Volume 9 Numbers 1/2

Winter/Spring 2000

 

Kosovo: Dillemas of the Protectorate
Jacques Rupnik

A year ago, NATO's objectives in intervening in Kosovo were clear: to halt the escalation of repression, the systematic violation of human rights, and the ethnic cleansing engineered by the regime in Belgrade. In Tony Blair's words, the aims were "to get Milosevic out, NATO in, and the refugees back." Today, after having made Kosovo into a protec-torate, the international community seems to have no clear idea of its goals in the province, much less what means it is prepared to use in order to achieve them. If the immediate goals were merely to allow the return of Albanian refugees (approximately 900,000), to avoid the resumption of conflict with Serbia, and to prevent the destabilization of neighboring countries, then the outcome has been mostly positive. Albanian refugees returned home in record-breaking time and, thanks to the combined efforts of international-aid agencies and the resourcefulness of the local inhabi-tants, the reconstruction of destroyed homes has been infinitely more rapid than it was in Bosnia. In addition, after a decade of apartheid in Kosovo, the energy of liberation has not yet clashed openly with the constraints of the international protectorate. If, however, the goals were more long-term, if the inter-national community hoped to establish a climate of internal security, the rule of law, and respect for minorities, then the operation remains a partial failure, even in the eyes of the international authorities- KFOR, the NATO-led peacekeeping force, and UNMIK, the UN administration-which run the region. The institutional, judicial, and administrative void has been filled by the logic of revenge and an economy run by mafias.

Kosovo also has three epicenters of conflict that could compromise the fragile peace and the slow process of institution building. First, armed skirmishes are taking place on the border between Serbia and Kosovo. Since the beginning of the year, three ethnic Albanian villages inside Serbia (Presevo, Bujanovac, and Medvedje) have witnessed violent confrontations between the Serbian police and ex-Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) forces, which want this border region integrated into Kosovo. Second, tensions between Albanian and Serbian populations in Mitrovica (a divided town much like Mostar or Brcko in Bosnia and Herzegovina) have escalated. Some 70,000 Albanians live in the southern part of the town, and 30,000 Serbs live in the northern part. These Serbs constitute the only enclave inside the protectorate with direct access to Serbia and, therefore, are the most significant lever Belgrade still has in postinter-vention Kosovo. Finally, neighboring Montenegro, under President Milo Djukanovic, oscillates between flirtations with secession (witness the adoption of the deutsche mark as a parallel currency and calls for a referendum on a confederal status) and the threat of a military coup staged by Milosevic's army. The stakes are high: if Montenegro leaves the federation, Yugoslavia will be dissolved. The implications for Kosovo would be important, though not necessarily violent. The formidable international military pres-ence would undoubtedly prevent Kosovo's complete destabilization, even in the event of a civil war in Montenegro, or Serbia proper.

But the international community's objectives remain ambiguous, and these ambiguities feed misun-derstandings and tensions between Kosovars and the international community. Three differences of interpre-tation deserve mention. The first concerns the conflict's nature and its outcome. Seen from the West, the "war" refers to NATO's intervention, between March and June of last year. For Kosovar leaders, those four months were merely the culmination of a ten-year liberation struggle. For the West, the intervention ended in June 1999, with Milosevic's signature in Belgrade and a UN resolution. For the Kosovars, the state of war has yet to end. The second source of misunderstanding concerns multiethnicity in the postwar context. For the Western democracies, NATO military interven-tion was justified by the need to halt massive human-rights violations and ethnic cleansing. Yet, since last summer, the Serb population and other minorities, especially gypsies ("the friends of my enemies are my enemies"), have been subjected to what some call a reverse ethnic cleansing. Half of the Serbian population has left Kosovo. In Pristina, only 400 Serbs remain of a preintervention population of 40,000. No institution-not even the universities or hospitals-have avoided this ethnic outflow. Of course, the intolerance of 90 percent of the population toward the remaining 10 percent may seem less "unjust" than the reverse, which was the state of affairs since Milosevic imposed apartheid in Kosovo in 1989. But Kosovo and its international administration are being judged today by their treatment of minorities. This poses a twofold problem. First, international intervention was conducted in the name of ethical or political principles that are not necessarily shared by the beneficiaries of that intervention. Second-and no less important-comes the question of just how far the international community is ready to go to implement its values and principles. Currently, a concept of "armed multiethnicity" is being put into effect. For example, a checkpoint is set up at the entrance and exit of every minority village, and minority inhabi-tants cannot move about without being accompanied by KFOR personnel. Or, as in Mitrovica, Albanian families are being moved back into housing projects (from which they were driven) in the north of the city and, inversely, Serb families are being moved into the city's southern section-all under permanent military protection. From afar, these may sound like policies tailored to undo ethnic cleansing. But is this really the road toward a multiethnic society? Up close, it looks more like establishing enclaves within enclaves, with all the accompanying risks if there is an escalation of violence.

Part of the problem is that multiethnicity in Kosovo has never had the same character as it did in Bosnia. Pristina is not-and never was-Sarajevo. The stakes in the war in Bosnia were presented (sometimes exaggeratedly) as a confrontation between ethnic nationalism and a multicultural society. This was why many intellectuals in the West and in Sarajevo considered that conflict's outcome as a defining moment for post-Cold War Europe. The conflict in Kosovo has never been seen in the same terms, mostly because Serbs and Albanians never intermarried, the region was 90 percent Albanian, and the Serbian presence in cities like Pristina was identified with a colonial system. Because of this, the protectorate needs to help create the peaceful law-based environment necessary for the coexistence of Albanians and Serbs. In the long run, economic reconstruction and an eventual transition to democ-racy may create the preconditions for authentic pluralism. Protectorates are about buying time. In the best scenario, this will require decades of an interna-tional military presence.

Unfortunately, the question of Kosovo's final status will not wait for decades. In fact, it is on the table today. UN Security Council Resolution 1244 of June 1999, which affirms that Kosovo remains part of Yugoslavia, is striking in its total disconnect from reality. After the way the rump Yugoslav state has treated them for the last decade, including expelling half of them by force, Kosovar Albanians will neither agree to be citizens of Yugoslavia nor ask for passports from a state that just last year was systematically destroying their identity papers. Kosovo today is a de facto freestanding entity. The Serb authorities have retreated, the deutsche mark has become the official currency, and the flags are Albanian. Whatever the rivalries between Hashim Thaci (the ex-KLA leader) and Ibrahim Rugova (leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo), all Albanian political forces in Kosovo share three main objectives: first, independence; second, independence; and finally-independence. The international protectorate preserves the fiction of a Kosovo within Yugoslavia and masks the reality of de facto secession. International representa-tives claim to be working out an institutional and democratic framework while postponing the question of final status. Municipal elections are planned for this October, and general elections will be held in one year. But what will the first democratically elected assembly in Kosovo do? It will immediately declare Kosovo's sovereignty and independence. And how will the international community respond? Will it tell the Kosovar Albanians they should work to reform Yugoslavia from within and hope that the so-called democratic opposition, perhaps led by Vuk Draskovic, comes to power in Belgrade? Yugoslavia itself has become a fiction. After ten years of wars of secession, even Montenegro, Serbia's only remaining partner, is in the process of jumping ship. As for Vuk Draskovic and his party, they have no credibility with the Kosovars, who remember that Draskovic was part of Milosevic's government barely a year ago. We know the arguments against independence: the fear of a chain reaction that would destabilize the region, beginning with neighboring Macedonia (one-third of whose population is Albanian) and potentially spreading to Bulgaria and Greece. Independence could also undermine what the Dayton Accords have accom-plished in Bosnia. (If Kosovo can separate from Yugoslavia why not Republika Srpska from Bosnia?) Both the geopolitical-stability argument and the legal-precedent argument cannot be easily dismissed. Yet fear of a domino effect has too often been used to justify a status quo that itself turned out to be the prime cause of instability. Albania today is a failed state with little appetite and even less capacity for "greater" statehood. Macedonia has, under Kiro Gligorov and now with its paradoxical coalition of nationalists, rather successfully pursued the politics of inclusion. Throughout the past decade, Bulgaria has been the most moderate country in the region, having learned lessons from its history, namely that all attempts at creating a Greater Bulgaria have ended in failure. Even Greece, which claims to have a copyright on the very word "Macedonia," under the leadership of Prime Minister Costas Simitis (and Papandreou Jr. as foreign minister), has abandoned Andreas Papandreou's aggressive nationalism. Nobody in the region wants an independent Kosovo. But no one would actually go to war over its secession from Serbia, a country that everyone sees as the main threat to regional stability.

No solution is possible in Kosovo, nor to the Albanian question, unless the region as a whole is taken into account. Yet it is hard to imagine Europe, which is reluctant to launch its stability pact for the Balkans, initiating a new Congress of Berlin and redrawing the map after the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution. But to maintain the status quo exposes Kosovo to several risks-the radicalization of Albanians, whose domestic politics will probably be dominated by competition among nationalist agendas; Milosevic's manipulation of border conflicts and the situation in Mitrovica; and, last but not least, the prospect of a protectorate that is doomed to fail or, at best, is condemned to presiding, as in Cyprus, over decades of stalemate.

Between the impossible task of maintaining Kosovo within Yugoslavia and the improbability of independence in the short term, a third interim option could be developed: an evolving protectorate, where international involvement would gradually be reduced to a minimum, while building up a maximum of self-government (thus allowing time for judicial, police, and administrative systems and a democratic legiti-macy to fill the void). This would lead to de facto independence under three conditions: international guarantees of the borders of all countries neighboring Kosovo; an Anschlussverbot, in other words, the prohi-bition of any project of a Greater Albania; and, lastly, respect for minority rights. Failure to respect these conditions would expose Kosovo to NATO's retreat, leaving the Kosovars alone against the Serb army (which has not been destroyed and could be tempted into a war of reconquest). Respect for these condi-tions, by contrast, would open prospects for regional and European integration. Integration through conflict is the model suggested by Veton Surroi, editor-in-chief of Koha Ditore (the leading newspaper in Kosovo), who humorously makes a virtue out of necessity: "A year ago, Kosovo entered NATO before Sweden. With the deutsche mark, it has joined the euro zone before Greece!" What is at stake in Kosovo is relevant for the entire Balkan region: how to move from a European protectorate to European integration.

Jacques Rupnik is the director of studies at the Center for International Research (C.E.R.I.) of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris. Previously, he was the director of the International Commission on the Balkans, which published Unfinished Peace with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1996.

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