War fears in Kosovo as Moscow veto looms

Serbs and Albanians know Russia holds the key to their future as the
rift between them widens

Sunday May 20, 2007
The Observer

In Kosovo now there is only one question. What will the Russians do?
It is asked in smoky cafes, on the countless building sites, and in
government offices. It is asked by the majority Albanians, hoping for
independence for this divided former Serbian province, who fear the
Russians will torpedo the dream for which they fought the Kosovo war
of 1998-99.

And it is asked by the minority Serbs, who ruled Kosovo for so long
and regard it as their cultural and spiritual heartland, trapped in
their ever-shrinking enclaves in the south and in their last
stronghold in the north around the city of Mitrovica. Their fear is
that their Slav ally, which opposes the independence plan drawn up by
UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari, might at the last moment abandon them
through the pragmatism of international diplomacy.

It is an issue troubling the functionaries of the international
community who oversee Kosovo and who are anxious to see an endgame in
sight eight years after the war in Kosovo was ended by Nato’s bombing
of Serbia and Belgrade.

What makes Russian thinking so important is that the Ahtisaari plan
has now been tabled by the United States before the Security
Council. A point of no return has been reached. And, crucially, a
Russia that is resurgent in its sense of its international importance
and hostile to both the US and the European Union over issues as
diverse as criticism of its democracy and a planned missile shield for
eastern Europe, has not only rejected the resolution calling for UN
endorsement of the Ahtisaari plan, but has warned it might exercise
its veto if there is a vote.

Instead, Russia is now circulating its own counter-proposal for Kosovo
that would keep it within the ‘general sovereignty’ claimed by
Belgrade and put off the question of Kosovo’s final status, risking,
some say, renewed violence.

A crisis eight years in the making is unfolding with a giddy
inevitability. For while the fighting in Kosovo stopped in 1999, the
conflict itself, as diplomats here acknowledge, has never really
ended. All that has been held in check has been forced to the surface
again.

For Kosovo’s Albanians, fired up by the repeated promises of their
political leaders, there is the prospect that independence may be only
weeks away. It is a prospect that has forced Serbs to confront the
fact that it may now likely require some act of partition on their
part, a gesture that risks retaliation and expulsion of the most
vulnerable Serb pockets. Suddenly all is to play for.

‘During these past years we have made Kosovo. It is done,’ insists
Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Agim Ceku, former chief of staff of the
ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. ‘We have built functioning
institutions. We have built our vision for the future. The worst case
scenario now is a lack of clarity, an ambiguity.’

‘If you ask me what I think the risks of partition are at the moment,’
says Naim Rashiti of the International Crisis Group, which issued a
report last week warning of the risk of violence if the Ahtisaari plan
was abandoned, ‘I would say 50-50. And I am worried that, if there is
partition, it has the potential to be very dirty, precisely because no
one has any plan B.’

In an entity whose economy has survived for almost a decade on
international handouts, remittances from family members working
abroad, and a grey and black economy – the latter based in large part
on smuggling – independence has become a kind of spell that for its
Kosovo Albanian believers promises to transform a landscape of chronic
underemployment and pitiful wages.

It is a fact that is underlined during a visit to the memorial to the
Kosovo Liberation Army leader Adem Jashari – his bullet and
rocket-wrecked compound in the village of Prekaz, where he perished
with most of his family in the incident in the winter of 1998 that
triggered the descent to all-out war.

The preserved ruins are being visited by Nurlje Sadiku from the
ethnically divided city of Mitrovica. ‘I have never worked,’ says
Nurlje. ‘But we hope everything will be better when independence
comes. Then jobs will be easier. The World Bank will help out with
donations and everything will be good.’

It is an expectation that has been stoked in the years since the war
by Kosovo’s Albanian politicians, many of them former fighters. ‘There
is no alternative to independence,’ says Hashim Taqi, the president of
the biggest Albanian opposition party, the PDK.

‘Any attempt to delay the process is high risk. The people are ready
and want a decision. They are counting the days. We were ready
yesterday. Today is too late. Tomorrow,’ he adds, ‘is dangerous.’

Crossing the bridge into the Serb stronghold of northern Mitrovica
that borders Serbia is like entering another country. The cars that do
have licence plates have Serbian ones. The mobile phones are on the
Serbian network. The signs are written in Cyrillic. Even the beer is
different – Kneva, not the ubiquitous Peya brand drunk to the
south. It reflects a society in equally dire economic straits, but one
sustained not by Kosovo’s provisional institutions but by
Belgrade. And by a different dream.

For if Kosovo’s Albanian population is fixed on independence, the
Serbs here, and in the scattered enclaves in central and southern
Kosovo, are equally determined that they wish to remain a part of
Serbia.

‘The Serbs in the north around Mitrovica are not afraid,’ says Petra
Miletic, a journalist turned politician. ‘But the Serbs in the
enclaves are afraid.

I am afraid for them and, yes, I do know of Serbs in the south who are
selling up and leaving, as Albanians in their enclaves in the north
are also selling up.’

But even if population exchanges are continuing, he has no illusions
about the conditions for partition, if only in Kosovo’s north: ‘For us
to survive independently would require the support of Belgrade.’

It is one of Kosovo’s two as yet unanswered questions: whether the
Albanian population denied independence by a Russian veto would
declare independence on its own, and whether, faced with any kind of
independence for the Albanian majority, the Serb minority would
secede.

What it is driven by – as Miletic and many others on both sides
concede – is the utter failure of any reconciliation since the year’s
end.

Such failure was perceptible at the prom night for the graduating
high-school class of 2007 in Pristina – a city that once had a Serb
population of 40,000. As they turned out in their posh frocks and
dinner jackets, it was clear that, whereas their Albanian parents
could once speak Serbian, the new generation speaks it not at
all. Albanians and Serbs can no longer communicate.

In his deputy director’s office in the hospital in Mitrovica, the
reality is laid out by Milan Ivanovic of the hardline Serbian National
Council. ‘I don’t know if partition is possible,’ he says, although on
his wall hangs a large map showing his movement’s claim to 38 per cent
of Kosovo’s land for the Serbs.

‘What is true is that in the north we have a better possibility than
in the Serb enclaves in the south and centre. We have our own system
and no contact with the Albanian institutions. And we have freedom of
movement over the border into Serbia.

‘We believe that we are between two extremities: between Ahtisaari’s
plan and between that of [former President of Yugoslavia Slobodan]
Milosevic’s plan for Kosovo. There must be room for further
negotiation.’ What he means is room for further stalling.

It is what the Russians are calling for, but time is running out. For
as much as Serbs are calling for more time, Albanians are desperate
for results. And those who lost most in the war are most anxious for
a final resolution.

In the village of Krushe e Vogel, in the Kosovo Liberation Army
heartland to the south and the scene of one of the worst massacres of
the war, in which more than 100 residents remain ‘missing’, the
alternative is brutally outlined by Xhylferije Shehu, 48.

In her tomato frame among the fields, Shehu, who lost her husband
among nine family members, says: ‘We have waited eight years for
independence. I’m not optimistic that there won’t be trouble. If there
is no independence, then we will have to fight again.’