The real deal
While I’m posting intereviews, I’ll put this one up too. I did it for Marin Dushev, who writes for the Bulgarian weekly Capital, last week. But far better than reading me is reading Kurt Basseuner and Bodo Weber’s Not Yet a Done Deal: Kosovo and the Prishtina-Belgrade Agreement. They are right about many things, but most important of all that “normalization of relations” means mutual recognition and exchange of ambassadors, which will have to occur before Serbia enters the European Union.
Q: Belgrade is considered to have been strongly interested in high turnout among Serbs in the North because of the expected beginning of negotiations with the EU in January. And it seems that the Serbian government was pretty active in persuading the local Serbs to vote. But still the turnout in the North seems to have been relatively low. How can we explain it? Did Belgrade use all its leverage in the North to convince or even pressure the people to vote or did they underestimate the strength of the opposition towards the agreement?
DPS: Belgrade seems to have made a serious effort. It largely failed, due at least in part to intimidation. That suggests the need for a deeper effort at countering organized crime, linked to politics, in northern Kosovo.
Q: When speaking about those who campaigned against participation in the vote who are we really talking about – average local people, organized radical nationalists, political parties or criminal groups? What is their motivation and how much leverage do they have locally in the North?
DPS: Maybe all of the above. They have a good deal of leverage without a minimum of law and order.
Q: It seems to me that the problems in the North weren’t that much noticed in Pristina as they were in Belgrade. Is the question of the North on the agenda among the Albanian majority?
DPS: Yes, Albanians are watching the issue of the north, but they won’t be as unhappy as Belgrade with the low turnout. They likely expected that and hope that it means election of more moderate Serbs in the north, assuming the election results are deemed valid.
Q: What can the consequences of the lack of success in the elections be? Can we expect to see new negotiations between Kosovo and Serbia?
DPS: We are going to see continuing negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo for the next two decades, as they develop all the many connections that any two neighbors in the Balkans require. These elections are only the first step. There will be many more.
Q: Can all this lead to a postponement of the negotiations between Serbia and EU?
DPS: That’s for Brussels to decide. I really don’t know when the accession negotiations will start. But it is pretty clear that the EU will be unhappy with the criminal acts that were aimed to spoil an election that was up until the attacks going pretty well, even if turnout was low.
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