Swiss newspaper: Kosovo given Valley, Serbia north

In a comment published Friday, the Swiss newspaper «Neue Zürcher Zeitung» requires radical change of the international community's policy to the Kosovo issue. Commentary author Andreas Ernst has for years engaged in almost every presentation of changing Kosovo's borders. In his comment, he writes that Kosovo has unilaterally declared independence «». This is not true, because the status settlement process has been multi-year-old and UN-controlled report Kai Eide, the Martti Ahtisaari plan, the mediation of «troika» (an EU diplomat, one of America and a Russian). The Russians and the Serbian side, of course, have been participating in this whole process. Dialogue. 

Ahtisaari's plan has also been formulated with the participation of the parties. When the Finnish diplomat has cited independence, which has all been clear, Russia too had accepted the Contact Group principles that in Kosovo there can be no return to the pre-1999 situation, Belgrade and Moscow have abandoned the diplomatic train and have decided to reject independence. So it's not about unilateral declarations of independence, it's about declaring independence with the consent of most of the international community. The author of the comment does not take this into account, when he stresses that the West in Kosovo acted as a benevolent «hegemon», imposing the solution on the parties.

Now, according to the Swiss newspaper, the EU must change approach: Brussels should prohibit only the use of violence and impose them to legitimise their agreement with referenda. Anything else, the commentator writes, let the parties handle it on their own. And what seems to be the solution: division, border change, because, as the author thinks, with Kosovo's secession from Serbia the international community has already changed Serbia's borders. So now the next taboo needs to fall, borders change and if the parties agree to exchange territories even north to Serbia, as Presevo and the Kosovo district. It ignores the fact that Kosovo, even under Socialist Yugoslavia, has had its borders, has been a federal entity. Serbia has committed aggression against Kosovo when it has suspended Kosovo's autonomy and established a military regime and an apartheid system. The author silences this important aspect.

The comment author does not hesitate to call the international community hegemon, but the proposal he makes for drawing borders in the Balkans reminds a arrogant neocolonialist who shares Balkan lands. Consequently, the comment author says Kosovo must be divided, but by no means Macedonia and Bosnia. How logical? If a state like Kosovo destroys for 400,000 northern Serbs, with what argument can Albanians in Macedonia (over half a million) be asked to live in this country? The partitioning of Kosovo will, however, give support to trends for the defined burial of Bosnia and the secession of the so-called Republika Srpska from this state.

In his fury the author says five EU states do not recognise Albania's independence, thus confusing Albania with Kosovo. If the desire of 40 thousand Serbs in the north to live in Serbia is great, as the author underlines, then what about the wishes of not the few Albanians who tomorrow can seek union with Albania? With this respect the author, who also has no answer to what will be the future of other Kosovo Serbs if Kosovo divides? Will Serbs in Anamorawa have any future at all? Pristina suburb? In Shrptz? The Iber River lives around the majority of Kosovo's Serb minority. Not in the north, but in the central and western part of Kosovo are the most important monasteries of the Serbian Orthodox Church. /dialogplus/