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04.02.08
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Going West
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By Boris Kamchev
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For Serbians, yesterday’s elections were a choice between East and West, between the past and the future – a choice for isolation or integration. The outcome of the elections indicated that the majority of the voters have chosen closer ties with the EU rather than returning to the nationalism, isolation and war characteristic of the 1990s. According to primary and unofficial results from the state electoral commission and independent vote monitors, pro-Western incumbent Boris Tadic won about 51 percent of the vote while Tomoslav Nikolic, the ultra-nationalist and pro-Russian challenger, received around 47 percent in a closely contested race.
Speaking with the Serbian newspaper Blic just before the election, Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic said: “on Feb. 3, the people are deciding not only the president of the republic, but also about whether Serbia will move towards the EU or return to the 1990s. I am convinced that they will choose the EU.” Tadic had also repeatedly emphasized that that for the time being, the future of Serbia is linked to the European Union and the North Atlantic alliance. For its part, Brussels supported the liberal stance by indicating that it will sign an interim political agreement with Serbia later this year and discuss a liberation of the visa regime.
The status of the Serbian province of Kosovo was one of the main topics of discussion in the election campaigns of both candidates. The province has been administered by the United Nations and NATO since 1999, when NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal crackdown against Kosovo separatists.
Both Nikolic and Tadic have strongly opposed independence for Kosovo. Serbian Prime Minister Voijslav Kostunica, a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Serbia, had also opposed Western efforts to resolve the status of the province, an opposition that became clearer after the presentation of the Ahtisaari plan in 2006 and the failure in December 2007 of a second round of talks between Pristina and Belgrade.
Nikolic, the “caretaker” of the Serbian Radical Party led by Vojislav Sheshelj, who is currently on trial in the Hague, surprisingly has softened his stance over the country’s prospects of immediate EU membership, but never missed an opportunity to mention “the strong connections with our ally Russia” and calling for the establishment of Russian military bases in Serbia should Kosovo declare independence. One of the reasons for Nikolic’s success in the first round of voting was his visit during the campaign to Kosovska Mitrovica, one of the oldest settlements in Kosovo and the home of the biggest Serbian community in Kosovo.
This tactic was tapped towards the end of the campaign by Tadic, the liberal candidate of the ruling Democratic Party, which played a key role in the ousting of Milosevic from power in 2000. On Thursday, he visited Cernica, the smallest Serbian enclave in the province.
“As a president I will do my best for the existence of Serbia and Serbs in Kosovo,” he said as he was welcomed in the local schoolyard by the remaining Serbs - 52 children and their parents and relatives in national dress, who offered him bread and salt and sang the national anthem together with him in front of the Serbian flag. Contrary to his recent statements that Serbia has the right to send troops to Kosovo for protecting the Serbian minority, in Cernica he admitted that he would not push the country into war, but that he would search for a peaceful solution through negotiations.
In Kosovo, the region’s ethnic Albanian leaders maintain that they will soon declare independence unilaterally, bolstered by the support of the United States and several EU member countries although Spain, Romania and Greece have said that they will reject such an action.
Serbian ally Russia has long opposed plans to give monitored independence to Kosovo. On his recent trip to Bulgaria, Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized that the unilateral independence of Kosovo is an illegal and immoral act and that the Russian viewpoint is unchanged, despite energy talks between Belgrade and Moscow. A week after Putin’s visit, the Serbian leadership visited Moscow and signed an agreement allowing Russian energy giant Gazprom a controlling stake in the Petroleum Industry of Serbia (NIS), the country’s largest energy asset. The agreement also granted Russia a multi-billion dollar series of energy investments in Serbia. For both countries, the agreement represents legitimate economic interests, but some Western analysts indicated that behind Russian support for Kosovo unambiguously stands the Kremlin’s willingness to take over the NIS.
Last week, senior Kosovo officials said that the province will declare independence from Serbia with Western backing on Feb. 17. The same source quoted unnamed Kosovo politicians as saying that they have mustered support from Washington and Brussels to declare independence after the Serbian run-off, no matter who wins.
Slovenia is likely to be the first country to recognize Kosovo, followed by the region’s immediate neighbors: Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. According to other Kosovo officials, EU foreign ministers are to approve the deployment of a police mission to Kosovo one day after the declaration of independence.
Meanwhile, the spokeswoman for the EU Special Representative for Kosovo said on Friday that it is not time yet to consider a date for determining Kosovo’s future status, adding that a number of dates had been touted for sending a future EU police and justice mission to the province, not to mention for the independence declaration, but that for the time being they were all in the realm of "speculation."
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica recently criticized EU plans to send a mission to Kosovo, and said if this happens, Serbia would annul any agreement with the EU. Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Peter Rodman, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, added their voices to those opposed to Kosovo’s independence, writing in a comment for the Washington Times that the Bush administration is making a mistake by recognizing Kosovo and that even if Kosovo declares itself an independent state, it will be a dysfunctional one and a ward of the international community for the indefinite future. “Corruption and organized crime are rampant. The economy, aside from international largesse and criminal activities, is nonviable. Law enforcement, integrity of the courts, protection of persons and property, and other prerequisites for statehood are practically nonexistent…the result would be a new ‘frozen conflict,’” the three said in the piece.
Many speculate that the declaration of independence would lead ethnic and religious minorities in other countries to follow the example of Kosovo. This includes sizeable Albanian communities in adjoining areas of southern Serbia, Montenegro, and especially the Republic of Macedonia, as well as the Serbian portion of Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to experts, current U.S. thinking with respect to the risks of Kosovo independence does a disservice to the gains Serbia has made in democratic development and economic revitalization since the fall of the Milosevic regime.
However, in their Washington Times comment, Bolton, Eagleburger and Rodman said that a confrontation with Russia over Kosovo is not necessarily in the cards since there are many urgent matters in which the United States and Europe must work with Russia, including Iran's nuclear intentions and North Korea's nuclear capability. It remains to be seen if this is just wishful thinking on the part of Western officials or if it is possible to move past the decade-old regional problem of Kosovo’s status. |
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