Free Kosovo, Week 2: soft landing = soft partition

by Richard Gowan | Mar 3, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia

It’s all gone a bit quiet on the Kosovo front.  The violence of week one has given way to… not very much.   When the most exciting piece of news is that Serbia has “retaken” a massive 30 miles of railroad in the north of the province, it’s hard to panic.  That’s not to underestimate the symbolism of railways in the Balkans: I recall a tedious train ride through Bosnia in 2003, during which we changed engine and crew when we crossed the internal boundary between the Serb and Bosniak regions, and again on entering Croatia.  As pretty much the only passengers were my brother and I, this seemed a tad pointless, but was doubtless a point of great pride…

But back to Kosovo.  Should we be relieved that it looks like a soft landing?  Yes, up to a point.  But it’s probably also a sign that the Kosovo Serbs (and Belgrade) have got what they were after: a de facto partition of the province.  Last week, the EU insisted that it would not accept any formal split between the Serb-majority north and Albanian-majority south.  But at the same time, EU personnel in the north were ordered out, and  Belgrade has been moving its people in.

NATO is still up there, but as I suggested last week, the Serbs can essentially get round it by avoiding any major violence that would justify a sustained military response.  A modus vivendi could emerge by which NATO patrols the area, but its guys don’t bother to get out of their vehicles – the Serbs will tolerate this, as they know that other NATO troops are protecting Orthodox sites in the south. 

That would probably suit a lot of Western governments just fine.  The most important piece of news for Kosovo today isn’t about Kosovo at all, but Iran: Russia signed up to the new sanctions resolution, signalling that this unpleasantness over the Balkans isn’t going to turn it into a universal spoiler in the Security Council.  Given the strains within the EU about what Kosovo could mean for “effective multilateralism”, newly-elected President Medvedev will be able to rack up some easy wins by looking constructive at the UN on other matters.  Western diplomats had already noticed that Russia made a point of looking for ways to be helpful on non-Kosovo issues after hopes of a negotiated settlement finally died in December.  Moscow has cleverly linked its opposition to Kosovar independence to its desire to see Cyprus reunified, which happens to be an EU priority too.

So all sides now have something to gain out of playing down Kosovo as a problem for a while (and as The Economist has noted, a period out of the news would help the new sort-of state attract investment too).   There will need to be some technical compromise on how to handle a transfer of policing and civilian tasks from the UN to EU – in an interesting new paper for ECFR on Mr. Medvedev, Andrew Wilson suggests that the EU should lean on the new man in the Kremlin to accept the transfer (tacitly or otherwise) as a sign of his goodwill.  If he can detach this operational question from the broader politics of Kosovar independence, he might just do that.  One way or another, it’ll probably be possible to find a viable fudge.

And in the longer term, expect to see the soft partition of Kosovo grow harder and – somewhere down the road – the international community  wondering if it might not be such a bad idea to put it on a more formal footing.  The idea might even come from the Kosovo Albanians, if it won them wider recognition.  Scenarios of this sort have been doing the rounds in Pristina for a year or more, after all.