World watching as Kosovo waits

As U.N. deadline passes, independence at issue

NTERVIEW. Thousands of Kosovars took to the streets of Pristina on Monday after United Nations negotiators failed to reach an agreement on the future of their province.
The demonstrators’ mess-age lacked such indecision: They want Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, and they want it now.
Thier adherence to that position and Serbia’s opposition to it are perhaps the only political certainties in the Balkan region at this point, as negotiators from the United States, the European Union and Russia remain divided on the possibility of an independent Kosovo — with Serbia’s EU berth on the line and a Dec. 19 U.N. Security Council showdown looming.
Nida Gelazis, a Kosovo expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, says that while diplomatic options may be exhausted, the war-weary Balkans may not let an opportunity for peace and prosperity slip by.

With no declaration of independence from the Kosovar government as of yet, how will the international comm-unity act as the new year approaches?
There’s now a letter between European Union member states saying that they should abandon future negotiations and just proceed with taking over the United Nations’ mission and coercing reforms in a Kosovo that maintains the same status it has now — without full independence but with what they call conditional independence. There’s no deadline for when “conditional independence” might end or if there could be an attempt to keep Kosovo in Serbia. That process may go on indefinitely, but that seems to be the hopeful scenario — where the latest status issue is delayed again, but Kosovo proceeds without status and the EU just takes over.

How has Kosovo’s government avoided declaring independence up to this point?
It seems like the international community has succeeded so far in preventing them from declaring independence. According to accounts, there is a clock in Kosovo that had been counting down to Dec. 10, and it had been believed that once the clock ran out, Kosovo would declare independence. There’s been a big diplomatic effort to postpone that because it would tie the international community’s hands in negotiating a possible settlement. The big problem is that the international comm-unity is not united on this issue, which is allowing Kosovo and Serbia to manipulate both sides. It’s also given a lot of power to Russia, since the EU is not united on a policy, and the U.S. doesn’t agree with EU countries.

Russia has sought to keep Serbia happy during the Kosovo negotiations. How much do Russia’s concerns about Chechnya affect that position?
I think that’s a concern of theirs. When you consider the complaint about granting independence to Kosovo or ack-nowledging independence there, countries that don’t want the settlement to happen are countries that are concern-ed about minorities within their lands who may try to declare independence. That’s why Spain, Slovakia and other countries had opposed Kosovar independence. But, if you consider the actual precedent, which is that, in Serbia, the Milosevic government acted violently toward a resident minority and started this whole process along, Chechnya would fall under that prece-dent because a very similar thing happened there — where the Russians violently resisted their push for inde-pendence.

Is further bloodshed in the Balkans inevitable?
I don’t think so. For reasons that are obvious, both sides have threatened bloodshed if they don’t get what they want. What we don’t know is how many residents of Kosovo and Serbia are willing to go through that again. They know what war is, and they know the costs. Everybody in that region has an eye toward becoming a member of the European Union, and there’s no rational reason for them to be left out. If Kosovo becomes independent, the reaction from Serbia will be negative. The question is, “How negative will it be?”

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