The Farce of the Kosovo Negotiations
TOP STORY <http://www.strategic-culture.org/rubrics/top-story.html> | ISKENDEROV Pyotr <http://www.strategic-culture.org/authors/iskenderov-pyotr.html> | 01.10.2010 | 11:27 0 comments <http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2010/10/01/the-farce-of-the-kosovo-negotiations.html#comments> <http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2010/10/01/the-farce-of-the-kosovo-negotiations.html#comments> Description: to leave the comment Kosovo <http://www.strategic-culture.org/tags/kosovo.html> Serbia <http://www.strategic-culture.org/tags/serbia.html> The story which began with the passing by the UN General Assembly of the joint Serbia-EU resolution calling for dialog between Belgrade and Pristina is unfolding: Serbian president B. Tadic was still in New York when EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton requested – in line with the plans of the Western architects of the Kosovo independence - that Serbs open negotiations with the Albanian administration of Kosovo as soon as possible and on an equal basis.Her openly dictatorial demand - the sooner the better! – was extensively cited by the Serbian media. C. Ashton said the EU offered Belgrade and Pristina assistance in organizing the talks aimed at preparing both sides for advancement towards the European integration. Moreover, Brussels intends to delegate a group of experts to the talks and play a role in them as a full-scale partner [1]. President Tadic sounds surprisingly optimistic. He expressed the view lately that talks should be opened over a set of issues selected so as to make it possible to produce immediate results and to create a generally favorable atmosphere for the coming dialog on the entire array of unresolved problems. The situation provokes a strange sense of déjà vu: back in 2006 – 2007 there were talks patronized by the clearly pro-Albanian EU, all kinds of assurances, and similar references to purely technical issues that could allegedly be handled without much hassle. In several rounds of arm-twisting in Vienna, the West attempted to make Serbia sign an agreement with the Albanian separatists admitting some form of Kosovo independence. The independence was being sold as supervised, transitional, etc. The Serbs consulted recognized experts, surveyed the autonomy models adopted across the world – on the Aland Islands, in Quebec, or in Bosnia and Herzegovina following the Dayton deal – and felt they were facing the debates in good shape. Eventually months of negotiations failed to translate into serious agreements like a legally binding one on the protection of Serb churches and monasteries in Kosovo, least into a framework agreement on the Kosovo status. Serbia's negotiator Jelica Kurjakwho currently serves as Belgrade's ambassador to Moscow provides a vivid description of the “favorable atmosphere” which dominated the talks: “Whenever the Serbs made an offer, the Albanians said No. They replied No to whatever they heard and were determined to reject anything, absolutely anything other than independence” [2]. The reason behind the collapse of the Vienna talks is clear – the West promised independence to the Kosovo Albanians already in 2005. Meeting with no audible objections from Moscow, the Contact Group set the three limitations that were subsequently built into Ahtisaari's plan for the supervised independence of Kosovo: the province could not be partitioned, it could not be incorporated into any other country, and the situation could not revert to the 1999 condition. The third provision automatically implied that Russia and Serbia – the latter as the country which accepted the Contact Group's set of guidelines simply as a given – agreed that Kosovo would never again be under Belgrade's jurisdiction. After that, the negotiations became a meaningless show. It is rather strange that Serbia expects returns from the new dialog considering that the EU has in practice recognized the Kosovo independence and even devised the constitution which the separatists promulgated in 2008. The constitution's opening passage asserts the independence, sovereignty, and indivisibility of the so-called Republic of Kosovo [3]. The formulation – or, for example, Kosovo Interior Minister Bairam Rejepi's recent statement that Pristina is not going to discuss with Belgrade the status and domestic affairs of Kosovo – show that Tadic's words about a favorable atmosphere during the dialog reflect illusions and nothing else. Serbia's president B. Tadic, foreign minister V. Eremic, and other establishment figures are free to believe naively that the status of Kosovo belongs to the list of unresolved problems, but the Brussels curators of the dialog simply do not care. Therefore the negotiations will again, as in 2006 – 2007, play into the hands of Belgrade's opponents. The US will put the finishing touches on the picture of the preparations for the talks when US Secretary of State H. Clinton visits Belgrade on October 12, the goal, as the Serbian media admit, being to exert additional pressure on Serbia [4]. All of the above is no news to Serbia's current administration. Consequently, there has to be a goal behind Belgrade's participation in the farce other than attempting to convince Pristina and Brussels to disavow the independence of Kosovo. B. Tadic must have had that actual goal in mind when he said incautiously a few days ago that the joint Serbia-EU resolution on the dialog between Belgrade and Pristina by the UN General Assembly is to maintain neutrality in the debates over the status of Kosovo [5]. It is the “neutrality” - towards Kosovo and its Serbian population, evidently – what Serbia's current ruling coalition which customarily follows the course charted by the US and the EU seeks to maintain. [1] Politika, 23.09.2010. [2] Kosovo Undermining Europe? Diskussii, Moscow, 2006, p. 11. [3] Kushtetuta e Republikës së Kosovës. Prishtinë, 2008. F.1. [4] Blic, 27.09.2010. [5] Tanjug, 25.09.2010. Petr Iskenderov is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Science and an international commentator at Vremya Novostey and the Voice of Russia. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2010/10/01/the-farce-of-the-kosovo-negotiations.html
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