

Vehbi Miftari of the LDK agreed; status ought to be resolved before elections. “Only then every party would be able to guarantee a real programme,” he said.

But supporters of elections like Pacolli disagree, saying they are ready right now with their programmes and ideas. Lulzim Zeneli of the LDD said that “now is the right time for concrete programmes”.

He added: “Since the election will most probably happen in November, we have enough time to explore our programmes.”

In the meantime, there is confusion about how the elections would be run. Until now, people have voted only for their political parties, and the party chiefs have then appointed members of the parliament and the executive.

But the Unity team agreed that voters in the next election should directly elect their representatives. However, it is not clear whether this change should take effect if the next election takes place before final status is resolved.

One LDK representative told Balkan Insight that if elections did take place before final status, they would have to be held according to the previous regulations under the system of so-called closed lists.

Besnik Tahiri agreed. “Nothing from Ahtisaari’s plan will be implemented before the elections if they happen before final status,” he said.

That means there will be no movement either on the creation of new Serb-run municipalities, which the Ahtisaari plan envisioned.

But many new voters may feel deterred if the electoral reforms are not put in place sooner rather than later. Many Kosovars will be voting for the first time in the next elections, having turned 18 in the meantime. The percentage of them is high on account of Kosovo’s youthful demographic profile. Many want to vote directly for the candidates they prefer rather than simply choosing a party.

Potential first-time voter Ibrahim Murati is one of them. “I would vote for people who have realistic programmes, especially for the economy,” he says. “If there are no programmes and the elections are with closed lists, I would prefer not to vote.”

Krenar Gashi is BIRN Kosovo Editor. Igor Milic, Balkan Insight`s contributor from Mitrovica also contributed to this article. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.