Kosovo bravely bids for independence

GEORGIE ANNE GEYER

Kosovo bravely bids for independence

WASHINGTON — It’s a poor little corner of the world — long-oppressed, totally impoverished and pitifully isolated from the mainstream of the world — but last weekend tiny bleeding Kosovo washed itself up, stood tall and declared itself “independent.”

It was a grand moment for the longtime province of Serbia. Fireworks blasted through the somnolent winter skies, and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the anthem of the European Union, was embraced by Kosovo as its anthem as well. Many of the 2 million Kosovars, at least that 90 percent who are of Albanian descent, wept in the streets of this Balkan backwater. The 10 percent of Kosovo’s population that is Serbian largely hid away out of fear while their Serbian masters in Belgrade snarled threats of future retaliation for the world to hear.

History was made

Still, with the United States and Europe having taken the side of Kosovo against the Serbs, it was a great moment in history.

And now? Monday, when Belgrade had gone back to work and the Kosovars (an estimated 65 percent are unemployed) lifted their hungover heads to see if they could possibly find work any place east of Austria, Kosovo found it had indeed become “something” in the world.

The problem was what that something was.

UKosovo had become the most recent and best example of a dependent non-state of the world.

Kosovo has a prime minister, Hashim Thaci, formerly famous as a not-too-meticulous leader of the Kosovo Liberation Front fighting the Serbs. It has a moribund economy, and its security system is run by 16,000 NATO-led troops, while some 1,200 Europeans and Americans under agreement with the U.N. will man (and woman?) the justice and police systems. Essentially, Kosovo will live on the largesse of the E.U. and the United States. But by early Monday, the U.S., France and Britain had already recognized the new country, and a hundred more were ready to.

All of this is immensely preferable, notwithstanding, to what the Kosovars went through under Serbian rule until 1999, when the NATO air war under American Gen. Wesley Clark freed the province from immediate Serbian rule. In the ‘90s, the Serbs closed the schools and hospitals, forbade Kosovars from getting bank remittances or traveling abroad, and in general established a regime of terror that reminded one of Nazi Germany.

UBut after Sunday, too, Kosovo became what many analysts are calling a “frozen conflict.” These are conflicts involving small entities that generally want the kind of independence from a large mother country that Kosovo wants (and still does not have) from Serbia.

Orthodox Russia comes into the picture rather swiftly. As the Kosovo/Serbia problem progressed in recent months, the Kremlin, with its special historical ties to Orthodox Serbia, threatened to retaliate by recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regimes it supports inside its West-leaning former republic of Georgia in the Caucasus.

In fact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov went so far as to say, “The declaration and recognition of Kosovar independence will make Russia adjust its line toward Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”

At another point, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov warned that Kosovar independence would set a dangerous international precedent “that would definitely be beyond international law” and would be “something close to opening a Pandora’s box.” Ivanov further warned of a “domino effect” (shades of Southeast Asia in the ’60s) that could lead to more ethnic fracturing in the region of the former Yugoslavia.

UKosovo could also become a primary factor in the recoupling that is going on between Russia and Serbia.

Russia has already moved to acquire a controlling stake in Serbia’s national gas and oil company and plans the construction of a 250-mile stretch of pipeline through Serbia that will pump the natural gas of Gazprom, Russia’s energy giant, to European customers farther West, solidifying the relations between the two countries even further.

If this renewed relationship between Moscow and Belgrade continues (it was broken after NATO’s attack on Kosovo in 1999), then Serbia’s other goal — to join Europe in the E.U. — could become seriously unhinged.

We would then see the Serbian remnants of the former Yugoslavia surrounded by members of the E.U. (soon-to-come Croatia, Macedonia and Albania, and now probably Kosovo).

Size doesn’t matter

So, yes, Kosovo is only a little fellow, but the history of the Balkans shows us rather too repeatedly that it’s the deceptively small sagas there that cause the infinitely awful stories. The 1914 killing of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, in Bosnia’s Sarajevo by a Serbian terrorist, which started World War I, is more than a case in point.

It will not be easy for little Kosovo to take its place among the countries of the world, yet still its declaration constitutes an heroic moment in an era of less-than-heroic ones.

Universal Press Syndicate