Kosovo has declared independence, thus ending 16 years of legal limbo and political uncertainty. Thousands of Kosovar Albanians celebrated in the streets of Pristina late into Sunday night.
The announcement hardly comes as a surprise. It was carefully co-ordinated with the US, EU and the UN secretary-general, and deliberately delayed until after the Serbian presidential election on 3rd February when the pro-European Boris Tadic defeated Tomislav Nikolic, a hardline nationalist, by just 3 per cent.
Kosovo has accepted the UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari's plan as the blueprint for independence. It will grant substantial autonomy to the northern districts with a Kosovar Serb majority, establish protection zones around Serbian religious and historic sites, and enshrine the "double majority" rule in its constitution, thereby giving minorities (Serb, Roma and others) a veto over certain key areas of legislation. As Chris Patten has observed, this gives Kosovar Serbs rights enjoyed by no other minority in Europe.
In addition, Kosovo will submit to indefinite supervision by EU civilian and Nato military missions. EU foreign ministers have approved a 2,000-strong civilian and police mission, which is supposed to take over from the UN mission presently administering Kosovo within 120 days. However, this will not be straightforward. Russia, Serbia's ally, has made it clear that it will block Kosovo's application for UN membership as well as any security council resolution authorising the EU and Nato missions. So the authorisation of the missions as well as the continued presence of the UN will be a legal fudge.
First, the woolly wording of the security council resolution 1244, which back in 1999 authorised the UN and Nato missions, has been invoked by Nato to argue that its mission is ongoing and therefore authorised until the security council decides otherwise. Second, the EU council's "joint action" establishing the EU mission makes reference to the same resolution but falls short of basing its legality on it. The legality of its mission will therefore primarily be based on the fact that the Kosovo government has invited it to supervise its independence. Third, the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has stated that the UN mission will remain in Kosovo under resolution 1244, without specifying which article of the resolution he was relying on.
Opponents to Kosovo's independence maintain that it will set off a chain reaction throughout the Balkans and other ethnically fragmented areas of the world. They fear a mass exodus of the 100,000 Serbs living in Kosovo which in turn would resuscitate old ideas of "greater Serbia" and "greater Albania" and lead to a violent redrawing of borders in the Balkans along ethnic lines, including possibly those of Greece and Bulgaria. Others warn against exacerbating the rift between Russia on one hand and the US and the EU on the other, as well as of the dangerous precedent it sets for separatist movements around the world.
The stakes are high. However, the reality is that even if the Kosovar Albanians could have been dissuaded from declaring independence, the continued de facto partition of the Serb-majority districts north of the Ibar river would sooner or later have culminated in violence. It was precisely to avert this scenario that the EU and the US have supported the supervised independence of Kosovo. The entire region has been in stalemate for over a decade. The uncertainty in Kosovo was stifling progress in Bosnia, because Serbia was using the threat of retaliatory secession of Republika Srpska there as a bargaining chip in the Kosovo negotiations. Efforts to integrate Serbia, Bosnia and the rest of the region into the EU were greatly hampered.
The fear that independence for Kosovo will set a dangerous precedent for separatist claims in countries such as Spain and Georgia is misplaced. Kosovo's claim to independence is unique. It became a part of Serbia only in 1912. For more than four decades, it enjoyed significant political autonomy in the former Yugoslavia, which, according to some legal scholars, included a constitutional right to secede. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia left Kosovo inside a Serbia that was structured upon unitary and mono-ethnic rather than federal lines. Finally, the expulsion by the Milosevic government of 750,000 Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo in 1999 has made rule by Belgrade simply unthinkable for Kosovar Albanians.
How the situation now plays out will depend on Serbia's reactions. The Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica has rejected EU attempts to sugar the pill by offering various travel and trade inducements, claiming that this would be to forsake Kosovo for the sake of EU integration. Yet despite the bellicose rhetoric of the Serbian government, there seems to be little appetite for a real confrontation with EU and Nato. President Tadic has made it clear that force would not be used to stop Kosovo's independence.
Still, Serbia still has a range of possible retaliatory measures. These include cutting electricity supplies to Kosovo, sealing the borders and thus preventing trade, and severing diplomatic relations with all countries that recognise Kosovo—Serbia has already withdrawn its ambassador from Washington. There are also hints that the legality of recognising Kosovo will be challenged in the UN and the international court of justice.
There may well be violence in the days and weeks ahead. Several bombs have exploded in Kosovo and Serbia and a number of embassies in Serbia have been attacked by angry demonstrators. The key will be to contain any violence. A mass exodus of non-Albanians (Serbs and other minorities) from Kosovo is unlikely, especially given the call by the Serbian patriarch for Kosovar Serbs to stay and defend their land. The role of the 16,000-strong Nato force will be crucial in ensuring that minority communities feel safe. The troops should be stationed in potential flashpoints throughout Kosovo, but particularly in the north where the majority of Serbs live.
But in parallel with these peacekeeping efforts, it is essential for the EU to step up the process of integrating the Balkan countries into the EU and, most importantly, making funds available to them. The peoples and governments of the region must understand that the process of European integration is irreversible. This is the only way of stabilising the region and ensuring sustainable peace and economic development. With luck it will not be long, as people in the region often joke, before the peoples of Yugoslavia will be happily living together again—as part of the EU.
