There is a grim familiarity about the violence on Monday in the Serbian half of Mitrovica. It smacks of the same low-level confrontations that preceded the conflict in Bosnia, not least in the town of Mostar where, as in Mitrovica, a bridge divided two rival ethnic communities, in that case Bosnians and Croats.
As a result of Monday’s riots, a Ukrainian serving in the UN police force died yesterday of shrapnel wounds. NATO troops called in to support the beleaguered UN police oversaw their withdrawal from the northern part of Mitrovica, which is now entirely in Serb hands and reportedly patrolled by Serb policemen who have refused to accept orders from the Kosovar authorities.
The UN says that its departure from the Serb part of the town is only temporary but no one is giving any idea of when the internationally mandated peacekeepers will return. It can be expected that in the meantime, the rebellious Serbs will quickly turn their canton into a fortress in the expectation that the UN will cry off the blood-letting that would be caused by any attempt to return. Thus, part of Kosovo will become a no-go area for the authorities and a de facto independent Serbian enclave, that will be supported, overtly or covertly from across the border in Serbia.
Such a Serb territory might also serve as a base from which paramilitaries will sally forth to attack targets elsewhere in Kosovo, as part of a rising tide of rebellion. This in itself would be extremely dangerous and might well foster revenge attacks from Kosovar paramilitaries, thus starting a new Balkan range war. Yet, unless the international community is prepared to act in Mitrovica immediately to reassert its control and the control of the government in Pristina, whose interests it is there to protect, it seems certain that the town’s Serbs and the wider ethnic Serb Kosovar community will be emboldened by a significant victory.
The UN police administration, its NATO protectors and the EU peacekeepers who will shortly be replacing them are between a rock and a hard place. There is no use wondering why the UN police risked the showdown by re-taking a court house in the town seized by Serb militants last week.
If it had not been this incident, it would have been something else that catalyzed Serbian violence. The only useful consequence of Monday’s rioting was that it was condemned, albeit mildly, by the Serbian government in Belgrade, which also pointed out that 70 demonstrators had also been injured along some 63 UN police and NATO peacekeepers.
There is an argument that the Kosovar government should go gently here and not protest too vehemently the rebellion on its territory. That will very probably be the advice that Brussels is already giving privately as it prepares to take over responsibility for the new country’s peace and security. The EU’s main weapon is not force but prosperity. This said, its economic offer will need to be rapid, convincing and generous if it is to nip this new violence in the bud.
