Is partition the answer?

Is partition the answer?

Bosnia can never be a fully functioning, viable, and dynamic state while saddled with its current Constitution and other aspects of the Dayton Peace Agreement.  Serbia lives under the shadow of growing Radical influence, disaffection with the West and its conditionality, and seemingly unbridgeable differences among the parties considering themselves to be "democratic." It is hard to see how, at least in the short term, this can end well.

Macedonia's future (and real peace in Southern Serbia) depends very much on whether extremists in Kosovo will be contained or will resume their efforts to foment revolution. Be sure that the idea of a "Greater Kosovo" is alive and well.

The fact remains, however, that Kosovo is a major source of the current instability in the Balkans and directly or indirectly impacts on all of the regional problems outlined above. It is in everybody's interest that it be "solved" in a way, which contributes to regional instability instead of the opposite.

Kosovo's fate was actually sealed when immediately before and during the initial phases of the NATO Air Campaign, Slobodan Milosević's government decided to solve the problem once and for all by forcing hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians to leave the country. It was the video images of these refugees pouring across the border into tent cities, that both provided the rationale for the NATO campaign to continue (there was widespread unease among member countries about it to begin with and it would have been difficult or impossible to sustain without those images) and also convinced many key players in the International Community that Serbia had forfeited its right to Kosovo.

Opinions were formed at that time that have not changed, despite the democratic transformation in Serbia itself. Members of the International Community, including from the United States, made many statements that helped to convince Kosovo Albanians that Kosovo would inevitably be independent.

It is absolutely clear that the decision on the future status of Kosovo will be a form of conditional independence. That has been telegraphed ad infinitum by leading members of the Contact Group in public and private sessions. There are not and never were "negotiations" in Vienna about Kosovo. This is a play, written and directed by the Contact Group and UNMIK in which each actor has their role to play. It was really all about "form" and not about "substance" at all. The next stage of the play is when the UN/Contact Group arbitrarily announces its decisions. The only issue is whether this particular play should be called a tragedy or a farce.

Serbian government's President of the Kosovo Coordination Center, Sanda Raskovic-Ivić, recently made a statement on BBC that if the parties could not in the end agree, some sort of partition would be a fit solution.  She should be congratulated on making the statement for two reasons: first, it united all parties in the region and internationally on an issue for the first and perhaps only time: everybody came out against it!  But secondly, for throwing on the table a different approach that has never been fully and fairly analyzed.

It is not a new concept. Partition, cantonization, and the establishment of entities were all in theory legitimate options to consider. Because the reality is that there are absolutely no good options for Kosovo. Every alternative has significant downsides and the potential to make the overall regional situation worse, not better. Because of that, in 2001 and 2002 I persuaded the State Department and Secretary Powell that in our official statements on possible outcomes for Kosovo, we would "rule no solution out, keeping our options open." This was a short term victory, however, as the proponents of independence were so strong, that virtually every other type of solution was arbitrarily ruled out with little thought or analysis. At the same time, due to Washington's eagerness to escape the problems of the region, pressure was put on to resolve the question prematurely.

Ironically, one of the reasons for ruling out entities or cantons such as in Bosnia (which would have been a logical step) was that although few will admit it, virtually the entire International Community believes that the entities and cantons in Bosnia have been a total disaster and have led to stagnation. They privately vowed to never repeat that mistake. They will never say this publicly, however, because it leads to the natural question of when they intend to do something about it in Bosnia itself.

The problems that confront proponents of partition are two-fold. First of all, its opponents believe that it will give precedent and impetus to similar movements in Macedonia and in Bosnia.  But those who state this are fooling themselves if they believe that those movements do not already exist and will undoubtedly create significant problems in any case. Moreover, the very independence of Kosovo is a very bad precedent for other parts of Europe, as the Russians are quick to point out (and warn).

Secondly, the international community is wedded to the idea of a multi-ethnic society and extremely reluctant to take steps that formalize ethnic divisions.  While absolutely correct as an ideal, in practice Kosovo never really was a multi-ethnic society and the experiences of the past 20 years have only widened the already existing gaps between the ethnic groups there. The Kosovo Albanians, however, have been brilliant at "talking the talk" of multi-ethnicity which the West so loves to hear. That this is a total sham seems to escape the International Community. That the likely outcome will be an exodus of Serbs from Kosovo as we saw in Sarajevo in 1996 also doesn't seem to register.

Prime Minister Koštunica is in an impossible position. No Serbian politician can agree to independence for Kosovo and maintain his/her political standing. Moreover, the Serbs more than most are focused on their history and no one wants to be remembered for generations as the Serb who gave away Kosovo. So he is sticking to a position, which is and will increasingly be in confrontation with the International Community. It would like to see the Prime Minister using this time to "prepare" Serbia for the inevitable instead of rallying Serbs to the Kosovo cause.  This has the side effect of making the International Community less receptive to Serbian positions on many of the key areas of disagreement in Vienna.

This is too bad, as the very best that Serbia can hope to achieve is to have significant decentralization take place along the lines of the models they suggested. Given how hard the Kosovo Albanians are fighting this concept, it is likely that the end result will be something that doesn't give the Serbs enough to convince most of them to stay in an independent Kosovo.

One remaining question is timing. There is a debate going on in the International Community over whether to press forward with the Kosovo decision this fall or to wait a while in hopes of early Serbian elections. The strategy would be to wait until after those elections so as to give democratic forces the best chance of prevailing.  This option might have more of a chance if the democratic parties seemed to be moving towards those elections in a reasonably short time period, but that is not yet the case. Thus, the pressure to announce the decision on future status continues to increase.

The other new development is that the series of steps by which the conditional independence will be obtained may be far more drawn out that Kosovo Albanians will like and the International Presence and authority more robust than was earlier planned.  This is in response to the growing awareness of the impact in Serbia itself. The reasoning seems to be that the pain will be softened if spread out for a sufficiently long period. This would also give time for the treatment of ethnic minorities to improve.