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Spectre of Partition Haunts Kosovo

03 September 2007   Kosovo experts warn that territorial division of province on ethnic lines would open up a Pandora’s Box throughout the region.

By Krenar Gashi in Pristina

The first round of new internationally mediated negotiations for Kosovo took place in Vienna on 30 August between delegations from Pristina and Belgrade and the international “troika” consisting of three Contact Group special envoys.

But while Wolfgang Ischinger, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko and Frank Wisner listened once again to the familiar demands of Kosovo politicians for independence, and to their rejection by Serbia, what really characterised the beginning of the new round of talks was the talk of partition coming from some of the diplomats.

While Ischinger himself said on 30 August that partition had “never been on the agenda of the troika”, a few days earlier, on 12 August, he conceded the troika was open to the possibility. ”If both sides are prepared to follow up on any option, it would be good for us”, he said.

Some EU diplomats have also been promoting what they call “out-of-the-frame ideas”, which is taken to mean solutions that have not been foreseen until now by the parties or the international community.

Maxim Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister, told reporters in Pristina on 28 August that the Netherlands would countenance partition of the province “if both parties agree and if that is considered to be a sustainable solution”.

The German defence minister, Franz-Josef Jung, disagreed. On 31 August he insisted that the issue would be neither considered nor discussed.

While EU seems to be divided regarding considering partition as an option, so too are the US and Russia.

The US troika member Frank Wisner told the Voice of America on 1 September that as far as he was concerned, the option of partition was not even on the table.

But a day earlier, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told reporters in Moscow that the Kremlin was ready to support any solution agreed by Pristina and Belgrade.

Officially, Kosovo and Serbia have both rejected the idea of partition, though the spirit of rejection is far stronger on the Kosovo side than in Serbia, where many officials and historians have discussed it as a way out of the current impasse.

Kosovo has been under UN administration since 1999 when NATO air strikes forced the Serbian authorities to withdraw.

A UN proposal for final status drafted by Finland’s Martti Ahtisaari, envisioning eventual independence, has not been endorsed by the UN Security Council owing to Russia’s rejection.

As a result, the parties agreed to return to the negotiating table for an additional 120 days of talks.

When talks were initiated in 2005, the so-called Contact Group of countries on the Balkans drafted three basic principles for Kosovo’s final status.

These were that Kosovo could not return to the state it was in before 1999, could not be permitted to unite with any other state –meaning Albania – and could not be partitioned.

Kosovo leaders want to stand by those three pillars. “We made it clear that the integrity of Kosovo is not negotiable,” Kosovo’s President, Fatmir Sejdiu, said after he met Maxim Verhagen. Sejdiu rejected partition as a dangerous idea, saying it would merely “open up many other issues”.

In spite of that, ideas continue to circulate on a potential division of the territory, allowing the northern part of Kosovo, including the municipalities of Leposavic, Zubin Potok, Zvecan and the northern part of Mitrovica, to seceded from Kosovo and remain in Serbia. The Albanian-dominated rest would then be granted independence.

However, Kosovo analysts point out that this would create many new problems in Kosovo and also in other recently pacified parts of the region, such as Presevo valley of southern Serbia and western Macedonia, which are mainly ethnic Albanian. If Kosovo Serbs were allowed to join Serbia, they might demand the right to split off from their states and join Kosovo.

Naim Rashiti, from the Pristina office of the International Crisis Group, ICG, said Kosovo Serbs would suffer if the mainly Serbian far north broke away. This is because most Kosovo Serbs live in scattered enclaves in the south, and in case of partition might have to move out of their homes.

Rashiti worries that the voices in favour of partition as an option are rising. “Partition is now in every diplomat’s mouth,” he said. “But a partition of Kosovo would open a Pandora’s Box and cause new secessions,” he added.

Albanian politicians in southern Serbia agree. Riza Halimi, head of the Party for Democratic Action in Presevo and a member of Serbia’s parliament, said: “It is logical that if the North secedes from Kosovo the [same] requests … will be reactivated among the Albanian population of Presevo valley.”

Ethnic Albanians living in the municipalities of Presevo, Medvedje and Bujanovac held a referendum in May 1992 demanding the right to unite their region with Kosovo.

Halimi insisted that Albanians from this region would have a right to demand secession from Serbia and unification with Kosovo in case of Kosovo’s partition. “Partition would cause a chain of reactions that would not be limited to Kosovo and Serbia but destabilise Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he noted.

Behlul Beqaj, a Pristina-based political analyst, concurred with this dark prognosis. “If Kosovo’s north secedes from Kosovo, it will not remain a Kosovo-Serbia border issue but it will reactivate other crisis in the region,” he predicted.

“Kosovo Albanians are not greedy for the territory and are not in a position to demand the attachment of the Presevo valley to Kosovo,” Beqaj told Balkan Insight.

However, that does not mean that Albanians in the Presevo valley and elsewhere will not reactivate demands for unification anyway. “Breaking the principles of the Contact Group will be a precedent for other unresolved ethnic issues in the Balkans,” Beqaj said.

There are already secessionist rumblings in neighbouring countries, involving Kosovo. The small Albanian-populated village of Tanusevci in Macedonia, for example, has already said it wants to unite with Kosovo.

According to the Macedonian daily newspaper Fakti of 24 August, Xhezair Shakiri, a former guerrilla commander, said locals in the border village, where the 2001 armed conflict in Macedonia started, want a referendum on the matter.

“If Kosovo is partitioned then the installation of the EU mission in Kosovo, as foreseen by Ahtisaari’s proposal will be impossible,” Rashiti added.

But, Rashiti concedes that however much Kosovo politicians try to formally keep the north within Kosovo’s borders, this will involve making new concessions in the negotiations.

Even if the north remains formally part of Kosovo, he observed, “the [Kosovo] government will never be able to control it. It will become a zone that is likely to break away after a period of three years”.

Beqaj, who proposes a confederation between Kosovo and Serbia as a solution for the disputed territory, said there were two visions of resolving Kosovo’s status on the table. One was a vision for the speedy integration of the Balkan countries into the EU without changing Kosovo’s current borders. Another was a backward-looking vision, involving the creation of ethnically pure nation states. “I hope the EU promotes the vision that looks to the future”, he said.

Krenar Gashi is BIRN Kosovo Editor. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.