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.)

Crimes were committed by both sides, [Tibor Varady, chief representative for Serbia] noted. “What happened cannot be reduced to a one dimensional picture,” he said. “The misdeeds of one side were matched by the misdeeds of the other.”

Quite wrong. It was a war of aggression masterminded by a genocidal maniac who held the Serbian nation in his thrall. Indeed, the Serbian defense is acknowledging as much by arguing that Belgrade is “not responsible for the government’s behavior during the Milošević years.”

The Germans were not allowed to make such specious arguments after World War II because the world powers understood that collective guilt was the only way to bring about the necessary catharsis for the modern German state of today to emerge. The mere fact that Belgrade feels comfortable airing such poison goes a long way to prove that the Serbian body politic has not adequately grappled with its recent history.

While I certainly don’t trust the International Court of Justice to come to a competent, honest judgment in this case, arguments such as the ones made by Serbia have to be answered consistently and methodically lest they succeed in muddying the historical record.

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

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.

I’d like to examine this argument in more detail, and I’ll try to post something longer over the weekend. Briefly, though, I would argue that Hillary is America’s best hope for a smart yet assertive foreign policy; McCain scares me for a variety of reasons; and yes, Obama is the least convincing of the three. I’ll stick to writing about Obama for this post, and hopefully get around to expanding on my thoughts later.

I find Obama most troubling of all, because though I believe that he is the most capable and intelligent candidate, I get the sense that his gifts for oration and inspiration can get the better of him sometimes.

In his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, he states:

I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosovo because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides.

Unlike Dr. Hoare, I don’t see this as a pander. I think he has a genuine concern that America’s recent moves in the region are sowing the seeds of a broader future conflict. He is calling for Kosovars and Serbs to get together and work out their differences in good faith. It’s a nice sentiment, and a nice template for solving conflicts in theory. In the practice of international relations, however, we’re frequently not dealing with good faith interlocutors, and a harder-nosed realpolitik is oftentimes called for.

I worry that Obama’s proven ability to motivate people in the domestic setting is making him believe that he can replicate this on the world stage. I worry Obama believes that the Balkan tragedy of the 1990’s came about because the Great Powers didn’t insist on negotiations hard enough. I worry that he thinks that the Russians, who are saying very similar things to what he’s saying above on Kosovo, are being honest and sensible, rather than duplicitous and deceitful. I worry that Obama, listening as he does to the Samantha Powers of the world, has an idealistic and naive idea of how the United States ought to behave.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Velimir Ilić (minister for infastructure): They have caused us much greater damage than broken windows. Those people at B92 and other media had better be careful how they talk about those young people.

Snežana Marković (minister for youth and sport): You are the last person who should tell people how to behave. Everyone knows what you have been advocating.

Ilić: Madam, you have been in sports for two months, and I have been for twenty years. Be careful, the sportspeople will come to you.

Dragan Šutanovac (minister of defence): What sportspeople, what are you talking about? I will stand in front of those wimps if somebody has to. Now, why was the police instructed to allow the hooligans to g wild on the one hand, and on the other hand to protect public order? That just endangers the police.

Ilić: You cannot call them hooligans just because they broke some windows and injured a few police officers.

Šutanovac: To be precise - 53 of them.

Vojislav Koštunica (prime minister): Those people, hooligans as you call them, were just reacting to the violation of international law.

Šutanovac: Oh please, if they had not been organised they would not have known what to do. What defence of international law are you talking about?

Bizarre personal threats aside, you can clearly see the machinations of Koštunica and his henchmen on display. Keep in mind that these deliberations were not meant for public dissemination, so what you’re reading here are unvarnished behind-closed-doors discussions. Šutanovac and Marković are from Tadić’s party (DS) and Ilić belongs to Koštunica’s DSS.

If you haven’t yet, go and read Marko Hoare’s essay on the situation in Serbia and what it all means.