In the light of what went on around yesterday’s post, I find the following report incredible:
“Kosovo’s U.N. governor will tell the U.N. Security Council next week the disputed province has made major progress on security and minority rights, in a report that could mark the beginning of the end of the province’s uncertain status.
In the report, seen by Reuters ahead of its presentation in New York on May 27, Kosovo’s U.N. governor Soren Jessen-Petersen, a Danish diplomat, details “significant progress” over the past three months on all eight “benchmarks.”
These are democracy standards set by the West as a condition for opening talks on whether the protectorate ultimately becomes independent, as its 90 percent Albanian majority demands, or remains nominally part of Serbia, as Belgrade insists.
Now either the Independent report about the absence of security of minority rights was false (in which case the article was even more absurd) or – more probably – the UN governor, not having read the Independent’s account of the state of things, is giving the clean bill of health in order to move things on, since the staus quo obviously cannot continue indefinitely.
Perhaps the key is to be found here: “The United States and
European Union want the talks to start in the autumn, to head off any risk of fresh violence from Albanians impatient to close the final chapter in the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia which led to war in Kosovo in 1998-99.”
This may be, and pragmatism does dictate that something should be done, but should we really be fooling ourselves that ‘major progress has been made’ if it in fact hasn’t.
