So says Dukagjin Gorani, a chief aide to Kosovo’s Prime Minister-elect, Hashim Thaci.
Now that talks over Kosovo’s final status have broken down and ended in failure, it appears inevitable that Kosovo will unilaterally declare independence and formally break away from Serbia. There are fears of renewed violence, both against the Serb minority–who are reportedly preparing to flee when Kosovo becomes independent–and against ethnic Albanians. Attacks on culturally important sites are also a strong possibility. NATO, for its part, “will stay here to protect every Kosovo citizen, majority and minority alike.” Given the record of peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia, that should bring little comfort. A friend who visited Kosovo earlier this summer said that the UNHCR has set up refugee camps in anticipation of a crisis.
In portraying Serbia as being unequivocally against Kosovo’s independence–which isn’t entirely unfair, mind you–the media has glossed over the debate in Serbia over Kosovo’s future. Polls suggest that seven percent of Serbians support an independent Kosovo, which is the same amount who believe that Kosovo will be integrated into Serbia. The Serbian historian Dubravka Stojanovic puts the problem with the debate in Serbia this way:
As in all previous years, their [the Serbian political and intellectual classes] statements address only an imaginary Kosovo. During the parliamentary session at which the Resolution on Kosovo was adopted, no one (except the deputies of the coalition around the Liberal-Democrats) spoke about the concrete political questions that would be posed if by some miracle Kosovo were to remain in Serbia. No one spoke, for example, about how the Serbian army and police would enter Kosovo, given that only the presence of such instruments of force testifies to real national sovereignty. No one spoke about how Kosovo citizens would vote in Serbian parliamentary elections, or how the Serbian elite would deal with Albanian deputies in parliament and Albanian ministers in Serbian governments. What sort of educational system would there be? How would the Battle of Kosovo and the Balkan Wars be taught? Would it be in the spirit of ‘the only truth’, ‘our truth’, as our current educational authorities like to say? During all these years, ever since Kosovo was separated from Serbia, I have heard no explication of such questions, because no one ever mentions Kosovo’s population. What is talked about in such conversations is only ‘Kosovo’ - a Kosovo that does not exist in reality, a Kosovo without the people.
She isn’t the only one to understand that Serbia hanging on to Kosovo is a lost cause. Dragan Bujošević at Serbia’s B92 writes that “[realists] in Belgrade know the return of Serb rule in Kosovo is not an option. Serbia’s political elite, even the Radicals, know the vague illusion of sovereignty over its southern province is less than a fig leaf”. Desimir Tosić, a member of Boris Tadić’s Democratic Party, has said that “[nowhere] in the world today is it possible to run a territory on the basis of 3% of the population.”
Given that ethnic Albanians make up 92% of Kosovo’s population, have long been oppressed, and overwhelmingly want independence, you would think that liberals and the left would unanimously support the Kosovars in their struggle for self-determination, while opposing any violence directed against ethnic minorities, forced expulsions, the destruction of cultural and religious monuments, and so on. Think again.
Neil Clark (who is so against war that he finds it hard to condemn the extreme nationalists–no, not just Milosevic–who eviscerated a country and turned it into an abattoir, though you’ll never hear a word of support from him for Serbian anti-war organisations) is foaming at the mouth about “the U.S’s plan to dismember the former Yugoslavia” (never mind that an organised independence movement in Kosovo dates back probably to the 1960s and was about wanting Kosovo’s status in Yugoslavia to be changed from an autonomous province into a full republic–in other words, it has nothing to do with American imperialism); Lenny Lenin sympathises with “the perpetually harrassed and abused Serbs” and rightly notes the expulsion of around 200,000 Serbs from Kosovo, though he doesn’t mention the some 850,000 ethnic Albanians who were expelled from the province and the further 500,000 or so that were internally displaced in the late 1990s. Never mind the thousands that were simply murdered, or the up to 20,000 women who were raped. And it’s doubly ironic–or hypocritical–that ol’ Lenny fears an outbreak of terror on Kosovo’s Serbs considering that he supports violence against civilians in the form of the “Iraq resistance”, Hamas, Hizbullah, and a host of other organisations that he can contort himself into believing are “anti-imperialists”. These are only two examples, but it doesn’t take much searching to find a number of other cretinous individuals, generally of an “anti-war” disposition, parroting the line of the ethnic nationalists. It’s not difficult to spot a trend here.
This isn’t to excuse the KLA, who, let’s not mince words here, are terrorists, but this shouldn’t discredit the larger project of Kosovar independence. Moreover, it is reprehensible for self-described leftists to side with the vicious blood-and-soil ideology of Serb nationalism over a legitimate demand for self-determination.
