THE fate of Kosovo may possibly be decided in the coming days. A UN Security Council team moves this week from Brussels — where it is consulting EU and NATO officials — to Belgrade and then to the Kosovar capital, Pristina. Under 1999 Security Council Resolution 1244, the UN has the power to decide the future of this Serbian province. Unfortunately, however, no stroke of the pen is going to bring about a lasting solution for this region of 1.8 million people, who are among Europe’s most economically deprived.
Virtually all Kosovars wish to be independent. This desire is not simply based on ethnic Albanian pride. It is also a product of centuries of repression by Serbian rulers. In 1913 the province was returned to Serb control. It had been lost 524 years before when the Serbs were routed by the Ottoman armies at the Battle of Kosovo. The ethnic Albanian inhabitants, the majority of them Muslim, served as a constant reminder of the Serbian humiliation. In the 1960s, in the then Yugoslavia, Serbs mounted a concerted campaign to suppress the region’s Albanian identity. Mosques were destroyed, land was seized and given to Serb immigrants and attempts were made to ban the teaching and speaking of Albanian.
Though Belgrade granted Kosovo autonomy in 1989, it clamped down when the majority of the population demanded full independence. The brutality of that action led to NATO’s intervention, first with airstrikes and after the Serb military had been forced to retreat, with KFOR peacekeepers. The Serbs remain bitterly opposed to Kosovo’s independence, on emotional and nationalistic rather than economic grounds. While they have little chance of stopping the move, it is clear that it would be one more humiliation for which nationalist hot heads would seek revenge.
The UN team meanwhile will be asking themselves if there is sufficient economic rationale for the creation of an extremely poor new Balkan statelet. Some Kosovars believe union with neighboring Albania is the only realistic option. But Albania has its own troubles. Per capita in Albania is hardly more than in Kosovo, unemployment is very high and every month thousands flee the country trying to gain entry, usually illegally into the EU.
It is clear that NATO cannot continue indefinitely patrolling Kosovo, protecting the remaining 100,000 Serbs from attack by ethnic Albanians and also stop any idea in Belgrade that the province might be re-occupied. A deal has to be made and the Serbs hold the key. But how will the UN team persuade them to use it? On the face of things, there seems little room for compromise by either Serbs or Kosovars. Belgrade would probably prefer the UN/NATO protectorate to remain, perhaps in the hope that impatient Kosovar nationalists will eventually begin attacking it. That would be sweet revenge for NATO’s humiliation. Kosovars, however, want independence from NATO peacekeepers as well as from the Serbs. Washington shares this aspiration and will very soon move a resolution in the United Nations on independence for Kosovo based on multiethnicity with full respect for human rights, including the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes in safety.
