Council on Foreign Relations, NY
Dec 6 2007

Holbrooke: Kosovo Independence Declaration Could Spark Crisis

Interviewee: Richard C. Holbrooke, Vice Chairman, Perseus LLC
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, The Council on
Foreign Relations

December 5, 2007

Richard C. Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
who helped broker the Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian war, says a
lack of Russian cooperation may lead to a `huge diplomatic train
wreck’ when Kosovo declares its independence. The Russians helped end
the fighting in 1999 when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) bombed Serbia on behalf of the persecuted ethnic Albanian
population in its province of Kosovo. Yet Holbrooke [a member of
CFR’s board of directors] says this time Moscow has been no help at
all, encouraging Serbia’s stubbornness and declining to help work out
an arrangement to allow Kosovo a peaceful transition to the
independence it has been promised by the international community.

On December 10, the three-man group – U.S. envoy Frank Wisner, Russian
representative Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko and EU envoy Wolfgang
Ischinger – that the United Nations set up last summer to bring about a
negotiated solution between Kosovo and Serbia ends its work in
failure. It’s widely expected that Kosovo, the autonomous province of
Serbia, will soon announce its independence. Do you have any idea
when that may happen?

To the best of my knowledge, the Kosovo Albanian leaders, who were
elected last month, will make a unilateral declaration of
independence about a month or so after December 10.

And they will ask all countries of the world to recognize them, as
well as the United Nations?

Yes.

Now the European Union, at the moment, from what I can tell, has
about five member states that are nervous about recognizing an
independent Kosovo.

The United States, Britain, France, and Germany have already said
they will recognize Kosovo. Most of the EU [European Union], but not
all, will recognize them. Some will recognize them on a slightly
slower time frame than others. Russia will not recognize them. Other
countries will be up for grabs. There will be a lot of pressure in
both directions. And I’m assuming the Islamic states will recognize
them.

This will leave the new country of Kosovo in somewhat of an awkward
position. UN membership will not be possible as long as the Russians
are prepared to veto their admission, and the Russians have indicated
that will be their policy. The EU will have to find ways of giving
them economic assistance, even when not all EU members recognize
them. Most importantly, a new basis for the continuation of
international security forces – the sixteen thousand NATO forces that
are now there – must be found. If those forces were to leave, the
chances of violence would be even greater.

How many Serbs still live in Kosovo?

There is no accurate census, but the best estimates are that there
are about two million Albanians, and somewhere between 100,000 and
200,000 Serbs left. But I stress, those are estimates.

Serbs have a majority in the most northern part of Kosovo that
borders on Serbia.

Around the town of Mitrovica in the north is a predominantly Serb
population and then there are Serb communities scattered throughout
other parts of Kosovo. It is my assumption that Serbian-populated
districts, which did not participate in the recent elections at all,
will announce that they do not accept the fact that they are part of
a newly declared independent state of Kosovo. They’ll say, `No, we’re
still part of Serbia.’ So you’ll have another one of these breakaway
conflicts, which have dotted Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union in the last fifteen years, such as in Nagorno-Karabakh [a de
facto independent republic within Azerbaijan but claimed by Armenia],
South Ossetia [a rebellious part of Georgia backed by Russia],
Abkhazia [an independent republic within Georgia that is not
recognized by any state but backed by Russia] and Trans-Dniester [a
breakaway part of Moldova also backed by Russia]. I suspect these
Serbian areas in Kosovo will fall into that category.

Talk a bit about the situation in Belgrade. The Serbian government is
supposedly pro-Western, right? And they’ve been talking about trying
to get in the EU.

Calling the Serbian government in Belgrade pro-Western is a bit of a
stretch. They are intensely nationalistic, particularly Prime
Minister Vojislav Kostunica. He is a real nationalist. Former Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic was a fake nationalist. He’s the real
deal. He has a mystical attachment to Kosovo as the birthplace of the
Serb people. Some of the greatest religious monuments in Europe are
these ancient Serb monasteries that are all over Kosovo – twelfth-,
thirteenth-, fourteenth-century monasteries. So the Serbs have been
there a long time, but over time this area has become overwhelmingly
Albanian.

A new basis for the continuation of international security forces – the
sixteen thousand NATO forces that are now there – must be found. If the
forces were to leave, the chances of violence would be even greater.
The Serbs suppressed the Albanians and denied them their political
rights, particularly under Milosevic, but ever since 1912, Serbs have
been the minority rulers of Kosovo and now the situation is about to
be reversed in the most dramatic manner imaginable.

Will the Serbs in the north make some declaration to definitely be
part of Serbia itself?

It’s very possible that the northern districts will do the same thing
which the Serb portions of Bosnia did in 1992, when the Bosnian
Muslims declared Bosnia an independent country. You’ll recall that
the Bosnian Serbs refused to accept it, and instead started the
terrible civil war, which was so costly.

The difference between Kosovo in 2007 and Bosnia in 1992, however, is
twofold: One, the overwhelming majority of the people in Kosovo – over
90 percent are Albanian, where as in Bosnia there was a relatively
even balance between the three groups, Bosnians, Serbs and Croats.
Secondly, there just isn’t the appetite anymore for the kind of
all-out, brutal, genocidal war, which took place in that area for so
long.

Still, there’s a real threat of violence as this escalates, and for
that reason I have called, in my recent column in the Washington
Post, for the United States and NATO to put additional troops into
both Kosovo and Bosnia as quickly as possible. Not an enormous amount
of troops, because those aren’t available anyway, but enough to let
both sides know that a slide back into violence is not acceptable to
the international community.

NATO is stretched to the hilt with its troop obligations in
Afghanistan right now.

They’re stretched very thin, but they have troops. And I’m just
talking about a couple of companies, a battalion or so, and it
doesn’t have to be primarily American. We have two choices here: You
send troops in beforehand, to prevent the violence, or you rush
troops in after it breaks out and the social fabric has been further
torn apart.

We always talk about `preventative diplomacy.’ The Council on Foreign
Relations has a Center for Preventive Action. Everyone talks about
it, but no one ever does anything about it. Here is a classic case
where a few troops now might prevent the need for more troops later,
and we have to try to get some additional troops in fast. I am very
pessimistic that the suggestion I just made for more troops will be
acted on, because of the problem you just raised: Iraq, Afghanistan.
Also the passivity of the European Union, the mistakes that the U.S.
government has made in the last few years, and the opportunistic
actions of the Russians have been a poisonous combination.

On the Russian side, has the United States pressed President Vladimir
Putin on this at all?

Not adequately. It’s been discussed at lower levels, but President
Bush has not brought it up with Putin in a firm, determined way that
would indicate to Moscow that this really matters. And the
U.S.-Russia relationship is not a very good one anyway. This
administration misjudged Putin from the beginning. In effect this
administration gave Putin complimentary words, which he didn’t
deserve. And he just kept taking advantage of it – not just in Kosovo,
but all over the place.

So you think there’s about a month between the end of the UN mission
and some declaration of independence. Do you think Kosovo can work
out any kind of deal with the Serbs on their own?

No. The only chance for a deal was if the Russians had joined the EU
and the U.S. in the search for a solution. They did this in 1999,
while the United States and NATO were bombing Serbia for
seventy-seven days, and that group, run by former Finnish President
Martti Ahtisaari for the EU, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott
for the U.S., and Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, produced UN
Resolution 1244, which ended the bombing and created the UN
trusteeship over Kosovo, which has lasted eight years. That was a
pretty successful operation, because when the Serbs, Milosevic
specifically, realized that there was no more chance for him to get
Russian help, that’s when he came around. But this time around, Putin
is playing a very different game. He is in effect enabling the Serbs.
He’s put no pressure on them at all to reach an agreement. On the
contrary he’s become their encourager, and that is the reason we’re
headed towards such a huge diplomatic train wreck.

Is there any chance the Serbs will try to send troops into Kosovo?

There’s a chance, and the only way to prevent that is twofold: One,
the international community must prevent Albanians from taking
vengeance against the Serbs. That’s a real danger and it’s a big one.
Secondly, the presence of additional international troops, NATO
troops in particular, is the best guarantee to reduce the chances of
that happening. Serb troops moving into Kosovo would be such a
provocation that it’s hard to imagine, but this year everything has
gone wrong in the region because of the Russian encouragement of the
Serbs.

Are there problems in Bosnia, too?

In Bosnia, after twelve years in which the Dayton Accords [which
Holbrooke helped broker] have worked pretty well, and there have been
no casualties, a very serious dilemma has now arisen. In the Serb
portion of Bosnia, the Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, has previously
been pro-Western and worked with the United States and the EU quite
well, but he now seems to have been turned into something of an
anti-Western, pro-Russian, pro-separatist leader. I believe it’s
because the Russians have been showering petrodollars on him and he’s
under intense pressure.

Here is a classic case where a few troops now might prevent the need
for more troops later, and we have to try to get some additional
troops in fast.
When I wrote this in the Washington Post last week, he wrote a very
angry letter back to the Post, in which he said the Dayton agreement
was still `sacrosanct.’ I wrote a letter saying, `Well, I’m glad
things are sacrosanct, but I’m not sure we interpret it the same way
and, besides which, some of his words have undermined it.’ So that’s
the problem, but it’s also true that some of the Muslim politicians
in Sarajevo have been provocative lately as well. Bosnia is a federal
state. It has to be structured as a federal state. You cannot have a
unitary government, because then the country would go back into
fighting. And that’s the reason that the Dayton agreement has been
probably the most successful peace agreement in the world in the last
generation, because it recognized the reality.

I’ll conclude on Kosovo. You were talking about the possibility again
of the Albanians seeking retribution against the Serbs. They already
had a kind of brief massacre a couple years ago, right?

Yes. Very serious.

I would have thought by now things had calmed down, but I guess not.

Who knows? Most people hate each other, really hate each other, much
more than in Bosnia. In Kosovo, there was almost no intermarriage,
there are completely different languages, different cultures sitting
in the same land – it’s much more like Arabs and Israelis. Bosnians,
Croats, and Serbs all spoke the same language, all went to the same
schools, all lived together – it wasn’t the kind of apartheid that
you’ve got in Kosovo. And there’s so much history there. Even in the
Middle East, you will not find people who hate each other as much as
these people.

rooke.html?breadcrumb=%2F