Why Kosovo's independence bid is unique

[Harold F. Schiffman]

from the February 15, 2008 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0215/p07s01-woeu.html

Why Kosovo's independence bid is unique

Effort may lack UN legality, but is politically practical, say many
diplomats, despite Serb anger.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

PRISTINA, KOSOVO

As Kosovo prepares to be Europe's newest state on Sunday  supported by the
United States and most of Europe  it is doing so without United Nations
Security Council approval, the guarantor of legality among nations. Russia
calls Kosovo independence illegal, a "Pandora's Box," in the words of
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Serbia, a UN member, says Kosovo
succession violates its ancient, sovereign territory. Cyprus and Romania
cite a dangerous precedent in allowing minority groups to split
willy-nilly.

Even some diplomats supporting Kosovo say that on legal grounds alone, the
arguments  Serbian sovereignty vs. ethnic Albanian self-determination  are
inconclusive. They say Kosovo is a political not a legal problem  one
clouded by nine years of world attention on terrorism, Iraq, Guantnamo,
and an erosion of America's high ground after the Berlin Wall fell.

"I worry that we've forgotten how we got here [to Kosovo independence],"
says William Walker, head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe mission in 1999 to verify that Serbia was not using excessive
force in Kosovo. "I visited the site of a mass execution in Racak the day
after it happened, before the Serbs could clean up the story. Such events
were taking place all over Kosovo, as they did in Croatia and Bosnia. This
led to NATO intervention."

Indeed, supporters say the Kosovo case is unique: The dissolution of
Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs in the Balkans conducted by
Serbian state actors, the second-class status of the majority Albanians
and their refusal to ever accept Belgrade as a capital  creates an
exceptional confluence of historical, moral, and practical claims.

A central legal issue bears on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and Kosovo's
former status in it. Kosovo was not a republic. But it had a special
status. It not only had veto rights and a president in Yugoslavia's
rotating presidency, it had representation in all aspects of federal
Yugoslavia  parliament, courts, civil administration. Analysts say Kosovo
benefited from the balancing of its status among the other five republics
of Yugoslavia  all of which now exist as separate states. Serbia can't
offer Kosovo what Yugoslavia offered it, they say.

"You cannot return Kosovo to anything like the status it enjoyed under
Yugoslavia," says Albert Rohan, former Austrian foreign secretary who
worked with Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari on a UN plan for Kosovo. "It
is not that the other republics like Slovenia separated, it is that
Yugoslavia dissolved."

Then there is the issue of minority rights. Under Serbia, Albanians were
treated as a minority, even though they are the third largest ethnic group
in the Balkans. Their language, rights, and status in Serbia was not an
equal partnership. Serbian intellectual Dobrica Cosic in the 1970s and
1980s went so far as to argue in a famous memorandum from the Serbian
Academy of Sciences that Albanians never really lived in Kosovo prior to
the modern period. Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic turned the
memorandum into a Greater Serbia policy of denigration and humiliation of
Albanians, essentially forcing them to create a parallel structure of
schools and government. (Oxford scholar Noel Malcolm argues that "the
Albanians are one of the oldest established populations in Europe.")

Even today, Serbian "Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica refuses to accept
the Kosovo Albanians either as full citizens of Serbia or as citizens of
an independent state," argues James Hooper of the Public International Law
and Policy Group in Washington.

For Skender Hyseni, spokesman of Pristina's "unity team" of negotiators,
the argument for independence is practical. "Mr. Milosevic carefully
planned ethnic cleansing of the Albanian people and used state
institutions, police, and paramilitary structure to implement this
policy," he says. One million people were driven out of Kosovo in the days
around NATO's bombing, he says. "It was a gambit by Serbia of a
nonconsensual breakup or collapse, to rid Kosovo of Albanians. To now say
we can't remember this is impractical as a political reality."

Mr. Kostunica yesterday called for a pre-annulment of any independence
deal by Serbia's parliament, and argued against an agreement to start
talks to become a member of Europe, saying "There would be no greater
humiliation than for Serbia itself, in any way, to sign or give its
indirect consent to the existence of a puppet state on its own territory."

Prior to the Ahtisaari plan that will give Serbs enhanced minority rights
in Kosovo, diplomats confronted the question of independence. It was
decided Kosovo could not be "half-independent," says one insider. "We
opted for independence for two reasons: One, you can't go back to 1989 as
if nothing happened. Two, you can't implement something less than
independence, that 95 percent of the people won't go along with."


http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0215/p07s01-woeu.htm