Making and Remaking the Balkans by Austin Robert Clegg;

Author:Austin, Robert Clegg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Others
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Conclusion

Kosovo’s path to independence was not the bloodiest in the Balkans – Bosnia’s was. Events between 1998 and 1999 in Kosovo cost almost 11,000 lives, with almost 1,700 people still missing. Moreover, Kosovo’s path to independence was certainly the longest, as it had declared independence in 1991. Rugova’s relentless pursuit of passive resistance and the solidarity of the parallel society should be lauded. But passive resistance yielded nothing, and the KLA took over. In the end, Kosovo did get lucky – for the first time in the twentieth century, just as the century ended – when NATO decided to intervene in 1999 to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. NATO effectively became the KLA’s air force. While Kosovo certainly should have been granted a kind of independence then, the international situation did not warrant such a bold and even visionary step. Albania’s breakdown in 1997 helped to arm the KLA but did serious harm to the Albanian cause, in that nobody trusted Albanians to build a democracy. As the Republic of Albania was hardly a success story, why create another Albanian state? Milosevic’s ouster in the fall of 2000 and the arrival of the darling of the West, Zoran Djindjic, as Serbia’s new leader, did not help the Kosovo independence cause, as we shall see in the epilogue.

The legacy of UNMIK is mixed. Given the amount of money spent and the numbers of experts sent, it must be judged a failure. Just like the politicians in the region, UNMIK staff stayed too long, got paid too much, and got too cozy. UNMIK did serve as a bridge between the chaos of the late 1990s and the basis for self-government. Less talked about is the legacy of a sort of cosmopolitanism, given how international the staff of the mission was. Kosovo is quite tolerant, and had the refugees streaming through the Balkans in 2015 gone through Kosovo, it is doubtful they would have been harassed or chased away, as they were in Bulgaria and Macedonia. UNMIK taught the locals some bad habits, especially in terms of accountability, as UNMIK was extremely opaque. The near-total absence of accountability still permeates Kosovo life today. Unquestionably, UNMIK was less intrusive than the OHR in Bosnia, but that meant that it ignored things that should have not been ignored. The events of March 2004 hastened status talks but also, like 1997, cast a shadow on Kosovo’s image, which came back to haunt the Kosovo Albanians during the negotiations for the Ahtisaari Plan. Coupled with the events of 1997 in Albania, it was clear that the Albanians could not entirely be trusted. As we shall see in a subsequent chapter, supervised independence morphed into compromised independence, as Kosovo’s sovereignty became more and more diminished and the elite really proved they were not up to the job.

The Ahtisaari Plan, which focused on the Serb issue, was flawed, but there was not much else on the table. Even before the plan was tabled, the Albanians had more or less already

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.