Patience is a virtue

I’m in Pristina, so friends and colleagues are assuming I know something about the talks Thursday between Serbian Prime Minister Dacic and Kosovo Prime Minister Thaci.  The truth is I know nothing I wouldn’t know in Washington DC, except that the few people I’ve talked with here are skeptical of any agreement on the northern bit of Kosovo not under Pristina’s control and concerned that the young Kosovo state may get snookered. I imagine that mirror-image concerns exist in Serbia.

Complicating the situation here are three more or less simultaneous bombs that went off Thursday evening targeted at parked government cars.  “Dissatisfied” claimed the bombings, which appear not intended to kill anyone but rather to warn the government not to give in on the north.

Vetëvendosje! (Self-determination), a Kosovo opposition political party that  opposes the dialogue, has accused Thaci of violating the constitution by offering “special” autonomy to the north.  That’s rich, since Vetëvendosje! itself has an anti-constitutional platform calling for a referendum on union with Albania (which is prohibited in the Kosovo constitution).  If Thaci were to give away the north, it would benefit Vetëvendosje! more than the government.

The simple fact is that we don’t have enough data on either what was agreed in Brussels or who was behind the bombings to even begin to speculate on the implications.  Patience is a virtue.  We should give both Dacic and Thaci the benefit of the doubt.  They are risking their political careers trying to resolve one of the last remaining war and peace problems in the Balkans, with a lot of help and pressure from their European and American colleagues.  Dacic is getting flak in Serbia for suggesting that Kosovo might get UN membership if a satisfactory agreement can be reached on the north.  Thaci is getting flak in Pristina for supposedly agreeing that customs revenue collected in the north will go at least temporarily to development projects in the north, in a scheme jointly administered by the Kosovo government, a Serb from the north and an EU representative.  Neither of these alleged offenses sounds capital to me, but I’m suspending judgment until we know more.

Let’s wait and see what has really been agreed and how it will be implemented.  In the meanwhile, is it too much to ask that all political parties in Kosovo renounce violence and wait for the Prime Ministers to report to their respecctive parliaments on what happened in Brussels?