Western Balkans–Salience and emotion

Ethnic map of the Balkans. Note: Henry Robert Wilkinson published in 1951 the work Maps and politics: a review of the ethnographic cartography of Macedonia where he stated tthat this ethnic map, as most ethnic maps of that time, contained a pro-Bulgarian ethnographic view of Macedonia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Posted on May 10th, 2012 in the category Western Balkans by TransConflict

Progress toward more effective management of regional disputes will be possible only if leaders emerge inside the region capable and willing to channel their own and their followers’ emotions toward negotiations everyone accepts from the outset will lead to painful sacrifices on everyone’s part.

By David B. Kanin

In a region burdened by frozen conflict, current events are reminding everyone involved of the dangers posed by contested sovereignty.  Kosova’s ill-conceived decision to knuckle under to international pressure and accept the placement of an asterisk on its identity led Pristina to become aggressive in its demand that international overseers prevent Kosovar Serbs from holding local elections in conjunction with Serbia’s just-completed election.  Various Serbian responded to Pristina’s rhetoric by warning darkly of possible violence against Serbs in Kosova.  A few days after what proved to be relatively quiet elections – compared to what went on in France and Greece, Serbia appeared to be Europe’s island of political continuity, and not much at all went on inside Kosova – Kosovar interior minister, Bajram Rexhepi, still hinted at possible use of force north of the Ibar.  At the same time, Serbian police arrested ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia as a part of Ivica Dacic’s campaign strategy – Dacic was accordingly rewarded at the ballot box.

The internationals’ diminution of Kosova’s status put into high relief continuing disarray over what to do in the Balkans; the US and others continue to fail to bring to heel five EU members who refuse to recognize the new state.  Whether and how sputtering negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina resume depends on the outcome of the negotiations that will form the new government in Serbia on how Kosova decides to deal with its externally imposed diplomatic disadvantage.

Macedonia’s inter-communal condition is even more worrying.  Early EU membership is off the table – much as this author would wish it otherwise.  The “name” imbroglio with Greece ensures that the NATO summit in Chicago will be no more satisfying to Macedonia than was the Alliance’s poorly choreographed meeting in Bucharest in 2008.  The arrest of allegedly radical Jihadists for the murder of five Macedonian fishermen tests the stability of a piece of former Yugoslavia so far spared the horrors of major fighting.  The bombastic “Skopje 2014” project highlights ethnic Macedonian insecurity over their identity and reinforces ethnic Albanian irritation with being treated as less than a fully constituent political community.

It is worth remembering that Bosnia too remains a faltering Western enterprise.  The central state is illegitimate (or irrelevant) to two of the country’s three major communities and is too weak to provide much value to the Bosnjak plurality – witness the trade of insults and accusations over the Dobrovoljacka Street commemoration.

Prosecutor explains Mladic mix-up

The trial began — and then it stopped because of so-called “disclosure” problems. What’s up with that?

Prosecutors at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal today gave their first detailed explanation for the bungled opening of the Ratko Mladic trial. In a 42-page filing to the court, they blamed the fiasco on a computer “operator error” that had led to the non-disclosure of around 5,000 documents, or just over 3 percent of the disclosable trial record. They added that the omissions were largely “technical” in nature, and should not require a lengthy trial delay.

The trial, which began on May 16 with a summary of the prosecution case against the former Bosnian Serb military commander, was due to resume on May 29 with the calling of witnesses. But Judge Alphons Orie ordered an indefinite delay while he investigated “significant errors” by the prosecution in the disclosure process. Lawyers for Mladic have called for a six-month postponement of the trial, alleging “an unprecedented disclosure failure whose scope is without parallel in the history of the Tribunal.”

For those interested in the details, I have posted the latest prosecution filing here, along with the defense filing here, and e-mail correspondence between the prosecutor and defense here.

Kosovo & Pristina doesn’t really want negotiations on the north

Map of Kosovo UNMIK Mission (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Posted on May 22nd, 2012

The May 17 arrest of a young Serb employee of UNMIK’s north Mitrovica office suggests that the Kosovo Albanians have no intention of accepting a negotiated outcome for the region north of the Ibar River.

By Gerard M. Gallucci

The May 17 arrest of a young Serb employee of UNMIK’s north Mitrovica office removes any good reason for resisting the judgement that the Kosovo Albanians have no intention of accepting a negotiated outcome for the region north of the Ibar River. They do not want negotiations on the north, they just want the north. So, to head off any possibility of having to accept compromise, they will provoke the Serbs there into refusing to deal with them.

The young man arrested frequently travelled to visit family in the mixed north Mitrovica village of Suvi Do. To get there, he’d have to pass through an Albanian area. At that point, he would also have to pass by a unit of the so-called “regional” Kosovo police that EULEX allows free reign in this sensitive area. His routines were known. He could have been stopped at any time, as any of the Serbs living there can be. The decision to arrest him at this point on “suspicion” that he was involved in a demonstration in April to prevent the Kosovo Albanian police from setting up another provocative checkpoint – where there had just been a deadly explosion – was clearly political. (EULEX has still not managed to release any information on who might have been responsible for the explosion.) Many, many Serbs turned out for this. The targeting of a local UNMIK employee also allowed Pristina to take another shot at the UN office in north Mitrovica.

A cynic might say that the arrest was Pristina’s way of “recruiting” Serbs to take part in its “dialogue” over the north that it plans to unilaterally launch in September. The truth, however, is more basic than that. The Kosovo Albanians do not want to negotiate over the north, they want to have their “rule of law” imposed there so that they can use it to enforce more “returns” and eventually push the Serbs out entirely. They expected the internationals to do this for them; first UNMIK, then the ICO and EULEX. Having failed in that, they have mounted steady provocations since July 2011. Now they see the internationals pushing them to talk with the northern Serbs. So they provoke the Serbs, either to set off violence that they can use to justify new repression or to simply strengthen the hands of those Serbs opposed to talks.

Millet, nation, community

Български: Етнографска карта на Европейска Турция на Ернст Равенщайн. English: Ernst Ravenstein’s Ethnographical Map of Turkey in Europe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Posted on April 3rd, 2012 in the category Western Balkans by TransConflict

As a signifier, Bosnjak – which is gaining traction as a national identity in Sandjak (in both Serbia and Montenegro), and among Balkan Muslims in Western Europe – is coming to connote a political identity associated with access to state power, “European” credentials and Islamic legitimacy.

By David B. Kanin

“Arab Spring” works too well as a simple slogan; the term permits various protagonists to appropriate fluid, diverse, and interacting developments to serve very different agendas.  Brussels and Washington congratulate themselves as being the indispensable models for democracy and cultural diversity.  This goes beyond government propaganda – one NGO maven was cited in the Washington Post as saying Egypt (for example) had no alternative to moving forward in cooperation with the United States.

The “Occupy” phenomenon, which exists more as twittered electrons than as an effective popular movement, embraces Arab revolts as part of its rhetoric of global revolution.  Western Occupiers, however, have yet to demonstrate anything like the efficacy of those who organized so well and sacrificed so much last year in the Middle East and North Africa.  Asserting that their lack of organization and strategic coherence are strengths rather than weaknesses will get the much less than 99 percent who take to US and European streets only so far.

In turn – outside of Tunisia, perhaps – some of the Arab heroes of 2011 are finding themselves eclipsed by savvy politicians and opportunists associated with old regimes or patronage networks (to include traditional regional and tribal configurations).  Activists in Egypt and elsewhere could suffer the fate of those who drove revolutions in 1789, 1848 and 1968.  Some eventually could follow the example of Serbia’s Otpor, which adjusted to its post-Milosevic popular rejection by translating the credit it gave itself for the events of October 2000 into an entrepreneurial credential used to advertise services to would-be revolutionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

War crimes and proconsulship in the Balkans

Image via Wikipedia

Posted on March 8th, 2012 in the category Western Balkans by TransConflict

The logic of contemporary post-war intervention and proconsulship in both Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina is impossible to divorce from concepts of collective national guilt.

By Matthew Parish

Political liberalism is a tradition within international relations that finds its origins in the thinking of US president, Woodrow Wilson. An academic and an idealist, Wilson thought that relations between states could and should be based upon moral principles rather than the brutal and ever-shifting vaguaries of the balance of power that characterised European diplomacy in the nineteenth century.  This ideology has recurrently infected US politics, from the drive to promote decolonisation in the aftermath of World War II to the fight against communism in Indochina. It has also been a pervasive theme of western foreign policy in the Balkans since the end of the Cold War. As Yugoslavia disintegrated into bloody violence, US President Bill Clinton’s team of advisors determined that some sides were more responsible than others. The Serbs and to a lesser extent the Croats were brutal butchers, while Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians were for the most part victims of aggression inflicted by others.

This factual conclusion shaped the US administration’s moral vision of how post-war Balkan political geography ought to be configured. Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats must not be rewarded for their aggression. Bosnia must remain a unified, multi-ethnic country, notwithstanding the efforts of two of its three ethnic groups to tear the territory apart. By contrast Serbia must be dismembered, because Serbs cannot be trusted to treat their Albanian minority properly. This inference – from atrocity to moral outcome – would have suited Wilson’s reasoning admirably.

The premise of this argument – that Serbs in particular where disproportionately barbarous – is contested, but significant empirical evidence in its favour exists at least in the Bosnian case. Atrocities committed against Muslim civilians in Srebrenica, Brcko, Omarska, Zvornik and other places were broadcast around the world and shocked the conscience of the international community. The siege of Sarajevo is cited as another heinous war crime, and the arbitrary shelling of a city of half a million people for three and a half years was a shocking cruelty. Sieges usually are so. The majority of commentators accept that Serb forces were disproportionately responsible for the carnage of the Bosnian war. Whereas the population of Bosnia in 1991 was 44% Bosniak, 31% Serb and 17% Croat, the number of deaths in the Bosnian war were 66% Bosniaks, 25% Serbs and 8% Croats. Thus relative to population sizes, Bosniaks suffered disproportionately while Croats were disproportionately fortunate.

Serbia wants to join global counter-terrorism pact

Image via Wikipedia

15. February 2012. | 08:46

Source: Tanjug

Serbian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Ivica Dacic stated Tuesday that Serbia wants to join the global counter-terrorism pact.

Serbian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Ivica Dacic stated Tuesday that Serbia wants to join the global counter-terrorism pact.

Dacic conveyed this position to the Australian Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism Bill Paterson in the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Serbian Interior Ministry released in a statement.
Serbia would like to join the global counter-terrorism pact, in which it would assist the tracking down of criminals in cases such as the recent one relating to an Australian citizen born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dacic said.

Dacic kicked off Monday a visit to Australia by a meeting with Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Chris Bowen on the possibilities of introducing visa facilitation for Serbian citizens.

Kosovo – another attempt to abolish the UN in the north?

Image via Wikipedia

Posted on February 10th, 2012 in the category Kosovo by TransConflict

Should the Kosovo government end funding of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) Administration in Mitrovica (UAM), it will cut-off one of the few institutional linkages between north Mitrovica and Pristina.

By Gerard M. Gallucci

The Pristina press is reporting on secret meetings between the Kosovo government, the US ambassador and chief of the International Civilian Office (ICO), Pieter Feith, on a new plan to push the UN out of the north. According to Koha Ditore, the three have agreed to close the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) Administration in Mitrovica (UAM) that administers north Mitrovica under UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Koha Ditore says it has the document, titled “Kosovo Government carries over the financing of the municipal services in the north from UAM to AONM.” It refers to an action plan aiming at the closure of UAM by March 31 and its replacement with an “Temporary Administrative Office for North Mitrovica” (AONM) under the authority of Pristina and to be placed in the mixed neighborhood of Bosniak Mahalla. The plan is said to contain 10 actions which were due to begin implementation early this month. Space and equipment for the AONM were to be secured by February 10th, with a meeting with the UNMIK SRSG on the 17th to inform him that the Kosovo government would cease funding UAM.