THE FUTURE HAS BEGUN IN KOSOVO
28.12.2007

 There was no result from the 120 days of additional negotiations between the International Troika and the Kosovar Negotiation Delegation over the final status of Kosovo. No-one was really expecting a result; the latest negotiations resembled a needless attempt to treat a terminal patient. It did not help to increase goodwill either.

The Troika, which was responsible for mediating the talks, met the Kosovar Negotiation Delegation once last time before submitting a report to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. EU ambassador Wolfgang İschinger, US ambassador Frank Wisner and Russian ambassador Aleksander Botsan Karchenko were unable to convince Pristina and Belgrade to agree. So ended 120 additional days of talks, as predicted.


Speaking after the talks, Mr İschinger said: “As we had stressed before, if we have no results from the negotiations this will be a failure of all sides.” Both he and Mr Wisner have completed most of their work in Kosovo; there is little left for the Troika to do.


Kosovo, being one party to the talks, is pleased with its position. Kosovo’s president, Fatmir Sejdiu, who was chief negotiator at the talks, said they considered the negotiations process over and would not accept further talks on Kosovo’s final status.

This means that Kosovo has dispelled what small hope there was of a future return to the negotiations table. But Mr Sejdiu has also said that the “Ahtisaari Plan is a good plan for Kosovo”. This is important, because the plan has received scant, superficial coverage in the news, and deserves more attention.


The plan, prepared by Finland’s former president Martti Ahtisaari, gives Kosovo a flag, a national anthem, and most importantly the right to make international agreements and join international organisations.


Mr Ahtisaari’s plan aims to turn Kosovo into a multiethnic society. If it is implemented, important rights will be granted to Kosovo’s minorities. 90-95 percent of Kosovo’s people are Albanian in origin; the remainder are Serbian, Turkish and Bosniac, and these groups are likely to have a balancing role in the system.


For instance, minority parties could have a critical role in forming Kosovo’s government and its policies.


The plan also envisages a constitution containing Mr Ahtisaari’s proposals. A commission of 21 people – including three from the Serbian community and three from different communities – will be set up to write the constitution. Elections are to be held nine months after the document is accepted in parliament.


Besides this, the Ahtisaari Plan proposes a new election system that includes 10 guaranteed seats for the Serbian minority, and ten for those of other communities. Certain law changes will require a minority vote, and there will have to be two minority ministers: one Serbian, one from another minority. When the number of cabinet ministers exceeds twelve, an additional minister and deputy minister from the smaller minorities would be required.


Any future constitutional change in Kosovo would require a two-thirds parliamentary majority, although this would also include a two-thirds majority of the minority MPs too. In the same way, at least 15 percent of High Court judges will have to come from minority societies.


Kosovo’s official languages will be Albanian and Serbian. The rights to education, national symbols, language and alphabet of all minorities will remain untouched. Minorities will also be granted a deputy mayoral office wherever they number more than 10 percent of the population.


The Ahtisaari Plan envisages a system that distances itself from centralisation so that, for instance, the Serbs of North Mitrovicha remain in charge of their own higher education and health care.


The operation of this complicated system will be entrusted to an observer – the International Civilian Observer – who will double as the European Union’s special representative.


The best plan is always the plan that can work, which is why it is too early to say the Ahtisaari Plan is the key to resolution in Kosovo. A possible boycott call by Belgrade would be enough to lock the system.


It is also possible that the Serbs in Kosovo could see their regions as their own Kosovo. What would happen if the international community was dragged into a future dispute between Kosovo and the “Kosovo of Kosovo”? What if a part of Kosovo sprung up and used the same arguments Pristina is making today?


In diplomacy – particularly following conflicts, resolutions and agreements – precedent should not be observed. Every case is different. The rule of strongest always applies, but so does the strength of destructiveness.


If the Ahtisaari Plan is implemented smoothly, and in its entirety, it could be an illuminating model in these days of rising ethnic tension worldwide. If it is implemented, Kosovo’s military will be intertwined with NATO, and its politics with the European Union.


The Albanian majority is currently concerned only with independence – what happens afterwards is of little interest to anyone right now. But when the celebratory glasses of champagne are placed back on the table and the final fireworks extinguish in the night sky, Kosovo will meet the cold reality.


Robert C Austin, of Toronto University’s Munk International Research Centre, said that the Kosovar Albanians have undertaken a great responsibility with the Ahtisaari Plan, one that cannot be implemented with Albanian desire and determination alone.


It is likely that when the recently appointed NATO European Forces Joint Commander, the US Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, said that the Kosovo Peace Force was determined to meet any kind of violence in Kosovo, he too shared the same justified concerns.


NATO’s Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has said that they would not turn a blind eye to violence in Kosovo. But it is dispute whether the international community can maintain security in Kosovo, having not been able to mediate an agreed solution over Kosovo. Perhaps a gradual, spiralling violence will emerge. Perhaps there will be no violence whatsoever.


Perhaps, with NATO’s presence, Kosovo will not even be threatened by another country. But what is certain is that developments in Kosovo will satisfy no-one.


It is clear that it was not Finland’s history that inspired Mr Ahtisaari to create this comprehensive, complicated plan. He has not revealed the sources he used while preparing the plan, but – even though it is a destructive, hurtful truth for the defenders of orientalism and the protectors of globalisation – it is true that Mr Ahtisaari copied his plan from Ottoman History books.


The Ottoman Empire respected cultures, history, religions and licences in the Balkans. It did not stoke conflicts, nor did it sustain them. But the Ahtisaari plan has serious deficiencies when compared to the Ottoman peace model. Although the same Ottoman respect for local identities is reflected in the plan, Europe’s Balkans policy is tainted with blood and has failed to capture hearts and minds. This means Mr Athisaari will not reach the same ends as those Ottoman documents that so inspired him.


The Ottoman entry to Kosovo – which, we should not forget, included Macedonia – began in the Preshevo Valley. As the Empire collapsed, the Ottoman exit was from the same valley. We can expect that ethnic tensions can rise once again in the Preshevo Valley, such as in a potential swap of the Kosovar Serb town of Mitrovicha with the town of Preshevo on the Serbian side. This could be both the appetite and the nightmare of the modern world.


Discontent at the start of the 19th century lead to Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, followed by Serbia and Romania in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908 and Albania in 1912.


In the Balkans, the Ottoman left last where they conquered first: Macedonia. Bulgaria spent 545 years under Ottoman rule, as against 400 years for Greece, 539 years for Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina Croatia, Kosovo and Macedonia, 250 years for Slovenia, 490 years for Romania and Moldova and 435 years for Albania.


The First Balkan War, in 1912, was followed by the Second Balkan War in 1913. After the Ottoman Empire left following genocide in the 19th century and these two wars, the Balkan peninsula was shaken by the First World War and the Second World War.


Following the Second World War came the Cold War and its aftermath, and two wars which could easily be seen as the natural continuation – from Turkey’s perspective – of the 1912 and 1913 wars. The 1992-1995 Bosnian war and NATO’s Kosovo operation of 1998 could easily be seen as the third and fourth Balkan wars.


These wars were in fact the continuation and result of far earlier wars, when the Turks took control of the Balkans in 1364, 1389, 1396, 1444 and 1448.


When Europe coined the phrase “South Eastern Europe” at the start of the bloody 1990s, it was actually recycling a phrase first used by the Geographer Theobald Fischer upon Bulgaria and Albania’s independence, before the First and Second World Wars.


Be it the Balkan peninsula or be it South East Europe, this region’s future could see local countries joining one of two camps: the Albanians, supported by Europe, and the Slavs, supported by Russia.


In such a development, the many Muslims and Turks of the region could be of critical importance. Muslims make up 13 percent of Bulgaria’s population, 33 percent in Macedonia, 44 percent in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 70 percent in Albania and 5 percent in Romania, while there are 725,000 Turks in Bulgaria, 120,000 in Greece, 78,000 in Macedonia, 35,000 in Romania and 15,000 in Kosovo – a total of 1.1 million.


Of course, we must mention McCarthy, who said “at least 1.7 million Turks were massacred” while Greece sought its independence, and British journalist David Barchard, who wrote in the Financial Times on 8 September 2005 that “nearly 5.5 million European Muslims, in the last period of the Ottoman Empire, between 1821 and 1923, died as a result of Christian ethnic-nationalists’ activities”. Not counting those who were forced to leave their homes, the population deficit of Turks in the Balkans is at least 65 million.


When looking at the situation today, it is clear that the heated foxhunt in the Balkans – having been interrupted by the Cold War – will emerge once again as a period of regional tension.


The process and priorities show that this new process in Kosovo has opposite meanings to those who feed globalisation and orientalism, and the Turks.

Source: Diplomatic Observer