Kosovo: Status anxieties

Far from being the only realistic solution, independence for Kosovo would prolong instability and reward ethnic cleansing, say Jan Oberg and Aleksandar Mitic in Transitions Online.

The Kosovo drama is approaching its final stage. By this summer, we will know whether Kosovo has passed a test set by the international community, a test that it must pass before talks on its final status can begin. By then, the province’s highest authority, UN special representative Soren Jessen-Petersen, will have to decide whether the province has met international standards of minority rights and good governance. There is little doubt that he will pass a positive verdict. 

If so, status talks would then begin by September. The positions are clear: inflexible demands by the province’s ethnic-Albanian majority run up against Serbian claims on the province based on Belgrade’s nominal sovereignty there. But, despite their complexity, the talks will probably last not years but months. 

In these talks, it may well be pressure from the international community that produces the most tangible results. In recent weeks, as before, the effect of international pressure has been apparent. Kosovo’s former prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, went to The Hague to answer war crimes charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), while Serbia has encouraged its own indictees to surrender to the court, paving the way for a positive verdict by the European Union on a feasibility study that is a key precondition for eventual EU membership.

The UN may decide that Kosovo has met all the standards. But that would give little reason for complacency about Kosovo’s future; it would be naïve to assume that such achievements might not be reversed according to the demands of the moment. So what is needed is an honest attempt to remove the most intractable source of instability in today’s Europe. The time to think about the substance of any agreement is now. Unfortunately, though, the debate so far has been narrow; the danger is that the talks may be similarly narrow.

To read the full article, visit the Transitions Online website.