Kosovo-Serbia agreement: Guarding Borders or Guarding Faces

Recent reports by the president of Serbia and Kosovo that they are considering changing borders to reach a historic peace agreement has caused shock throughout the region.

Speaking at the Alpbach Forum in Austria, Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vuciq, and Kosovo's Hashim Thaci, have stressed the need for reaching a compromise solution that would put an end to the Kosovo issue through some sort of border correction or demarcation, and have called on the European Union to help those efforts.

Although few details or offers, the plan would include northern Kosovo municipalities Leposavic, Zvecanin and parts of Zubin Potok [minute Lake Gazivoda, a cruise water source for Kosovo] that would weigh Serbia. In exchange, parts of Presevo and Bujanovac in Serbia [the West of Corridor 10] would become part of Kosovo.

Without these details, the initiative has fuelled local and international speculation about the potential goals and impact of such a plan and has raised fears about new efforts for border changes on ethnic grounds in the region.

The idea has divided local, regional and international acters and commentators. While senior EU officials, including Federica Moghrin and Commissioner Johannes Hahn, do not dismiss this consensus solution that guarantees regional stability, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has denied any kind of border change.

The US, key actor in the region and staunch supporter of Kosovo's independence, according to National Security Adviser John Bolton, are open for exchange of territory between Kosovo and Serbia as part of the agreement.

The political scene in Kosovo remains deeply divided even on this issue, with opposition parties along with two of the three parties in the ruling coalition [including Prime Minister Haradinaj's party] that oppose discussion on border issues. Opposition parties, which also oppose Thaci's mandate to represent Kosovo in negotiations with Serbia, have initiated a resolution to protect the country's territorial integrity.

Similarly in Serbia, where Vuciqi's idea of “devijasion” of the borders has opened another clash between the government and the Serbian Orthodox Church, which opposes any division of Kosovo that would legitimise the former province's independence.

Many local and international commentators and researchers have voiced concerns that this could produce a chain effect in the region and revive conflicts. More than 50 organisations and experts in the Balkans have signed an open letter calling on Europe and the United States to oppose the exchange of territories.

While it is reckless and superficial to discuss the merits of the initiative and its implications without seeing the concrete plan, the ongoing debate raises cruise issues.

The first one, it is clear that 20 years after the end of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the spectrum of conflict also depends on the region.

Although the presidential initiative proposes a demarcation/reform of borders as a joint agreement that would see Serbia finally recognise Kosovo's independence and pave the way for both countries to enter the EU, many people fear it would create precedents to use elsewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example.

As such fear is not groundless, given the history of the region, the application of the precedent principle is limited.

Serbia, and the Bosnian Serb leadership have since begun, reiterated that Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence creates a dangerous precedent.

Yet, the main entity of Serbs in Bosnia, Republika Srpska, did not secede in 2008 or later.

Similarly, claims that Russia or others would use an eventual change of borders between Kosovo and Serbia as precedent are too weak.

Russia has indeed mentioned Kosovo <x0). In reality, however, it annexed the Crimea and recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008 in response to the change of regimes in Kiev and Georgia's efforts to force those provinces.

In fact, Kosovo has been used as a post-festum excuse. Russia's actions continue to be guided by strengthened geostrategic ambitions and by a weak and divided West, not by the “Kosovo President”.

As for Bosnia, it is clear that its problems stem from the 1995 Dayton and its internal political dynamics. Any agreement between Kosovo and Serbia can and should leave Bosnia out, as the Dayton process left out of the Kosovo issue.

These two issues have always been considered separately.

The fundamental problem in Bosnia is that if Dayton and its signatories do not provide sufficient guarantees for its functioning, there is no way that a Kosovo left in court will guarantee its long-term survival.

A peaceful reform of borders between Kosovo and Serbia would reinforce the argument against the division of Republika Srpska without the approval of all sides.

Second, the very circulation of the reform/demarking idea of borders in public, and the implications of EU leaders, confirms the fact that, despite the manage of “the abnormalisation of relations” and the supposed powers of conventionality, the EU has no clear vision of how to get Serbia to accept a multiethnic and independent Kosovo.

The dialogue helped by the EU that started in 2011 despite its greater achievement of normalisation of dialogue has produced other tangible results.

For a long time, dialogue has become a goal in itself and an element of marketing for EU officials to demonstrate their perceived success in using the EU's condition to resolve bilateral issues in the region.

Clearly, EU accession is not enough to make Serbia accept Kosovo within the existing borders.

The gross mistake the EU made in dialogue is its attempt to invest in strong leaders, which also happens to be authoritarian figures rather than promote the local Kosovo Serb agency and social dialogue in Kosovo.

The EU appears to have adopted the idea that the Serbian leadership stole a solution “to save its face”.

Unfortunately, saving the face of President Vuciq and Foreign Minister Daciq, close relatives of Vojislav Seheshel and Slobodan Milosevic, respectively, has taken priority before the need to attach importance to local Serbs in Kosovo.

Despite the position they make as pro-European reformists, both Vuciqi and Daciqi have publicly praised Milosevic, viewing him as a Serbian <x0rider”

Third, braved by international accession, Vuciqi and Dacic successfully revived the disastrous political idea of revising administrative borders around ethnic lines 30 years after Milosevic's rise in Serbia.

And yet, although it is clear that Serbia's main strategy was minimising international concepts of multiethnic states in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, the latest border correction proposal is not entirely in line with that logic.

Change of borders would leave most Serbs and their religious monuments and cultural heritage within Kosovo. They would also save Serbia from the Albanian majority in southern Serbia.

While such a proposal sounds absurd from a realistic political perspective, since Serbia effectively controls both regions, it is symptoms of three key falsehoods in Serbian nationalist ideology. The first one, it shows that Kosovo has become a cross-circulating “ ” in the Serbian nationalist disk without clear understanding and clear borders. As long as the religious key countries in Decan and Gracanica were used to mark Serbian “”, today we have a mountain hanging in Leposaviq and Zubin Potok that they love.

The second, for most of the 20th century, Serbian leaders have treated Kosovo as a matter of territory rather than people.

In the 1990s, Serbia ignored and later the press penetrated most of the Albanian population in an effort to forcibly resolve the Kosovo “issue. Today, Serbia is proposing the solution that completely leaves the Serb population out of Kosovo as well.

Last but not least, Serbia's readiness to give up the territories inhabited by the Albanians Presevo and Bujanovac demonstrates its unwillingness to consider ethnic Albanian citizens in Serbia equal and to fully integrate them into society and politics.

The fourth, despite many unbased and groundless fears from Kosovo's perspective, the current proposal for border correction can present the best opportunity in a situation given to close the issue of citizenship.

Although they have achieved much in implementing the Ahtisaari Plan and later engaged in additional dialogue in Brussels since 2011 to accommodate the needs of local Serbs, there is an increase in the sense in Kosovo that EU talks on normalisation of relations are empty and do not guarantee the integration of northern municipalities within Kosovo, nor give the country an international accession, or membership in the UN.

Therefore, the spectrum in Kosovo remaining in an international oblivion, and with an autonomous region similar to Republika Srpska in the interior, it seems to have prompted Kosovo leaders Thaci primarily to consider other options in the process.

Although the integration of Presevo and Bujanovac in Serbia within Kosovo has never been the strategic goal of Kosovo's leadership, in the future this could be used to spread controversy over the loss of territory in the north.

However, the proposal raises a large number of questions without answers about the possibility and/or legality of such an agreement, since Serbia does not recognise Kosovo.

Many followers of this solution argue that this agreement would not necessarily lead to abolishing the self-government rights of municipalities in Kosovo, or make Kosovo less multiethnic than it is.

More importantly, since they have felt a political and diplomatic change in some key supporters, and frustrated by the lack of progress in normalising relations with Serbia, supporters of the correction of borders in Kosovo seem untraceable by any potential regional implications or by Serbia's goals beyond Kosovo.

To make a historic parallel, when in 1989, Republican leaders in the Socoalist Yugoslavia did not hear of protests in Kosovo due to its revocation of autonomy and its political submission to Milosevic's Serbia, this time it is the leadership of Kosovo who is refusing to think beyond its calculations and interests.

As a result, the current situation exposes a number of political absurdities and paradoxities; a) while the proposal is potentially dangerous, it comes as a consensus proposal by local acters and not as an external implant; b) although it exposes the failure of the EU condition to recognise Kosovo within the existing borders, the key EU leaders have hailed it as a deal setting the way for EU membership for both countries; c) the reason that it promotes ethnic borders, even though it leaves Kosovo's relatively intact; although it is thënët to end the conflict between Kosovo and Kosovo, it endangers most of them in the cold <oh)

The Serbian bus, the presidential proposal and reactions to it expose a strong sense of doubt and distrust about a political solution that would include borders in the region that still arouse the spectrum of war.

Although it has circulated as a local initiative, which has disturbed international, local and regional political waters, the fate of the proposal depends on the consensus of great powers, rather than on the two presidents or the societies in question.

Therefore, it is in the hands of international relevans to decide that “saves the Serbian leader's face”, or save the existing borders in the region and push for a full normalisation of relations, including full recognition of Kosovo.

Taken by Balkan Insight