Tag: Balkans
Heading for Pristina
I am heading in June to Kosovo for the first time since 2003, when my colleagues and I at the United States Institute of Peace offered an OSCE-sponsored training workshop to the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government (PISG). A number of ministers participated, including the then prime minister, Bajram Rexhepi (now Minister of Interior). That’s leadership! The idea was to prepare the PISG for negotiations with Belgrade that, as history would have it, only began earlier this year. We delivered similar training to the Serbian Foreign Ministry.
The training was at the police academy in Vushtrri/Vucitrn. One morning we watched the cadets line up in the yard. The commandant welcomed them (remember this was four years after the war, and 90% of the cadets as well as the commandant were Albanian-speaking) in Serbian: “dobro utro.” That too is leadership, rewarded by a great deal of respect from the Kosovo population for their post-war police force.
I have seen enough of the Kosovo government people in visits to Washington to know that they have made enormous strides since 2003. Eight years ago I would not have said that PISG was a real state–it was still more like an agglomeration of political trends with only a glimmer of consciousness of the need for an effective bureaucracy, an independent judicial system and civil society. I trust I’ll find things much improved on this visit.
But I’m also going to be asking a lot of questions. Here is a preliminary set that I’ll no doubt expand in the next couple of weeks before my arrival. I’ll welcome suggestions from readers of other issues I should be exploring.
- Has the state established itself in a way that provides support to, and continuity between, different governments? Is there a civil service worthy of the name? Have the politicians learned to respect the bureaucrats and use them effectively?
- Is the state delivering services that are needed and appreciated?
- How well is Parliament playing its legislative and oversight roles?
- Why does Kosovo’s economy seem stuck? Why has foreign investment lagged? Why are jobs in the formal economy so hard to come by?
- Is the judicial system capable of handling high-profile cases involving Albanian bigwigs as well as inter-ethnic crime? How much longer will EULEX be needed?
- How can more be done to reduce corruption and organized crime?
- How are relations between Albanians and non-Albanians, including but not limited to Serbs ? How do non-Albanians, both those who live north of the Ibar and those who live in the south, regard the Pristina government?
- How has Kosovo’s once strong civil society fared since independence? Is the press free? Is it responsible? How can civil society be strengthened?
- What role do Greater Albanian aspirations and their proponents play in Kosovo today?
A few days visit is of course not sufficient to answer all these questions in detail, but I am hoping that putting them out for public scrutiny will allow my many friends in Kosovo and elsewhere to offer answers, both in person and in cyberspace (answers as comments on this blog are welcome, as are answers addressed to daniel@peacefare.net).
I am looking forward to seeing Pristina again. My only real regret about this trip is that I won’t make it to Belgrade, though I am also going to Sarajevo. Some questions about Bosnia and Herzegovina in an upcoming post.
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In weakness strength
On reflection a day after the fact, I’d like to reiterate what Kurt Bassuener has already eloquently asserted: the arrest of Ratko Mladic was certainly a triumph for the Dutch. Both stubborn and racked by guilt, as Jerry Gallucci suggests, they deserve credit for sticking with their insistence on Mladic’s arrest.
But here is the deeper point: the EU’s famous weakness–its need for unanimity–becomes a strength when it comes to imposing conditionality. For Serbia to achieve candidacy status for membership, all 27 member states have to agree. The Netherlands’ hard line on arrest of Mladic as a precondition for its agreement to candidacy is what made the arrest happen.
I have little doubt that several years down the pike, when Belgrade has fulfilled all the technical requirements for EU membership, that the Dutch and others will insist that it also needs to resolve the issue of Kosovo (good neighborly relations being in any event an EU requirement). Many in Belgrade already know this; the sooner the EU makes it explicit, the quicker Belgrade will make the necessary moves.
Of course this capacity of member states to block EU decisions can also work against what I might consider a good idea. Witness EU relations with Kosovo, which are stymied by the five EU members that don’t recognize the government in Pristina as sovereign and independent, even though most of them seem to acknowledge its legitimacy and authority. But look what happened when those five joined the other 22 in insisting that Belgrade and Pristina begin a dialogue: it happened quickly and seems to be proceeding well.
The EU’s leverage is a powerful force, one that will need to be brought to bear both in Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina if the remaining Balkans problems are to be resolved peacefully. The disturbing thing is that the EU seems so infrequently capable of wielding power effectively.
Lady Catherine Ashton’s sudden visit to Banja Luka earlier this month to prevent a referendum in Bosnia on the authority of the state justice system got President Milorad Dodik to postpone his plans, but it also strengthened his position as an EU “interlocutor” and gave him the opportunity to sideline the Sarajevo government and institutions. I am not convinced the EU came out ahead with this maneuver, which undermined the international community’s High Representative and annoyed Washington. It is still not yet clear to me whether Dodik will cancel the referendum altogether, or hold it over the heads of his antagonists. But I can guess what he would prefer to do.
I can only hope that the EU will use its leverage well. Projecting power is not its strong suit, but its need for unanimity on important issues provides a strange kind of strength when it comes to imposing its will on those who aspire to membership.
With respect to Serbia, Kurt draws the right conculsions:
Serbia has proven it responds to rational incentives – and there is no reason to believe that this is not a reality across the party spectrum. So instead of bending over backwards to ensure Tadic and the Democratic Party’s re-election, the EU and wider West should instead insist that standards be met whoever is in power, and cut Serbia no more slack.
The same should go for other Balkans leaders.
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At last!
Ratko Mladic has been arrested, in Serbia, details still unknown. President Tadic is quoted by the New York Times:
Extradition is happening. This is the end of the search for Mladic. It’s not the end of the search for all those who helped Mladic and others to hide and whether people from the government were involved…this is happening on the day Catherine Ashton is coming to Serbia.
Yes, the moment is a good one, not only for the occasion of Ashton’s visit but also just as Chief Prosecutor Brammertz was to release his report on Serbia’s cooperation with the Hague Tribunal. Convenient, but welcome nevertheless. So too Tadic’s reference to searching for those who helped Mladic all these years, and his reference on NPR this morning to the importance of this arrest for regional reconciliation.
But the main thing this morning is just this: at last Ratko Mladic is headed for justice.
PS: Compliments to Nenad Pejic of RFE/RL for his well done “flash analysis.”
PPS: Too bad President Tadic can’t even mention “Kosovo” without adding something incomprehensible about “our autonomy Kosovo.” And too bad The Guardian couldn’t find a Bosnian Muslim who thought Mladic has a right to be defended:
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May 25 Yugo-nostalgia, not
A former Yugoslav friend writes:
May 25th was celebrated as Tito’s birthday, and was known as Youth Day. They used to take us out of school to wave flags at the runners carrying “best birthday wishes from students, peasants and workers of Yugoslavia” hidden in a baton. Students, peasants and workers started running a relay around the country around May Day, passing the baton hand to hand every couple of hundred meters — it was a huge honor to be a carrier. Factories would stop for a shift and schools would close while workers and students lined the streets to greet the passing baton. Every evening at 7:30, the daily news, which was mandatory viewing for all, would first show that day’s leg of the relay and all the happy workers and peasants celebrating.
Weeks of celebrations culminated on May 25th, at the Stadium of the Yugoslav People’s Army in Belgrade, where the baton would be handed to Tito, by a breathless Stakhanovite or his student equivalent. This one is Tito’s last birthday, in 1979. The lyrics of the song are: “Tito, Tito is our Sun. Tito, Tito is our heart. There is no end to our joy and one love binds us all. Tito-Party-Youth-Action.” Action refers to “work action” – unpaid physical labour that we performed for the motherland, digging ditches, picking corn, laying railroad tracks.
The determined young Albanian woman recites our collective wish: “that you continue to navigate the ship of our state for many more years with a steady hand and a clear eye.” The commentator gushes about the air being “charged with love, respect and gratitude.” The birthday boy manages to string a few semi-coherent short sentences.
I was in the audience. I was over the moon. Within a year, Tito dies. Life changes.
This helps explain how those same people lined up behind new leaders a decade later, and killed and died on command.
All the more glory to those who refused, and who still refuse today, to be led in the wrong directions.
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Own goal
Serbian President Boris Tadic is apparently prepared to skip a summit of Central and Southeastern European leaders in Warsaw Friday and Saturday because Kosovo’s president will be present and treated as an equal.
I of course understand Tadic’s domestic political problem. He doesn’t want to be seen acknowledging Kosovo’s sovereignty, which Belgrade continues to contest. He and Foreign Minister Jeremic seem almost in a competition to see who can move more aggressively in the nationalist direction. The Foreign Minister has come out strongly for withdrawal of the international community High Representative from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Tadic was pleased the other day to tell Serb school children from Kosovo that Serbia is their country.
This despite the fact that Serbia’s delegation to the EU-hosted talks has met with the Kosovo delegation at a symmetrical table, where rumor has it they will soon be able to announce modest progress on issues like mutual recognition of documents and customs stamps. Tadic needs that, in order for Serbia to gain EU candidacy status for Serbia before calling elections. Kosovo in the meanwhile will try to gain entry into the visa waiver program, whose technical requirements it claims to have fulfilled.
So there appears to be at least some limited progress on practical issues, but Serbia is unwilling to take the next step. Atifete Jahjaga is the constitutionally elected president of Kosovo. Whatever Kosovo’s status, she is clearly its legitimate leader. Tadic needs to learn to make this distinction: between recognizing Kosovo as sovereign and independent, and accepting its leader as its legitimate representative. He should take the advice of Sonja Licht, president of the Foreign Policy Council at the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
I personally believe that the time has come that the policy of the Government is reconsidered in order that more creative solution is found. That solution has to respect the fact that the circumstances have changed in the meantime. We have started dialog with Kosovo and accepted it as a side in negotiations. More courageous and determined steps are necessary.
Tadic’s refusal to go to Warsaw is an own goal. The Americans will certainly want to think more than twice before inviting Tadic to Washington if he is unwilling to join President Obama for this group summit in Warsaw.
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More in sadness than anger
I suppose I should resist the temptation to respond to International Crisis Group’s latest wrong-headedness. I’ve got friends at ICG and a great deal of respect for the fine work they have done in the past, and continue to do in many parts of the world. But that would disappoint my Balkan readers. So here goes.
ICG’s account of what was agreed between Republika Srpska President Dodik and EU High Representative Ashton is not the same as what Dodik says was agreed. ICG says Dodik agreed to cancel the referendum. What he says he agreed is the following:
…we think that the referendum is not necessary for the time being. The conclusions present a political position of the National Assembly of Republika Srpska [RSNA], but they will be reconsidered in the light of this agreement on structural dialogue.
This sounds more like a postponement than a cancellation to me, and he confirmed that in public on May 17. The promised reconsideration of the RSNA conclusions falls far short of what Lady Ashton sought, which was their withdrawal. The RSNA is proceeding very slowly even on reconsideration.
ICG goes on to say that “The deal is hard to fit into Bosnia’s political narrative.” That is true only if you have not understood Bosnia’s political narrative, which is one in which RS is aiming to enhance its legitimacy and prestige while demonstrating the ineffectiveness and irrelevance of the state institutions in Sarajevo. This deal fits perfectly into that narrative, as it enabled Dodik as RS president to begin dealing directly with the EU on issues of importance to the state, including not only the referendum but also the future “structured dialogue” on the state’s judicial institutions. To add insult to injury from the perspective of the state institutions, that dialogue will be conducted by the EU’s enlargement commissioner beginning in Banja Luka. I don’t know whether state officials will be invited (nor am I sure it would be wise for them to attend if they are).
ICG then declares the EU and Bosnia the winners. I’ll defer to their better judgment on the EU, though to me it looks as if Ashton got a good deal less than half a loaf. I don’t see any win for Bosnia and Herzegovina here. No legally valid referendum was going to happen: the international community High Representative Valentin Inzko was going to invalidate the law under which it would have been called. Nor is the referendum question one that would stand up to judicial scrutiny anywhere but North Korea (and, of course, RS).
People are asking me how it is that ICG has gone so far off the tracks in Bosnia. I don’t know the answer to that question. But it seems to me the fundamental error of judgment they are making has to do with EU capability. ICG is happy with the Ashton/Dodik deal because it emarginated the High Representative, whom they view as an obstacle to Bosnia’s democratic development and progress toward EU membership. I am inclined to agree that it is time for the EU to take over in Bosnia, but I’d like to see better performance at handling the issues than what happened on this occasion.
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