http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/sais/nexteurope/2008/12/kosovos_plot_thickens.html
Kosovo's Plot Thickens
By Elizabeth Pond
Three German spooks are back home after a nine-day sojourn in a Kosovo
prison, and a European rule-of-law mission named "EULEX" is now
stationed in northern Kosovo after a nine-month vacuum there. Between
them, the two events define the new landscape in the world's newest
state.
Neither event is quite what it seems on the surface. The three German
Intelligence Service (BND) fellows were jailed on the implausible charge that
they had set off a bomb at the Pristina headquarters of the senior European
Union official there. And, argues Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic
implausibly, Serbia and the United Nations are finally allowing the EU's
rule-of-law mission to deploy in Serb-majority northern Kosovo only because
EULEX will be "neutral" on whether Kosovo is independent or is still a province
of Serbia.
Below the surface, things look a lot more interesting. The first episode gives
every sign of being a warning to the BND not to snoop on organized crime in
Kosovo, which accounts for up to 80 percent of the heroin that enters Western
Europe. And diplomatic fudge leaves enough
ambiguity for Jeremic to fend off ultra-nationalist Serb critics by ignoring
EULEX's explicit mandate to "supervise" Kosovo's conditional independence and
guarantee the minority rights of the five percent of Serbs in this 90-percent
Albanian country.
Even further below the surface, reality is at its most intriguing. It might
seem odd for the Kosovars to single out the BND for unique humiliation; German,
British, Italian, and American agents all spy on criminal gangs-and Berlin has
long been a special patron of Kosovo,
leading the EU drive to facilitate independence last February and giving
Pristina more financial aid than does any other EU member. Yet, in internal
reports that have leaked out to the public, the BND and the German military
have indiscreetly fingered senior Kosovar politicians as being allied with
traffickers. Hence the special satisfaction, perhaps, in daring to bite the
German hand that feeds but criticizes Kosovo.
As for those EULEX rule-of-law teams, the first fact to note is that their
long-delayed deployment in northern Kosovo infiltrates them into a hotbed of
Serb mafias that profess ultranationalism but cooperate splendidly with
Albanian smugglers south of the Ibar River. It was these mafias that recruited
Serb mobs to burn down customs posts and chase UN officials out of the north
when Kosovo declared its independence.
The second fact is that the new pro-European Serbian government shares the EU
dislike of these Serb mafias, which were originally set up by the
pro-Europeans' ultranationalist foes in Belgrade. The Serbian government is
therefore quietly seeing to it that this time around, Serb mobs will not attack
the new international officials. So don't judge the progress of Belgrade, the
EU -- or the BND -- by the zero-sum rhetoric. Measure it instead by seeing how
far their tacit win-win collaboration squeezes out the local mafiosi in 2009.
CTR Senior Fellow Elizabeth Pond is the author of Endgame in the Balkans:
Regime Change, European Style (2006).
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