2011: Kosovo: Time for a New Approach

I left Kosovo in October 2008 with some encouragement from the UNMIK leadership and DPKO.  (I transferred to UNMIT in East Timor as chief of staff.)  But I continued to follow events in Kosovo, contributing pieces to TransConflict, and had visited northern Kosovo in June, 2011.  I can't quite remember how the invitation came up to testify in November to the US Congress on Kosovo but I did.  Here follows the text of my comments to the Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, Committee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representative.  (Note:  The Quint refers to the Contact Group on Kosovo -- the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Russia -- without Russia, which opposed Kosovo independence.  EULEX is the EU's rule of law entity in Kosovo and its police.)

(Note:  All documents posted in this space can be and enlarged and downloaded by clicking on them.)



 

Kosovo 2007: Understanding the North

Following up the previous entry, from my journal for November 27, 2007.:


Had to go to Pristina today for lunch with the chief DPKO guy for Europe, who encouraged me to keep doing what we are doing and to let them know when UNMIK HQ strays into anything that will upset the apple cart in the north. They liked my dissent messages and share our view that the basic thing is to get the UN out of here before the real crisis hits. That means before Kosovo becomes a failed state and the north fully partitions. The UN New York plan is to somehow squeeze between competing pressures from the West and Russia to leave five months after the UDI expected in the 2nd half of January, turning things essentially over to the EU, before it fully understands what it will be getting. I suggested we won't be able to last five months.


The second code cable I drafted follows here:

Fears of a Kosovo Partition (July 2006)

By mid-2006, Western concern over the unstable Kosovo situation had come to take the form of UNMIK Pristina worrying over a possible move by the northern Kosovo Serbs to implement a "hard" partition of the north to preempt an expected unilateral move by the Kosovo Albanians south of the Ibar to declare independence from Serbia.  (In the event, the northern K-Serbs never did seek partition -- though they hoped, and still hope, that Belgrade would thus save them -- while the K-Albanians did take the first move by declaring independence in February 2008.)  UNMIK's HQ stood in the middle of the K-Albanian capital of Kosovo -- Pristina -- and was under the direct influence of the Western countries (and especially the US and UK) which fully supported the K-Albanian position.  (At the US Office's July 4th celebration that year, the head of the office publicly called the northerners that UNMIK Mitrovica worked with "troublemakers.)  Under those influences -- channeled by the Office of Political Affairs (OPA) -- the UNMIK leadership grew quite paranoid about a northern partition.  OPA prepared a strategy paper outlining how UNMIK might work to prevent it.  OPA drafted a Code Cable in July to be sent to New York to cover the paper.  I don't remember UNMIK Mitrovica being given the chance to be involved in the preparation.  However, the PDSRSG was not unaware of the realities of the north so the OPA paper had to recognize that UNMIK had little to work with beyond continued diplomacy and peacekeeping.  In the event, in late July, he and I had the opportunity in Vienna to brief senior Western officials and Martti Ahtisaari (the UNSG's Special Envoy for Kosovo negotiations, UNOSEK) on the north.  It became clear that the Western dictum against partition was little more than words.  The draft code cable follows.  (I'm not sure it was sent.)  The full draft strategy paper is too long to provide here.

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The 2013 Brussels Agreement and the Implementation Plan

As noted in Wikipedia, the Brussels Agreement was made between the governments of Serbia and Kosovo on the normalization of their relations. It was negotiated and concluded, although not signed by either party, in Brussels under the auspices of the European Union. The negotiations were led by Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dačić and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi, and mediated by EU High Representative Catherine Ashton. The agreement was concluded on 19 April 2013.

Actually there does seem to have been an Implementation Plan initialed by the two leaders.  (I think it's them, but see for yourself below).  And relations have not be fully normalized until now and the plan never implemented.

A Map for a New North Mitovica municipality in 2006

I prepared this map in 2006 for Martti Ahtisaari, the UNSG Special Envoy for the negotiations over Kosovo status between Belgrade and Pristina.  I was serving as the UNMIK Regional Representative for Mitrovica (and northern Kosovo).  I had met Ahtisaari some 20 years previously while working on Angola.  We met in June in UNMIK HQ in Pristina and had other meetings during the summer.  One of his staff asked me to prepare the map which I delivered to Ahtisaari's team before the year's end.  It was supposed to balance the ethnic realities by giving the K-Albanian South Mitrovica a bit of the north while dividing the territory in a way acceptable to the majority K-Serbs in the north.  It was predicated on an eventual agreement in the UN Security Council on the status of Kosovo, some acceptable form of autonomy or "independence."  Despite Ahtisaari's best efforts, the US and Russia could not agree.  Pristina declared independence unilaterally in February 2008.  Ahtisaari later became President of Finland.

The light red line was the existing border of Mitrovica (which spanned the Ibar River).  The darker red line would have been the new border with the Serb majority North Mitrovica to the east and a mixture of Albanian and Serb villages as part of South Mitrovica to the west.  The area north of the Ibar were other Serb-majority municipalities