The United States and the European Union were the midwives attending the birth of Europe’s newest country this week. Brussels now takes on the role of foster parent, attempting to raise its infant ward to adult statehood.
It is a tall order, the EU’s toughest ever. Sunday’s independence declaration launches it on its most ambitious exercise in state-building.
The EU policy and actions are hugely contentious and divisive — politically, legally, practically and morally.
Just when it is striving to concoct common foreign policies, Europe is split between those who support a separate Kosovo state, those who oppose it and those sitting on the fence. The policy has triggered a crisis in relations between Brussels and Serbia. Moscow, Serbia’s main backer, is also exploiting the international equivocation over Kosovo to try to undermine EU unity.
‘This will be an international state of emergency,†predicted Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson.
Over the next four months an 1Â 800-strong European state-building mission, comprising police, judges, lawyers and administrators, will replace the lacklustre UN mission in Kosovo.
A French general, Yves De KermaÂbon, will head the so-called Eulex operation, aimed at basing Kosovo on the rule of law. The Nato-dominated K-For peacekeeping force will effectively be a European military operation. A Dutch diplomat, Peter Feith, will oversee the European protectorate, replacing the UN’s Joachim Ruecker. The EU is already the biggest international donor to Kosovo, having spent €2-billion. It plans to spend €330-million more by 2010, making Kosovo the biggest per capita beneficiary of EU largesse.
There are suspicions that the EU is biting off more than it can chew. ‘The transition will be very dangerous. There could be a vacuum,†said Carl Bildt, the Swedish Foreign Minister who held international posts in the Balkans in the 1990s. ‘The UN people are sitting on their suitcases waiting to go, but the EU people are not there yet. We don’t have assets on the ground and we’re not sufficiently prepared.â€
A senior diplomat who played a key role in the negotiations queried whether the EU was equipped to cope with unrest, especially in the Serb-controlled north. ‘That’s the area of trouble. How can you prevent it? Will we be able to keep order on the ground?â€
Apart from the practical and operational difficulties, there are big questions about the legal basis for redrawing international borders to create a new state, and for the European mandate in Kosovo.
The US and the Europeans wanted a UN mandate. But the Russians made sure that was not available. The West argues that Serbian behaviour — the construction of a police state in Kosovo in the 1980s, mass repression of the Albanian majority and Belgrade’s war, which drove hundreds of thousands of Kosovans from their homes and left thousands dead — invalidated the Serbian claim on retaining Kosovo.
The Serbs and the Russians counter that the UN Security Council, which ended the 1999 war and authorised the UN takeover in resolution 1244, affirmed ultimate Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. Indeed, knowledgable European officials say that the Finnish envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, who negotiated the war’s end with Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, promised Belgrade continued sovereignty, which was one reason that Milosevic agreed to the peace terms.
The Europeans, by contrast, insist that 1244 enables both the European mission and Kosovo independence. A confidential four-page analysis by legal experts at Britain’s Foreign Office, obtained by The Guardian, finds that the EU mission is legitimate unless the UN rules otherwise and that the UN resolution does not preclude Sunday’s act of secession.
‘Nothing in 1244 determines or constrains the outcome of the final status process, nor does anything in 1244 exclude independence,†the document states.
‘When we get to UDI [unilateral declaration of independence], it will be in a situation where every possible effort has been made to reach a mutually agreed way forward, but every possible effort has been frustrated. Acting to implement the final status outcome [independence] is more compatible with the intentions of 1244 than continuing to work to block any outcome where everyone agrees the status quo is unsustainable.â€
The new state is to be established on the basis of the independence terms drafted by Ahtisaari over 18 months of the failed negotiations he mediated between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians. The Europeans are to oversee implementation of the plan, which provides for far-reaching decentralisation and autonomy for the Serbian minority in Kosovo.
The benefits for the Serb minority can only be enjoyed if the Serbs take part in the governance and institutions of an independent Kosovo. This will not happen, at least in the short-term, since Belgrade is ordering Kosovo Serbs to boycott the new state and pursue an informal partition. —