WHO BLINKS FIRST? THE CRISIS IN KOSOVO IS JUST BEGINNING
By Michael Levitin

CounterPunch
Feb 28 2008
CA

As renewed Serb protests this week in Bosnia and elsewhere demonstrate,
the storm unleashed by Kosovo’s Feb. 17 declaration of independence is
long from abating. Rather, what recent events have showed is the start
of a long and protracted struggle that, in the end, the West probably
cannot win. Why not? Because we’re not talking about a few hundred
flag- and embassy-burning rioters as the media, the U.S. government
and a chagrined Belgrade leadership speaking last week would have
us believe.

Let’s remember that in Serbia’s presidential elections at the start of
this month, 48 per cent of Serbs went to the polls with their faith
in Europe already shattered. They voted en masse for the so-called
ultranationalist Timoslav Nikolic not for any love of him or his
Radical Party but because he vowed, unlike his pro-Western adversary
Boris Tadic, to keep a grip on Kosovo even if it cost Serbia entry
to the EU. His narrow loss signaled the depth of Serbia’s outrage —
the fact that today’s violence is about more than Kosovo, reflecting
instead the accumulated frustration and failure of Serbia, nearly two
decades after Slobodan Milosevic came to power, to move on politically
and psychologically from its past.

In this sense, the crisis now gripping the Balkans is more than a
reaction to the injustice over Kosovo than it is a symptom of deeper
conflicts boiling to the surface in Serb society. "Milosevic’s lies
got deeply embedded," Dusan Prorokovic, State Secretary for Kosovo in
the ruling Democratic Party of Serbia, told me several weeks ago in
Belgrade, "and Serbs are still confused about their past." They are
also — as they’ve shown in recent tests, from the three-month-long
protest aimed at ousting Milosevic in ’96-’97, to NATO’s 78-day
bombing campaign in ’99 — masters of patience and endurance. Which
is why America and its European allies backing Kosovo independence
must realize: Serbia is in this battle for the long haul. As a Serbian
Orthodox monk I was traveling with in Kosovo, put it:

"[Independence] is just a pause. The war will continue and Kosovo
will be ours again in 10, 20, 50 years when American power declines.

Kosovo is our Jerusalem. It is our identity. Without Kosovo, Serbia
does not exist."

In the meantime, life is increasingly hard for the 100,000 or so
Serbs who have chosen-and been at all times encouraged by the Belgrade
government-to stay put in their impoverished Kosovo enclaves. I had
the opportunity to drive with an Orthodox priest named Bogomir and his
21-year-old son Lazar to the soup kitchen that they run in Prekovce, a
200-person town about 20 miles southeast of the capital Pristina. More
than half the residents left this enclave and the countryside around
it after NATO bombs fell, factories closed and possibilities for
survival dwindled. Among those who remain are a handful of Serbs
with government jobs as teachers, doctors and administrators —
to whom Belgrade pays double salaries to ensure that they stay —
and a stooped, elderly mass of poor who show up daily at the town’s
broken-walled community center carrying empty pots and containers that
they fill with soup and bread. "I have no home, no work, no money,"
said an old woman waiting in line for bean and noodle stew who,
despite the hardship here, said her will to stay in Kosovo is strong.

As it is for Ana Gospova, whose remote house — ebuilt by the
Serb government on a small hill in a valley dotted with crumbling,
abandoned Serb homes — I visited with Lazar to deliver a bag of
groceries. A mother of nine, Ana came out with her oldest son to greet
us. Thirty-eight years old, swarthy, with a pot belly and missing half
her teeth, she was still somewhat attractive. Bed sheets were drying
on a line and chickens scratched around the yard as Ana pointed to
the half dozen bee boxes that used to provide some income, that is,
before the bees died. Her husband Radovan’s salary of 130 euros a
month from working in the nearby gold mine, plus 75 euros from the
Serb government, feeds 11 mouths. "Since the war it’s been terrible,"
she said, "but we never thought of leaving."

And that’s the point, because neither has Belgrade.

Serbia may face further international isolation for its decision, but
it is by no means close to pulling up shop in Kosovo. Just look at the
volatile, heavily Serb-populated northern area around Kosovo-Mitrovica
in the north, where the most ardent protests have been in recent days
and where Serbia, in the coming weeks or months, may simply bite off
a chunk of the province and call a temporary truce through partition.

Nearly two weeks after Kosovo’s declared statehood, Serbia has been
playing most of its cards right. It has engaged in a cat-and-mouse
game following the U.S. embassy burning, saying it will pursue
and prosecute those responsible while likely making no real effort
to do so. It continues to employ Russia on its behalf, welcoming
the country’s all-but-certain future president Dmitry Medvedev to
Belgrade on Monday, where he signed a mega-pipeline deal that snubs
the West’s Nabucco project and renewed Russia’s full support of
Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. It is developing, in short, into
another classic stare-down between Serbia and the West and Kosovo’s
ultimate fate may come down to who blinks first.

"The West made a fundamental miscalculation," the Serbian professor
and political analyst Leon Kojen told me on the eve of independence,
sitting in a cozy upstairs balcony of one of Belgrade’s many kavanas in
the Dorcol district. "They wanted to avoid the sort of frozen conflict
in Kosovo [that exists] in South Ossetia, in Nagorno-Karabakh, in
Transnistria, in Cyprus. What they didn’t realize was that creating
an independent Kosovo in opposition to the UN Security Council will
create a much more difficult, frozen conflict than we have now. It
will poison the whole politics of the region for the foreseeable
future and put in doubt the so-called European future, which will
more or less go up in smoke."

None of this erases the fact that Serbs themselves have a
ways to go before they’ve purged the decades-old experience of
governmental violence, corruption and deceit from their system. What
early February’s 48 per cent vote for Nikolic tells us is that a
sweeping portion of the Serb population still chooses not to accept
responsibility for the crimes the country committed in the 1990s,
and to apologize for that past; it also points to the failure of
successive governments since Milosevic (with the exception perhaps
of Zoran Djindjic, who was gunned down for his efforts) to root out
wide-spread corruption, reform the judicial system and stimulate a
sunken economy.

Surely no one in the worn-out Balkans wants to return to war-at least
not yet. But at what cost, I asked the Orthodox monk in Kosovo, would
Serbia’s retaking possession of Kosovo be worth it? Would it be worth
it at the loss of 10,000 more lives and decades more of bitter hatred
between Serbs and Kosovars? "Yes, it’s worth it," he answered.

"However many have to die for Kosovo. We will follow in the path
of St. Lazarus who defended his people [in the 1389 defeat to the
Ottomans]. That is the perspective of God."

Michael Levitin is a freelance journalist living in Berlin. He has
written for Newsweek, The Financial Times, Los Angeles Times and
other publications and can be reached at malevitin@yahoo.com