The Kosovars have voted for independence. That is the reality of Saturday’s general election won by former guerrilla leader Hashim Thaci’s party which had been persuaded to abandon violence and embrace the democratic process. The peacefully expressed will of the people of Kosovo cannot therefore be ignored as happened with the Palestinians, simply because the result is unacceptable to outside powers.
Nonetheless, there remain serious obstacles ahead. In just three weeks, the international troika of Russia, the United States and the EU should deliver agreed proposals for the future of this Serbian province. Agreement has eluded the participants in large measure because each has its own incompatible political agendas. The Russians want an agreement that is acceptable to their historic allies, the Serbs, and the Serbs will not accept an independent Kosovo. The EU is split internally on the issue, with some member states backing the US position that independence must be granted while others fear the partition could pitch the whole of the former Yugoslavia back into turmoil, with Bosnian Serbs, for instance, demanding their own statelet.
Both Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) and the second-placed Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) campaigned on a promise of an immediate demand for independence. That the firebrand Thaci won the vote demonstrates that many Albanians are fed up with the softly-softly approach. But the victorious PDK did not win an outright victory, taking only 34 percent of the vote and must therefore form a coalition, probably with the LDK. Handled well, this government could actually present a stronger political face to the world.
However, even if a new coalition government emerges rapidly, the challenges ahead are very considerable. Since 1999, Kosovo has been under UN administration and NATO protection. This outside presence may have avoided violence with the 120,000-strong Serb minority among the 1.5 million Kosovars but it has done little to establish a functioning and prosperous economy. It is also hard to see how an independent Kosovo can survive, at least in the short term, without NATO staying on. Nor indeed is it clear how well the new state of Kosovo can make its way economically in the world, given the heavy reliance of expatriate remittances and the artificial economic activity generated by its UN administrators.
The pity is that Kosovo’s long period since 1999 in a political no-man’s land, has not been put to better economic use. Conventional commercial funding sources would not lend a country whose political and economic circumstances were so uncertain. But other funding agencies could have done a far better job of seeding new economic growth, regardless of whether this would have been for a Kosovo that remained an autonomous part of Serbia or an independent state. Therefore the worrying face-off between the bitterly opposed parties continues to be over the future of the most wretchedly poor part of continental Europe.
