Now that it looks likely that Kosovo is heading for some sort of de facto partition, there’s a sense of weary inevitability abroad. Of course this was coming, the argument goes, and it won’t be long before some other Balkan backwater is trying redraw its border – Tim Judah has a typically excellent summary of the possible hot-spots here. I suspect that one of the medium-term results of events in Kosovo will be that anyone who talks about minority rights and reconciliation is going encounter a frosty reception in foreign ministries for quite a while. “We spent a decade promoting ruddy ‘education for all’ in Kosovo,” will come the answer, “and what did we get? Bunch of beardies yelling obscenities at our troops, that’s what!”
I’m pretty skeptical about the vast majority of youth reconciliation initiatives, community-based peacebuilding and the like, and my skepticism is based on (admittedly limited) experience of minority rights work in the Balkans. But I have just come across evidence that suggests that, until the middle of last year, Kosovo was making genuine progress towards being a tolerant, multi-ethnic society. That has fallen apart in the last six months in the run-up secession – but leaves some hope that, once the current kerfuffle is over, a pluralistic Kosovo might function.
This evidence comes from one of the very few international projects in Kosovo that has always worked pretty well: the “Early Warning Report” series of quarterly opinion polls run by UNDP and USAID across the province. These correctly showed a massive loss of public faith in the UN administration prior to the (otherwise largely unforeseen) March 2004 riots that threw the internationals into confusion.
By contrast, the polling data from mid-2006 to mid-2007 – essentially the period that the West was pushing for a UN-mandated deal on Kosovo’s independence – suggested that both Kosovo Serbs and Albanians were starting to accept pluralism:
- By the second quarter of 2007, half of Kosovo Serbs surveyed said they’d be happy to work with Albanians – two thirds would be happy to live on the same street, and 80% would be happy to live in the same town.
- Kosovo Albanians were less keen on cohabitation, but only a fifth of them said that inter-ethnic relations could “never” be normal. Roughly half said that they’d be normal in the near or distant future – the same was true on the Serb side, although there was a tendency to say it’d be “distant”.
- So even if it wasn’t exactly an inter-ethnic love-in (quite literally as the one thing virtually no respondents of either background would contemplate was inter-marriage) at least there was a vague sense of moving in the right direction. And, crucially, most people didn’t think it was heading the wrong way. In the first half of 2005, still shaken by the previous year’s riots, up to 96% of Kosovo Serbs said they thought relations were “tense and not improving”. That fell to 10% by mid-2007 (the Albanian community seemed more relaxed on this score throughout, but then they had less to lose from things going haywire, or so it seemed at the time).
Alongside these trends there was evidence that both Serbs and Albanians were growing more trusting of NATO and the UN. Had Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians come to some sort of compromise on independence, it might have all gone rather smoothly. Even if the Security Council had ruled that Kosovo was independent in mid-2007 over Belgrade’s objections, these figures suggest there was a viable base for a tolerant (or at least tolerable) settlement inside Kosovo.
There would still have been trouble in the Serb-majority north – the figures were far less promising there than among those Serbs living in enclaves in the rest of the province. Perhaps partition was inevitable. That’s what a lot of UN officials were predicting. But they also noted that, among the enclave Serbs, pragmatic entrepreneurs were getting bored of their dogmatically anti-Albanian politicians.
But the final tumble towards independence through the latter half of last year reversed the positive trends. By the third quarter of 2007 (the last period we have results for) fewer than 30% of Kosovo Serbs said they’d work or even live near Albanian. Nearly two-thirds said relations would never be normal. A similar number said relations were tense and worsening – faith in NATO/UN collapsed.
Albanian opinion shifted less dramatically, although the trends were generally mildly negative. Unsurprisingly, the realisation that Kosovo was headed for a unilateral declaration of independence was a real shock to inter-ethnic relations. But, before one returns to cliches about ancient ethnic hatreds, it’s worth underlining this basic fact: an inter-ethnic modus vivendi was emerging in Kosovo before independence got messy. If the Albanians are clever, and Belgrade isn’t too stupid in the months ahead, it may be possible to salvage parts of that.
