A badly fractured (far right, pro-Russian) Radical Party in Serbia.

Yes, the Bush Administration approached Kosovo’s recognition reflexively and without much forethought. But in this case, their decision seems to be paying dividends.

(Why it matters: here and here.)

New York Times: “Serbia Formally Proposes Ethnic Partition of Kosovo”

The West is standing firm on rejecting such proposals, but it’s not clear they’ll do much to prevent de facto partition.

Two recent stories give insight into the rotten game Belgrade is playing in Kosovo.

First, members of the Serbian Independent Liberal Party (SSLS) returned to take their seats at the Kosovo parliament yesterday. The SSLS chose not to boycott the November elections in Kosovo and therefore has claimed the several seats reserved for minorities. They hadn’t been participating in the government up until now due to several death threats they had received. The president of SSLS, Slobodan Petrović, gave an interview in January in which he heaped scorn on Belgrade for presuming to know what’s best for Kosovar Serbs, and in which he revealed that neither Prime Minister Koštunica nor Minister for Kosovo Samardžić had deigned to meet with him.

Second, several Serbian NGOs working to foster dialogue between Serbs and Albanians were attacked by a mob in Štrpce, a Serbian enclave in southern Kosovo. Sonja Biserko of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights claimed that Belgrade was behind the attacks:

Clearly, the security services have been keeping an eye on what we’re doing in Kosovo, and organized a spontaneous gathering of citizens. A group of people came after us, but the international police stopped them.

Kosovo is important to the nationalist factions in Belgrade because it is an emotional issue that can be manipulated for electoral gain. Anyone working to find a peaceful solution in Kosovo is seen as an enemy and is faced with violent reprisals.

As Petrović said in the interview cited above,

Besides the large problems which we have already, Kosovar Serbs resent that their interests and livelihoods are being negotiated by people who aren’t from Kosovo and who have no intentions of ever living there.

A poignant echo of the lament of Croatia’s Serbian minority—roused to revolt by Milošević’s regime only to be sold out when supporting them became a liability—it’s heartening that Serbs in Kosovo are coming to recognize that the cynical rhetoric coming from Belgrade may very well do them great harm.

Croatia, Bulgaria and Hungary recognized Kosovo today, joining Canada and Japan who recognized the country earlier this week.

Croatia’s governing coalition, which includes the SDSS, the party of Croatia’s Serbian minority, may pay the price. The SDSS minister, Slobodan Uzelac, tendered his resignation from the government, which was rejected by PM Ivo Sanader. The SDSS will now vote whether to remain in the governing coalition, or whether to try to bring the government down in protest.

For some Croats, recognizing Kosovo is a moral imperative—memories are fresh of Croatia eagerly awaiting international recognition when it declared independence in 1991. For others, especially those with business interests in Serbia, recognition unnecessarily complicates things. The decision to finally recognize Kosovo, however, was probably a precondition set by Washington in exchange for smoothing Croatia’s entry into NATO.

Earlier this year, noises were being made in official circles that Croatia was not yet ready to be admitted within NATO’s ranks. Then, about a week or so ago, it was announced that George W. Bush would visit Croatia immediately following the Bucharest NATO summit where a decision on the country’s NATO accession would be made. Some quid pro quo was probably arrived at.

So is recognizing Kosovo a smart move for Croatia? It’s hard to say. Geostrategically, it’s important that Croatia has decided to firmly place itself in the U.S.-centered NATO camp, thereby rejecting any dalliances with a resurgent Russia, a rising power with clear designs on the Balkans. SDSS’s position—to delay recognition until after Serbian parliamentary elections—was not without merits, however, especially if a more moderate, pro-EU government was to arise in Serbia.

The New York Times reports:

Peter Feith, the European Union’s special representative to Kosovo, said in an interview this month that the European Union was determined not to allow partition to become a political reality, and would work to ensure that Kosovo remained a multiethnic country in which both groups lived side by side. The European Union is soon to take over administration of Kosovo from the United Nations.

But many senior European Union officials admit privately that if the Serbs continue to push for partition, there is little the European Union can do to prevent it.

This, then, becomes yet one more example of Serbia’s uncanny ability to game the international system. The strategy has been consistent throughout the Balkan wars: create demographic facts on the ground to match your territorial objectives and then merely wait for the world to catch up with reality.

In both Bosnia and Kosovo, the end result may very well be Serbia annexing territories with majority Serb populations, majorities it created by starting expansionist wars. The bitter irony is that the only country to have escaped this fate is Croatia, a country whose military victory over Serbian irredentism is currently on trial at the Hague.

The AP reports that dozens of UN and NATO soldiers were wounded in Mitrovica as they attempted to dislodge several Serb protesters who had barricaded themselves in a courthouse.

At this point, the outlines of a Kosovo endgame become discernible:

The U.N. said later it was pulling out of the Serb-dominated northern half of Mitrovica because of the shooting. NATO helicopters hovered above the city and NATO troops remained, but the U.N. withdrawal could fuel a widespread Kosovo Serb desire to split from largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo and rejoin Serbia. The Serb minority dominates about 15 percent of the territory in northern Kosovo, including about a third of Mitrovica, Kosovo’s second-largest city.”

Indeed, partition has been on the table for quite some time. The most strident nationalists in Serbia don’t realistically hope to have all of Kosovo re-annexed. The genie is out of the bottle in almost every way imaginable, and if 2 million Albanians refused to be governed from 1989 through a few weeks ago, there’s precious little to suggest that they could ever be persuaded to join Serbia now.

The strategy is transparent. Just like in Bosnia, war has created relatively homogeneous communities, and Serbia, after bitterly complaining at having its heartland torn from its embrace,¹ will graciously concede to annexing only those territories which have Serbian majorities in them. This would be a monstrously cynical play because, again, just like in Bosnia, the majorities in questions only arose as a result of a war instigated by the Serbs themselves.

Why would Serbia agree to merely getting the north of Kosovo? Besides expediency, there is the small matter of natural resources—it just so happens that a healthy number of the country’s lead and zinc mines are located in the regions which now conveniently have Serbian majorities. And though the Albanians will protest bitterly that the viability of their state is being compromised, I can’t see the Europeans (or the Americans) having much appetite for compelling the Serbian parts of Kosovo to remain under Albanian control.

I hope I’m wrong.

If you don’t feel like reading a ton of Balkan history, Christopher Hitchens distills what you need to know about Kosovo and delivers it in his inimitable polemic style:

In fact, Kosovo has never been recognized internationally as part of Serbia. It was only ever recognized as part of Yugoslavia, and with the liquidation of that state Serbian claims upon its territory became null and void. A little history here is necessary.

During the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the then-distinct kingdom of Serbia, with some regional allies, did manage to invade and annex a formerly Ottoman territory that had been the scene of a Serbian military defeat in—wait for it—1389. (In that year, England was laying emotional claims to large and beautiful areas of France.)

As most things Hitchens, the essay’s worth reading in its entirety. If you’re hungry for more Balkanalia after you’re done, whip out your wallet and pay Noel Malcolm. Though it’s a short history, don’t go expecting it to be particularly “lite”—it’s a solid, well sourced book written by an academic (not a sloppy prejudiced screed scribbled by some hack journalist).

Marko Atilla Hoare, one of the finest Balkanists writing today, has an excellent essay up this morning on his blog:

This rioting and looting was not just the action of a few troublemakers; it is an expression of the new climate of violence and intimidation that the Kostunica regime and its allies in the Serbian Radical Party and other extreme right-wing and nationalist groups are deliberately encouraging.

It really can’t be overstated just how rotten and dangerous Koštunica’s government is. Read the whole thing for an excellent run-down on the thuggery being employed by these goons. It’s a must-read for anyone following the Balkans and questioning whether the Kosovo decision was the right one.

It won’t make you outright vomit like the more famous clip, but it’s still worth watching. During the riots which shook Belgrade this past Thursday, two girls went shopping at the late night sales where everything was 100% discounted. The wag taunts them: “For me, you’re the heroes of these demonstrations… Kosovo is Serbia!”

As the author of the clip notes on the YouTube site, these two shameless tramps aren’t representative of Serbs in general. After all, this kind of anarchic looting happens all over the world when there’s a failure of government to enforce security.

Still, great clip, and kudos to the cameraman for sticking with his targets and thoroughly shaming them.

Matt Yglesias posts an article at The American Prospect touting the imperfections of the outcome in Kosovo as a tentative, hedged proof that even well-intentioned humanitarian unilateral interventions are bad news.

He ends his argument thus:

Timely and effective diplomacy can often avert humanitarian catastrophes before they break out at much lower cost than coercive force can end them once they’ve started. And the U.N.’s traditional peacekeeping operations, where parties to a conflict request third-party troops to help monitor and enforce a peace deal, have a solid track record of success but are perennially under-resourced by an indifferent United States. Greater commitment — political, financial, and (when appropriate) military — to these kinds of operations would bring much larger humanitarian benefits than would any hypothetic humanitarian wars.

Sounds good on paper. But in Kosovo’s case, Milošević recognized what current Serbian politicians don’t seem to grasp: Kosovo was ungovernable by Serbia with 2 million Albanians living there. He therefore began expelling them. Given that kind of rationale, it’s hard to imagine that diplomacy without at least some sort of a willingness to back it up with force would yield much.¹

As for parties to a conflict requesting third-party troops to help monitor a peace deal, Milošević had that one figured out too. In both Croatia and Bosnia he would agree to UN troops coming in to help him consolidate his gains on the ground. In Croatia, the UN Protected Areas (UNPAs) stood until 1995 when they were overrun by a Croatian offensive covertly backed by the US. In fact, it wasn’t until the Croatian offensive started to threaten Milošević’s gains in Bosnia that he became more than eager to enter into the negotiations that yielded the Dayton Accords.²

In the Balkans at least, diplomacy not backed up by force and reliance on just the UN yielded terrible results. Matt’s a very smart guy and I look forward to reading his book to see how he addresses these kinds of issues. I don’t doubt it’ll be a thoughtful argument, though I do doubt I’ll agree with much of it.