Ahtisaari: Serbia was like a thief who stole Kosovo's wallet, so everyone knew independence was inevitable

In a confession in October 2008, several months after Kosovo declared independence, Ahtisaari in front of the audience following Nobel Peace Prize accession and shows an example of how he saw the negotiations.

Let me give you an example of how I look at the negotiations for Kosovo, because people have a completely wrong impression that we just sit there, I as mediator, here the delegation from Serbia and the delegation from Kosovo. People expect negotiations to mean that we must somehow find a compromise between the two. But, the situation very often in negotiations is that, let's take an example, that Serbia is like a thief who stole the portfolio from Kosovo”, Ahtisaari says in this presentation.

And if I'm a mediator, I'm not advising that the Serbian thief can decide for himself how much money he'll give to the one who stole the wallet. He should give you the whole fucking wallet and then probably go to jail for what he did. So this is what often negotiations are. You must do what is right”, the former Finnish president says away.

According to him, things went so far that the only solution was left, and all -- Belgrade, Pristina, Kosovo Serbs -- knew since the first quarter of 2006, when the five Contact Group members, all Western members, told these two Kosovo sides and Serbs as follows.

There were eight private messages, I won't bother you and the public to read them all, but I'll read the first one: The unconstitutional removal of Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, and the tragic events that followed and resulted in Kosovo's international administration have led to a situation in which Kosovo's return to Belgrade rule is not a applicable option. Everyone knew independence was coming, but Prime Minister Kostunica (former Serbian prime minister) and his company acted as if they had not heard what they told them. Well, you know, Serbs think that Kosovo is their wallet and you've taken it off of them”, Ahtisaari has said.

He is then asked by the moderator for a UN resolution, respectively, of the Security Council, in which it said Yugoslavia would never be disbanded. He continues that there are two sides of this story, but Ahtisaari's response is quick and clear:

No, not two sides of history, there's only one side of history. Because, in 2005, the General Assembly accepted the principle, the responsibility to protect itself. If a dictatorial leadership in any country behaves the way Milosevic and his company behaved towards Albanians in Kosovo, they lose the right to control them. And that's it. That was it”, which was the former UN mediator's response to Kosovo's status. /Democracy. com/