Kosovo Murky Reality

By Sinisa Ljepojevic

Apart from historians, almost nobody in the world heard of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, a small landlocked territory in the heart of the Balkans, until March 24 1999, when NATO started a bombing campaign against then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Since June 1999 Kosovo is under the international administration, a kind of the UN protectorate. On 17 February 2008 Kosovo's majority Albanians unilaterally proclaimed independence from Serbia under the supervision of the EU and the NATO. It is illegal and violates the Helsinki Final Act and UN Charter. Less then 40 out of 192 UN member states have recognised Kosovo as independent. Despite the declaration of independence the international administration is to stay in Kosovo. So, Kosovo continues in a state of limbo. Is Kosovo really independent? Kosovo has become a symbol of deep crisis in international relations much more so than Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, Kosovo's case is not closed and the story goes on. However, the fate of Kosovo,for the time being, does not depend of its citizensbut of the international community and, most of all, of its economy. Theeconomy almost does not exist and the present Kosovo is incapable of standing on its feet. This book is trying to shed a light on those two crucil elements - the international community policy and Kosovo's economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9781467022781

Sinisa Ljepojevic

Sinisa Ljepojevic is a Yugoslav-born journalist and writer based in London. He has devoted a good part of his journalist career to Kosovo and to the Balkans.

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© 2008 Sinisa Ljepojevic. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/19/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4670-2278-1 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-4343-8827-8 (sc)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

APPENDIX

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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PREFACE 

Kosovo has become an extremely important international problem, although by its nature, it is a local Balkan separatist conflict.

Kosovo’s crisis has divided the international community much more than any other in the modern world, even more than Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem between the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo has existed for centuries, but the current crisis began with the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, when the West supported the Albanian armed separatist movement. It was an illegal military action carried out without the authorisation of the United Nations Security Council and it destroyed the international order that had provided peace in Europe for more than 50 years.

Despite the importance of the Kosovo crisis, there are very few studies or books available in the West which describe the real situation in this Balkan province. One of the probable reasons for this is the lack of any reliable facts about Kosovo, especially its economy.

After nine years as a UN protectorate, the Kosovo Albanians have recently unilaterally declared independence and secession from Serbia. Regardless of whether or not one is a supporter of independence, there can be no doubt that Kosovo’s declaration is illegal. It violates the Helsinki Final Act and the UN Charter, according to which the borders of a state cannot be changed without its consent. However, Kosovo’s borders have been changed without Serbia’s consent and without the authorisation and jurisdiction of the UN. This illegal declaration has violated the fundamental principles of international law.

So, is Kosovo really an independent state now as is claimed, with real sovereignty and genuine self-rule?

Kosovo’s declaration of independence has been based on the Ahtisaari Plan which meant supervised independence. The Ahtissari plan has been rejected in the Security Council and it is therefore an illegal document. Under the supervision plan, the powers of Kosovo’s government will be limited, because the European Union and NATO will have wide-ranging powers, including the authority to override the government’s decisions. In fact, the EU and the NATO will be the highest authorities in Kosovo. From being a UN protectorate Kosovo is becoming an EU one. So, it is a declaration of dependence rather than independence.

The United States and the other Western powers – such as the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany – have recognised Kosovo but fewer than 40 out of 192 UN members states have done so. Big countries such as Russia, China, India and Brazil have openly stated they will not recognise it. Also, twenty out of twenty-seven EU states have recognised Kosovo, whilst nine have not. This is a sizeable minority. Taking the world as a whole, only a minority of countries have recognised Kosovo. A state cannot claim to truly exist with only minority recognition.

The future of Kosovo will be determined first of all by two factors – the international community and Kosovo’s economy. In the international community there is no consensus in sight about Kosovo’s status and the province’s economy barely exists. Kosovo has a non-functioning economy with high unemployment, more than 50%, and relies almost entirely on foreign aid and money sent by Albanians from abroad. Kosovo is not viable as a state, as at present it is incapable of standing on its own feet. Most responsibility for such a state lies with the international administration that has been governing Kosovo for the past nine years.

There is no intention with this book to argue about the political side of the Kosovo crisis. It is above all an attempt to shed light on what the international community has really been doing there, as well as more about the economy of the province. In the end the economy will be the key to Kosovo’s survival.

In the book I have used the standardised name Kosovo and also for the cities. With those standardised names for the cities I have also given Albanian names for them where it is appropriate. The Serbs use the name Kosovo and Metohia for the province, because those are the names of the two regions that make up the province. The Albanians used to call the province only Kosovo, as it was in the former Yugoslavia’s Constitution in 1974, but in the last few years they started to use the name Kosova, which is a Turkish word.

A lot of people helped me in writing this book and I am grateful to all of them. However, I owe most gratitude to my brother Neboysha and to Sara Payne without whose encouragement and assistance this book could not have been written.

London,

May 2008

INTRODUCTION  

Apart from historians almost nobody in the world had heard of Kosovo, a small landlocked territory in the heart of the Balkans, until March 24 1999 when NATO started a bombing campaign against the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). More precisely, NATO bombed Serbia and her southern province of Kosovo. It was the first aggressive military action in the history of the Alliance.

The vacuum created by the lack of awareness about Kosovo, especially in the West, was filled by NATO’s propaganda machine. The endless stories about humanitarian intervention sent the message that NATO bombs were preventing an ongoing humanitarian catastrophy and protecting the human rights of ethnic Albanians in a part of the world associated historically with violence, hatred and barbarism. (1)

NATO claimed that this was the first humanitarian bombing. After 78 days of aerial onslaught, NATO came to an agreement with Belgrade and the bombing ceased. All sides claimed victory.

Soon after, however, it became clear that the reality was quite different, and more complex, than the claims made by all sides in the conflict. As an American military analyst said: From one tactical exercise we got a strategic problem. Cynics might say that many forgot an old adage that the problem with the Balkans is that they produce more history than they can digest. But, it seems, that this problem has huge consequences for others.

The first NATO bombs that fell in the spring of 1999 not only caused destruction on the ground, but also destroyed the international order that had ensured peace in Europe, and to a large extent, in other parts of the world, for more than 50 years.

Today, nine years after the NATO bombing and the international occupation of the province, Kosovo is a symbol of deep crisis in international relations and world order, much more so than Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Kosovo, not Iraq and Afghanistan, which has caused a direct political confrontation between the Great Powers, China and Russia on one side and the United States and the European Union on the other. Such direct political confrontation did not occur in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, at least not in public.

Kosovo has became a symbol of the disintegration of the international order, and also of the failure of today’s political elite in the world to build a new order on the political ruins of the Cold War.

On 17 February 2008 the Kosovo Albanians proclaimed independence under the supervision of the European Union and NATO which in the (Marti) Ahtisaari Plan was called supervised independence. (2)

However, Security Council Resolution 1244 is still in place which as far as the United Nations and international law are concerned, means that Kosovo is still part of Serbia. This has created chaos, and Kosovo is now in a legal vacuum. Nobody can be certain how this whole affair will end.

Kosovo is full of people and myths but above all, it is history that counts. Unfortunately, history has not been well-disposed towards this central part of the Balkans and it had left too many unhealed wounds. Myths are reality in Kosovo. It is not important whether they are based on lies or the truth. They are a part of real life in Kosovo, and they need to be taken seriously.

As Kosovo’s greatest Serbian writer, Grigorije Bozovic, said history turned Kosovo into a damned place with the power and unpredictability of an avenger’s gun. (3)

What is the reality of Kosovo? It seems there are several realities. There is the so called international reality which is mostly based on the views and preconceptions of certain policy creators in the West. They are using Kosovo as a sort of political experiment. Then there is the reality as perceived by the Albanians and the one seen by the Serbs. Neither of these corresponds to the only real reality – that is one in which the ordinary people of Kosovo live their hard lives, and to whom this book is in large part dedicated. It is a harsh reality.

Most historians regard Kosovo as a symbol of violence and ethnic hatred. Perhaps, it is easiest for them to put it that way, but it is not the whole story. And, if violence and hatred are the basic symbols of the region, how come it is still populated by both Albanians and Serbs? Although attempts were made in the past by the Serbian and Yugoslav authorities to balance the ethnic structure of the province, the number of Serbs is ever decreasing, and the ethnic picture has changed. Crucially, however, Serbs are there, they have not been exterminated. Albanians, of course, are there in far larger numbers. And yet ordinary relations between Albanians and Serbs are much stronger, and more intense than is generally understood.

A spot of history here! Serbs inhabited the territory of today’s Kosovo during the XIth and XIIth centuries. After they became Christians, they created the central part of medieval Serbia there. Kosovo wasn’t the first Serbian state in the Balkans, but it was there that Serbs defined their Christian and national identity, and for them Kosovo is their Jerusalem. At that time all Albanians were Christians too, but later, after the occupation by the Ottoman Empire, most of them converted to Islam.

In Kosovo, problems have always appeared when a third party has got involved, starting with the Turks and culminating with NATO. Kosovo has always been used as part of someone else’s agenda. It is the same today.

Albanians were the last among the Balkan peoples to start campaigning for national liberation during the Ottoman rule. Many of the problems in the Balkans derive from that historical late start, so to speak.

In 1878, Serbia and Montenegro were gaining international recognition of their independence. Bulgaria was about to go down the same road, and with Greece having already been independent since 1830, Albanians were organizing the first national awakening meeting known as the League of Prizren. At that time they were only seeking autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, thus being the last people to remain loyal to the disintegrating Empire.

There were some individual liberation movements among Albanians later on, though these were not successful. One of them was led by the great man of Kosovo Isa Boletini who was a close friend of the Serbian colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic Apis. Admittedly, Albanians were the first to liberate Skopje, today Macedonia, from Ottoman rule in 1911 but only for a short time.

After two Balkan wars, in 1912 and 1913, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the first Albanian state, today’s Albania, was created in the historical circumstances of that time, but the majority of ethnic Albanians were left outside the borders of the new Albanian state. Albania is one of the rare states sharing all its borders with its relatives who thus became foreigners to her. It became the new Balkan reality.

In 1913 the international community, at meetings in London and Bucharest, acknowledged that Serbia, among the victors in the two Balkan wars, had an historical claim to Kosovo. Today Serbia maintains that subsequent changes in the ethnic structure and numbers in the province cannot alter that acknowledged right.

That is what happened in the course of history. All the countries in the region had, and still have problems because of what was decided in 1913, but everyone has had to live with it. Greece, for example, used the example of the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II to evict almost a million Albanians mostly to Turkey. That was not a solution either. There are still almost 700,000 ethnic Albanians living in North Epirus in Greece. And also there are around 360.000 Greeks living in Albania.

You can not destroy a people. It is the lesson not only from the Balkans, but that region has experienced it more than most.

During World War II, from the perspective of the victors, Albanians in Kosovo were mostly on the wrong side, supporting the Germans and the Italians. At the end of the war one element accepted the Yugoslav Communist Party which at that time, was promising union with Albania. That union never materialised but the communist regime paid its debt to the Albanians. Kosovo was awarded the status of an autonomous province within Serbia, and later a kind of dual status in the Federation of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. During the era of socialist Yugoslavia Kosovo prospered as never before, or since. Some $17.5 billion were invested in the province, infrastructure was built and developed, and Kosovo jumped over the centuries so to speak.

But, old habits die hard. In the last decades of the former Yugoslavia, when Croatia and Slovenia, supported by some Western countries, were looking to secede from the Federation, the Kosovo Albanians were among the first to support the secession process. Partly they believed that the collapse of the Yugoslav federation might be an opportunity for them too. Nowdays almost nobody remembers that the first separatist government of the Kosovo Albanians was based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the very end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s. At that time Yugoslavia as a federation still existed. Slovenia was the first Yugoslav republic to break away from the Federation in 1991.

Incidentally, in February 2008, Slovenia during her presidency of the European union (EU) was leading the coordinated action for the declaration of Kosovo’s supervised independence. The Slovenian Ambassador to Kosovo said that Slovenia was in fact the first country to recognize an independent Kosovo because she did so twenty years ago, referring to that seccessionist government of Kosovo Albanians in Ljubljana. Interestingly, nobody from that government is represented among the political leaders in today’s Kosovo.

Following the established practice of using Kosovo Albanians as the political instrument of others, in the process of the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation, the key events were the huge separatist demonstrations in 1981, not the later rise to power of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic as is usually perceived in the West. Part of the Albanian political and social elite rose against Yugoslavia and Serbia, only one year after the death of Yugoslav communist leader Marshal Tito, at the very moment when they were living better than any Albanian population in the region, and wielded full power in the province.

In 2005 the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) published a book with references to secret reports from the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia that suggest CIA involvement in Kosovo during 1981. The old intelligence reports in the book titled From National Communism to National Collapse suggest that Albanian demonstrations were the very beginning of the end of Yugoslavia. The Kosovo Albanians’ revolt, according to CIA reports, would be useful in the coming collapse of Yugoslavia because Serbia would be more preoccupied with Kosovo while the other republics, in the west of the country, Slovenia and Croatia, would be making plans to secede.

Despite huge investments and legal solutions, first and foremost in socialist Yugoslavia, that secured a high degree of autonomy for Kosovo and an emancipated and equal status for the Albanians there (the Albanian Sinan Hasani was even the President of the Presidency of Yugoslav Federation) many people, especially the authorities in Yugoslavia and Serbia never managed to understand Albanians.

At that time, a very small number of people, in what was mostly a Slavic country, understood Albanians as a specific social community with their own ancient rules, historical experiences and human tendencies. A particularly hard period for the Albanian community were the last decades of the twentieth century when, with better living conditions, they were facing the challenges of modern life and new social relations.

There were not enough answers to the changes that had already affected them. The ancient system of family organization, rules of behavior according to the old common law and all the other things that had preserved them through the centuries began to disappear. A new organization of life was nowhere to be found. The identity of Albanians built up over the centuries slowly began to be lost.

What came into being was a vacuum filled only with a strong social energy. Those who dominate the Kosovo Albanians today grew out of that vacuum. When the authorities of the country you live in do not do what they should, somebody else will do it instead.

Few people, if any, cared about the specific characteristics of the Kosovo Serbs either. Almost nobody, for example, knows that the first political movement of the Kosovo Serbs, formed in the early 1980s in the