KOSOVO’S INDEPENDENCE WILL STIR UP TROUBLE. WHO WILL BENEFIT?
John Laughland

Brussels Journal

D ec 13 2007
Belgium

Perhaps the most striking things about the impending declaration of
independence about Kosovo is that is happening at all. Why should
the Kosovo Albanians be striving for independence from Belgrade
now, since there has been peace in the province for eight years
(interrupted only in 2004, when a mob of Albanians killed 25 Serbs)
and since the regime in Serbia, of which the Kosovo Albanians are
citizens, has been democratic and pro-European since 2000?

Why, indeed, did the Kosovo Albanians spend the whole of the first part
of the 1990s in peace, when the rest of Yugoslavia was in flames? If
their desire for independence had really been so intense as their
national propaganda claims, then surely the time to act would have
been when the Yugoslav federation was collapsing in 1992-1992, or
during the Bosnian civil war of 1992-1995.

For that matter, why did the Albanians inside Serbia, who are in
the majority in the area around the Southern towns of Presevo and
Bujanovac, start their attacks there in 2001, a year after the fall of
Slobodan Milo~Zeviæ’s fall from power, whereas they had been left in
peace during the civil war between Serbs and Albanians in neighbouring
Kosovo in 1998-1999?

None of this seems to make any sense.

One thing is certain: the Kosovo Albanians would not have threatened
to declare independence if they were not certain that they would
receive diplomatic recognition from the United States and most European
states. The Kosovo leadership (which means the leadership of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, the guerrilla force whose head, Hashim Thaci, is now
the "Prime Minister" of Kosovo) has very close ties to the West. Thaci
famously kissed Madeleine Albright during the Kosovo war of 1999 and
also visited Tony Blair at Number 10; one of his predecessors as Prime
Minister, Ramush Haradinaj, who has since been indicted by The Hague
for war crimes, is known as a major CIA asset.

No doubt the Kosovo Albanians have some claim to independence,
although it is notable how seldom they refer to the persecution of
which they were supposedly the victims in 1999 under Milo~Zeviæ. This
is no doubt because everyone knows that those claims of genocide bore
as much relation to reality as did the claim made in 2002-2003 that
there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, the charge
of genocide turned out to be so unsustainable that it was never even
included in the indictment against Milo~Zeviæ.

The loss of Kosovo by Serbia would be a terrible blow to the values of
Christian civilisation, since that region is itself a symbol of the
victory over the European spirit over the superior military force of
Islam, having been the scene of Serbia’ historic battle against the
Turks in 1389. The province contains some of the jewels of European
architecture, the monasteries of Peæ, Deèani and Graèanica.

But the truth is that the new battle of Kosovo was lost a long time
ago, when the Serbs, like most Europeans, stopped having babies
while the Albanians, like many other Muslim peoples, continued having
them – and at a vast rate. The demographic battle having been lost,
there is very little the government in Belgrade can do now to halt
the inevitable.

Worse, perhaps, is the effect which the independence of this small
province will have on the region and the wider world. The anger of
Bosnian Serbs is inflamed by the West’s double-standards. While it
demands autonomy and now secession for the Kosovo Albanians, it is
pushing ever greater centralisation and curtailment of autonomy in
neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs there have been told they
must never hold a referendum on independence from Bosnia, while the
EU-back "High Representative" is determined to abrogate what remains
of the autonomy of Republika Srpska. Independence for Kosovo will,
in all likelihood, lead to the fragmentation of the artificial and
largely bogus state of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But the double-standards are not confined to the Balkans. The
narrative in Cyprus is almost identical to that in Kosovo: a Muslim
population there, the Turks, was the subject of persecution by
its Orthodox co-nationals, the Greeks, until they were protected
by military intervention according to international law: Turkey
invaded Cyprus in 1974 and invoked the terms of the 1960 Treaty
of Guarantee (between Britain, Turkey and Greece) which guaranteed
the constitution of Cyprus. Yet Northern Cyprus (the Turkish part)
has been the victim of an embargo and international isolation ever
since then, an international pariah while Kosovo’s leaders are the
toast of the world’s chancelleries.

The same goes for Transnistria. Transnistria is a small sliver of
land along the left bank of the Dniestr river, North-West of Odessa.

When the Romanian province of Bessarabia was illegally annexed by the
Soviet Union in 1940, according to the terms of the secret protocol
of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Transnistria became part of the
Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova. It had never before in history
been governed from the Moldovan capital, Chiºinãu, and most of its
inhabitants speak Russian. The Soviet Union started to collapse in 1990
precisely when Moscow admitted, after years of denial, the existence
of the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and this led to
the secession of the Baltic states and, eventually, the dissolution
of the USSR itself. Transnistria naturally said that its incorporation
into Moldova was as illegal as Moldova’s incorporation into the Soviet
Union and demanded independence. Although it has indeed been de facto
independent since 1992, the West has consistently told it that it
will not allow it to secede from Moldova. Ditto for Nagorno-Karabakh
(formally part of Azerbaijan, populated now exclusively by Armenians),
South Ossetia (part of Georgia but culturally linked to North Ossetia,
which is inside Russia) and Abkazia (also part of Georgia but de
facto independent since 1992).

Encouraging independence for Kosovo will only re-ignite the
conflict which has been basically frozen there since 1999, as well
as the similarly frozen conflicts in the Balkans, in Moldova and the
Caucasus. What is the point of this when the other option is to let
sleeping dogs lie? Does someone have an interest in causing trouble?

The only common denominator in all these various conflicts, indeed,
is attitudes to Russia. Russia supports Serbia on Kosovo and Bosnia;
it is broadly supportive of Transnistria and the other non-recognised
states on the territory of the former Soviet Union (although it has
done little concrete to help them). Any trouble in these area is
trouble for Moscow in its own backyard, which President Putin told
me in September is the last thing he wants. Maybe that is why the
West is determined to provoke it.

–Boundary_(ID_WwV1B/1u5xrorAoh1pH51Q)–