Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic has written a perfect little piece on Serbs and Albanians. If you have trouble understanding why everyone is being so unreasonable about this Kosovo thing, here’s a place to start.
Some excerpts and commentary below the fold. Continue reading
So Serbia has elected a new Speaker of the Skupshtina, or Parliament. That’s the first step towards forming a new government. This after more than 100 days of post-election wrangling.
Should be good news, right? Except that they elected the leader of the Serbian Radical Party — the obnoxious populist-nationalist guys.
“Obnoxious” doesn’t really do it. The leader of the Radical Party is currently on trial in the Hague for war crimes. The acting leader has been accused of war crimes… plausibly accused, IMO, though there’s not enough evidence to bring it to trial. And the party in general is crawling with former paramilitaries, sleazy businessmen who got rich under Milosevic, and mouth-breathing beat-the-Gypsies racists. There’s not a lot to like. In the last election they played down the nationalist aspect and played up the economic populism — Jobs for everyone! We’ll crack down on corruption! Banks are charging too much interest — we’ll renationalize them!
The Radicals got about 28% of the vote, which means they took about 1/3 of the seats in Parliament. But they’re pariahs, so everyone figured the other parties would find a way to bury their differences and form a government.
Maybe not. Continue reading
Saw this in the news the other day:
Kosovo official escapes death
13 April 2007 | 09:31 | Source: Reuters
PRIÅ TINA — Head of Kosovo Telecommunications Agency (KTA) Anton Berisha was the target of a mortar attack on Thursday, a police source said.“The car was hit by a mortar bomb. A Kosovo police officer is injured. It happened in the village of Loznica 35 km west of PriÅ¡tina,” the source told Reuters…
Anton Berisha has been under close protection since February 28 when gunmen opened fire on his car on the main road from Priština to the western town of Peć.
Berisha was recently involved in the awarding of a second mobile phone license for Kosovo, the breakaway southern province whose ethnic Albanian majority hopes to win independence from Serbia later this year.
I found this interesting, because I know Anton Berisha. Continue reading
By pure coincidence, next month brings not one but two major turning points for Serbia.
First, there’s the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovo. As we all know, the plan would give Kosovo de facto independence. On one hand, that’s just recognizing reality on the ground; 90% of Kosovo’s population wants nothing to do with Serbia, and they’ve been running their own house for almost a decade now. On the other hand, it would involve UN approval of the involuntary dismemberment of an unwilling member state. That’s never happened before, and it would be a big step into the unknown.
The plan goes before the UN Security Council next week, and it’s really not clear what will happen. Either Russia or China might veto it — Russia because of its traditional support of Serbia, China because of concerns about Taiwan. On the other hand, neither one may want to be responsible for vetoing a plan that has broad support in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
Meanwhile, Serbia’s quarrelsome parties are still trying to form a government. They’ve been at it since the elections on January 21, so as of today they’ve gone 67 days without success. That would be amusing, except that if a government isn’t formed within 90 days, Serbia’s Constitution requires new elections. That would throw Serbia into a major political crisis.
Here’s the thing: I could see either of these going either way. The UNSC might approve the Ahtisaari plan, or reject it; Serbia’s parties might reach agreement, or not.
So how about a betting pool? Continue reading
Brief recap: about six months ago, the EU suspended candidacy negotiations with Serbia because Belgrade was refusing to cooperate with the Hague Tribunal.
In particular, the Serbian government had stopped even pretending to look for accused war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. As chief Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte put it, “I’m telling those who still wish to receive me – and fewer and fewer prime ministers and foreign ministers now find the time or interest to do so – that since last October, Belgrade has not been cooperating with the Tribunal at all. Not only has it failed to provide full cooperation – there has been no cooperation whatsoever.”
So the EU shut down candidacy negotiations. Kudos all around, right? Cooperation with the Hague was always a clear prerequisite for negotiations. The EU had made that clear, and the Serbs had agreed. No cooperation, no candidacy.
Then some EU members started getting cold feet.
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78 days until Eurovision.
This is the season for choosing national entrants. The deadline is March 13; every candidate will have picked an entrant by March 10. Only a few countries have already made their choice. So, over the next three weeks, millions of people in over 30 countries will be choosing their national representatives.
It’s awe-inspiring, really.
First thoughts on this year’s contest below the fold.
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Because we just can’t get enough.
Imagine the US and Europe went to Putin tomorrow and said, “Vladimir, this Kosovo thing has gone on long enough. We want to get it off the table.
“So, we’ll agree to letting you annex Transnistria and those dangly bits down in Georgia. Abkhazia and, what, South Ossetia, right? All yours — they can join Russia tomorrow. All by free and fair referendum of course, cough cough.
” In return, we want you to sign off on Kosovar independence. No veto, no nothing. And full independence, too — ambassadors, an army, the works.
“Deal?”
Putin: “Da.”
There is a possible concern with China too, but let’s handwave that. [handwave] China very rarely casts a veto anyway anyway — only five times in nearly 40 years — and could probably be bought off with a resolution condemning the Dalai Lama or some such. So say China abstains.
A strong resolution on Kosovar independence flies through both the Security Council and the General Assembly. A Kosovar ambassador would take his seat in the UN a few weeks later.
This would be:
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In comments to the post on Kosovo, Alex Harrowell asked the following reasonable question:
“How can you have something that’s both a “mineral resource grab” and an “economic black hole”?”
The short answer: you can, because it’s Kosovo.
Here’s why. There has been no serious investment in those mines since the Yugoslav economy hit the skids in 1986.
A modern coal mine is not a hole in the ground full of guys with picks. It’s a major industrial installation. You have huge drills, borers, grinders, driers, fans, pumps, you name it. A big coal mine uses as much power as a good-sized town. A big modern coal mine uses cutting-edge, state-of-the-art materials technology and software. It’s not guys digging coal any more. It’s guys operating and maintaining big, complicated machines that dig coal. In the United States, the majority of coal miners have four-year college degrees, and need them.
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This is the title of a post from Seb Bytyci on his South East Europe Online blog. I reproduce the entire post below the fold.
So the UN seems set to adopt a plan which would allow Kosovo to make a giant step on the road to independence. This is hardly surprising, and frankly I see no other realistic way forward. But obviously not everyone is happy. And some of those who seem not to be happy have considerable ability to make mischief, and not the least among these, the Putin regime in Moscow.
Doug Muir and I have been blogging this week about the Serbian elections (here and here) and perhaps the biggest issue which arises from those elections is just which way Kostunica will fall. A lot depends on this decision, and this UN proposal, coming at precisely this time, may well serve to give him a sharp push in the wrong direction. Call it the law of the inopportune moment. Offering a share of power to the Radicals would constitute a major problem for Serbia, and in the medium term for the whole EU. But rising nationalist feelings, especially when they come on the back of desperation, are often hard to contain.
I would say that the biggest strategic danger is that the Serbs allow themselves to become a proxy for the ambitions, and mischief-making abilities, of Russian nationalism in the region.
This week a lot of people are gathered in Davos, and on the agenda somewhere is the topic of demography. Amongst those participating is demographer Nicholas Eberstadt who has repeatedly drawn our attention to the real and present danger constituted by a Russia which, on the back of low birth rates and reduced life expectancy, faces imminent demographic meltdown.
Only this week the Eastern Europe correspondent at The Economist Edward Lucas had this to say (in the Economist latest Europe.View column.
‘Forget, for a moment, the headline stories from central and eastern Europe―the pipeline politics, the corruption scandals, the treasonous tycoons. The big story in the ex-communist world is people. Too few are being born. Too many are dying. And tens of millions have changed country.’
This is the new reality of Eastern Europe, and it is one we would do well not to lose from sight, for if we do we may find ourselves getting bogged down in the detail of things whilst missing the big picture which is unfolding before our very eyes. (Claus Vistesen has an in-depth review of the world bank report to which Edward Lucas refers here).
Seb is reasonably optimistic, and understandably so given all that the Kosovars have gone through, but we should never forget the darker side of things, which lies out there in wait of us, if it can catch us unawares. In the context of what is happening right now in Russia and Serbia I would say that vigilance was the watchword.
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So the Kosovar Albanians are counting the days until the January 21 elections in Serbia.
Not because they care who wins. If they have a preference, they’d probably want the loathsome nationalist Radical party to win, since that would immediately turn Serbia into an international pariah (again) and make Kosovar independence that much easier. But they figure independence is coming anyway, so they’re not much concerned.
But the UN envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, has announced that he will make his recommendations for Kosovo’s status at the end of January… after the elections. This is, everyone assumes, because he’ll recommend independence. If he were going to recommend that Kosovo stay part of Serbia, he’d do it now. Recommending independence (it’s believed) would be a shattering blow to the current, “moderate” government of Serbia, and might lead to a Radical victory. So, best to wait.
Well… maybe.
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