At Last, Good News from the Balkans

If you only want bad news from the Balkans, it is easy enough to find. You can read the next few lines and then read something else. Bosnia is on the brink of war again. Kosovo’s independence is “a failure.” Serbs are scheming, unredeemable extreme nationalists, and organized crime is everywhere. In the last few years I have come to understand that many people outside the region actually want to believe the worst: they want black and white when, like everywhere else, real life is a shade of gray. I am not arguing that, fourteen years after the end of the Bosnian and Croatian wars and almost two years since Kosovo declared independence, serious problems do not exist. It is just that in many respects things are not as bad as commonly believed.

Here is a small example. A few weeks ago in Brussels there was an EU meeting with ministers of the interior and justice from the western Balkans. Just before it began the Serbian minister, Ivica Dacic, refused to participate because his counterpart from Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February 2008, had removed the nameplate at her place that described Kosovo under its pre-independence designation, UNMIK. That is the acronym of the old UN mission there, which now, to all intents and purposes, exists only to provide, where required, a nameplate for Kosovo in international meetings.

After a brief exchange it was agreed that nobody would have a nameplate and so the meeting began. Did the Serbian minister, who during the Balkan wars was a chief spokesman of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died during his trial for war crimes in 2006, refuse to participate if Kosovo was present? Did the news agencies decree “tension rising” in the Balkans? Was the border between Serbia and Kosovo closed? Of course not. But most outsiders are not aware that Kosovo and Serbia and all the other parties who not so long ago were engaged in slaughtering one another now work together frequently. On December 22, after being judged eligible by enough countries, Serbia formally applied for membership in the EU. Three days earlier, in a move that will affect many ordinary people, visas for most European countries, which were imposed when Yugoslavia collapsed in the early 1990s, were abolished for Serbs, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. They will likely be lifted for Albanians and Bosnians sometime in 2010.

1.

Kosovo was (or is, depending on your point of view) a province of Serbia; its population is overwhelmingly Albanian. After Yugoslavia disintegrated, Kosovo remained part of Serbia until conflict broke out there in 1998, and was followed the next year by seventy-eight days of NATO bombing. After that, Serbian security forces pulled out and Serbia’s administration of Kosovo was replaced, initially by UNMIK and eventually by Kosovo’s own elected bodies in which the remaining minority population of Serbs sometimes participated and sometimes did not. Since declaring independence, Kosovo has been recognized by sixty-five countries, but not of course by Serbia, whose refusal to grant recognition is supported by Russia, China, Spain, and many other countries.

Nobody knows exactly how many people live in Kosovo. Serbian officials, like Oliver Ivanovic, believe there are about 1.7 million Albanians and 115,000 Serbs. Albanians, like demographer Mimoza Dushi, believe there are as many as 2.5 million Albanians. Perhaps a third or more of the Serbs live in the north of Kosovo above the river Ibar, in the divided city of Mitrovica and in the almost solidly Serbian region north of there that abuts southern Serbia. The rest live in enclaves scattered across the rest of Kosovo. For years the enclaves lived in terror and were protected by foreign troops.

Now that has changed. Serbs and Albanians don’t have that much to do with each other but they coexist. Since independence the Serbs in the enclaves have lived rather as if they were on Serbian islands and the Kosovo Albanians have more or less ignored them. Kosovo’s Serbs, on the instructions of Belgrade, have spurned offers of Kosovo’s public services, like schools and health care, and so these are paid for by Serbia. By contrast Serbian policemen, after resigning from the Kosovo police forces on Serbia’s orders, later were permitted by Belgrade to return to the ranks. Quite simply, despite some violent tussles near Mitrovica, no one has the will for a fight.

In fact, when it comes to fighting to regain Kosovo, the pro-European government of Serbian President Boris Tadic has taken a radically new position for the Balkans. He and his colleagues in government tend to mimic Churchillian language about never surrendering; but nowadays, when they say “fight,” they mean “see you in court.”

This has proved a shrewd strategy. When Kosovo declared independence, Vojislav Kostunica, then prime minister of Serbia, proposed that Serbia launch cases at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague against the US and the EU member states that recognized Kosovo. At that point Kostunica was in a coalition government with the Democratic Party of President Tadic. The members of his team were aghast. Their main goal was, and is, to join the EU, not to declare diplomatic war on its most important members. The Kostunica government collapsed and after the tightly fought parliamentary elections that followed, Tadic’s Democrats took control of the government. They then launched their plan. They would ask the General Assembly of the United Nations to ask the ICJ for an advisory opinion on the legality of Kosovo’s secession. Vuk Jeremic, Serbia’s foreign minister, said to me that when he put forward the idea to a senior American official, he laughed in his face. But in October 2008 the General Assembly voted to accept Serbia’s proposal.

The plan was intended to halt the number of countries recognizing Kosovo and also to take the issue out of domestic politics because the government could be seen to be doing something, albeit not something that threatened violence. It has been partially successful. Kosovo is not an issue in Serbian domestic politics anymore. As for recognition by foreign governments, most states that have not yet recognized Kosovo have decided to wait for the conclusion of the Hague court, which began deliberating on the issue at the beginning of December. Never before have all five permanent members of the Security Council presented their views to the court on the same case. Twenty-four others did the same, including some with secessionist problems of their own, such as Cyprus, Azerbaijan, and Spain. Many countries are in a mess. Russia, for example, recognizes Serbia’s territorial integrity but not Georgia’s; while most EU states and the US recognize Kosovo’s right to self-determination but not that of South Ossetia or Abkhazia, which have seceded from Georgia and are recognized by Russia as independent states.

In all likelihood the judges will be divided or give an unclear answer because the law on self-determination and secession is unclear. Like its advisory opinion condemning Israel’s separation wall, the court’s decision on Kosovo will probably have little effect, at least in the short term. What many have utterly failed to understand, though, is that Serbia has taken the issue to court as a way to rid itself of Kosovo, not to see its flag fly over Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, once again. After all, what could Serbia do if it was suddenly compelled to try to rule over two million implacably hostile Albanians who would rather fight again than see the independence they have long yearned for suddenly snatched away?

Of course Serbian leaders don’t say this in public, but in private it is another story. At some point in the future, after the ICJ has issued its opinion, they will propose to the Kosovo Albanians to exchange the Serbian-inhabited north of Kosovo for an area of Serbia inhabited by Albanians called the Pre evo Valley. Then Serbia and Kosovo would recognize one another, and—so Serbian leaders hope—the matter would be settled once and for all. As if life were that simple.

The problem with this plan concerns not the Serb or Albanian populations in question, but the neighboring Macedonians and nearby Bosnians. Horrified Western officials, who have already been outsmarted by the Serbs with the court case in The Hague, say that if they allow the borders of Kosovo to be redrawn, what is to stop Bosnia from falling apart? And what about Macedonia with its one quarter Albanian population? The Serbian plan is pure fantasy, a Western diplomat told me.

When I asked Albanians in Pristina about the Serbian plan, they all replied ferociously that they would never consider it, but I had the distinct impression that, for many, this answer had been suggested to them by Americans and others. After all, Albanians would stand to gain by it.

Meanwhile, the leaders of Kosovo have other priorities—most of which seem boring compared to winning the struggle for formal independence. They are creating jobs and ridding themselves of the habit of waiting for guidance from American diplomats and other Western officials rather than making difficult decisions by themselves. Since no one knows how many people live in Kosovo, no one knows the real, high rate of unemployment. But the need to create jobs was underlined in late October when sixteen Kosovo Albanians, illegal migrants, heading for what they hoped would be better lives in Germany and Switzerland, drowned when the boat they were in capsized on the river Tisza between Serbia and Hungary.

2.

Unlike Kosovo, Serbia has received large sums—over 13.3 billion euros, to be precise—in foreign direct investment since 2000, although the flow has inevitably slowed since the global financial crisis. On the other hand, Serbia has also experienced a major political earthquake in the last year that seems to have been largely unnoticed by people who don’t live there or follow its political life closely.

For years the great bogey man of Serbian politics was the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party led by Vojislav Seselj, who is currently on trial at the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague for crimes against humanity including murder and ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. After he was indicted and voluntarily turned himself over to The Hague for trial in 2003, the party was led by Tomislav Nikolic, whose nickname is the “gravedigger,” because many years ago he had a job that included running cemeteries. In the 1990s the Radicals were war-mongering, hard-line Serbian nationalists. But over the past decade, after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, more people voted for them because they were the only credible opposition to the ruling Democratic Party than out of any desire to go to war again for Greater Serbia.

As the years passed, though, the gap between formal party leader Seselj’s take on reality—as viewed from the perspective of the 1990s and from his cell on the Dutch seaside—and Nikolic’s own became too great for Nikolic to bear. Irritated because the party’s vote was increasing, not thanks to Seselj but in spite of him, and because Seselj treated him like an errand boy, Nikolic decided in 2008 to quit. When he did so, he took most of the party leadership with him to found a new party, the Serbian Progressive Party.

The language of Nikolic’s new party does not question the basic pro- European strategy of the country under President Tadic and the Democrats, even though the Progressive Party is in favor of (peaceful) unification with the Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb part of Bosnia. Nikolic and other party leaders are now welcomed in Brussels and Washington, in stark contrast to the years when they were persona non grata. “No one needs wars anymore,” says Aleksandar Vuc i´c, the deputy head of the party. “Everyone is fed up with that.”

What this means is that for the first time since the end of Yugoslavia there is, more or less, a basic consensus in Serbia about its future. According to opinion polls and some local election results, the Radicals have been confined to the fringes of Serbian politics and the Progressives are a serious rival to Tadic’s Democratic Party. If the Radicals had won the 2008 elections, Serbia would, more than likely, have been plunged back into the isolation of the past. If the Progressives win the next election, distasteful though many find their pedigree, the Balkans would not face a new crisis. “For the first time,” says Marko Blagojevic, a political analyst and pollster, “we are not discussing what the problem is or where the country should go, but the best way for the country to get there.”

3.

Unfortunately, none of that is true about Bosnia. It would take twenty-three minutes to fly from Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika Srpska, to Sarajevo, the capital of all Bosnia; but there are no scheduled flights between the two cities, and in fact, as far as I could gather, in winter at least there are, apart from one flight a week to Munich, no flights from Banja Luka to anywhere, not even Belgrade. The Bosnian existential question is, “Where will the Republika Srpska go?” And the answer is, probably nowhere.

The Bosnian war ended in 1995 when Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat, finally forced the warring Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Muslims, now more often called Bosniaks, to sign an agreement for peace at an air base in Dayton, Ohio. This provided for a weak central government and two entities, the RS and the Bosniak-Croat Federation. In the early postwar years, things moved very slowly. The two parts of Bosnia remained implacably hostile. Then, they began to change with the help of a series of internationally appointed high representatives with strong legal powers. (Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat, is the current high representative.) Important steps were made in delegating some powers—including defense and indirect taxation—to the central government so that Bosnia could become more like a normal country. But in April 2006 everything ground to a halt when one of the principal Bosniak parties, led by wartime prime minister Haris Siljadzic, a Muslim, failed to support a modest package of constitutional reforms backed by the US. Since then the atmosphere in Bosnia has soured.

Siljadzic argues that the RS was founded by means of ethnic cleansing and genocide and so should be abolished. His nemesis, Milorad Dodik, the gruff prime minister of the RS, argues that his entity must retain all powers granted to it at Dayton; otherwise it will secede. Siljadzic says that he once asked Dodik if he wanted a Greater Serbia, to which the Serb replied: “No, I want a state of my own.” According to a Western diplomat, Dodik’s plan is to “imitate” the model of Milo Djukanovic, the prime minister of Montenegro who pushed through his country’s 2006 divorce from Serbia by destroying state institutions such as the central government and economic and fiscal policy “by actively blocking them and then claiming that they did not work.”

Dodik greets visitors in his new and gleaming government building in Banja Luka. Until a few years ago it was the poorer of the two Bosnian entities, but that is not the case anymore. Important privatizations, especially that of the RS’s main mobile phone network, brought in large amounts of money. The RS is also far better governed, being one unit, as opposed to ten small cantons in the federation. Dodik is scathing about anything to do with Bosnia and Sarajevo and points out that Bosnia’s people “never gave their approval” to the Bosnian state and that “Bosniaks never accepted Dayton.” Then he says: “In the RS we do not intend, nor do we have any plan to split from Bosnia- Herzegovina but we do want our rights to be respected. You can create the best political model but if there is no political will for it, then it is worthless. That is the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

Over the last few years, Bosnians have disagreed about almost everything. Dodik wants the post of high representative abolished while the Bosniak leaders in Sarejevo do not. Europeans, Americans, and Russians disagree too on the future of Bosnia. Two high-level meetings in October hosted by Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, and James Steinberg, the US deputy secretary of state, were designed to break the deadlock by introducing a small measure of constitutional reform. They failed to produce results although international officials claim that a “process” has now begun.

If Bosnia were situated somewhere else, for example where Moldova is or in the Caucasus, then doubtless everyone would have gotten bored long ago and just left the Bosnians to their own devices. But Bosnia is surrounded by countries that are slowly moving toward EU membership and, with the possible exception of Serbia, toward NATO membership too. Last year Croatia and Albania joined NATO. That means the stakes are high. Serbian President Boris Tadic says clearly that he is against partitioning Bosnia, “and not just because of Bosnia but because of the national interest of Serbs.” By this he means that the result of destroying Bosnia would be instability in the Balkans and an embittered Muslim statelet around Sarajevo that might act as a magnet for al-Qaeda or other extremists, of whom there are some in Bosnia today.

If Bosnia falls apart, all the work of the Serbian government over the last few years to rehabilitate Serbia and make the country an attractive destination for foreign investors, including Russians, would be lost. Today, there is one remaining domestic obstacle to Serbia completing its drive toward European integration—the capture of the last two Yugoslav war crimes suspects, the most prominent being General Ratko Mladic, who led Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian war. The other is Goran Hadzic, who was a Croatian Serb leader.

There is a genuine risk of disintegration in Bosnia unless some action is taken.

4.

How then can I say that things in the Balkans are not as bad as all that? My argument is that despite the problems I have described above, especially in Bosnia, there is another dynamic at work across the former Yugoslavia: in business, culture, social life, and indeed politics, many of the connections broken in the 1990s have been mended by direct dealings, particularly on economic matters, between former Yugoslavs. Slovene, Croatian, and Serbian companies have all been investing outside their home bases in other parts of the former Yugoslavia; musicians from one country now play regularly everywhere else; and big companies such as Zastava in Serbia, which makes Fiat cars, buy parts from firms in all of the former Yugoslav republics. In a piece I wrote for The Economist in August I coined a phrase for the gradually reconnecting region—the Yugosphere.¹ What is extraordinary is how this name was then picked up by the mass media and discussed with some approval from Ljubljana in Slovenia to Skopje in Macedonia. It seemed to catch people’s imagination.

In fact, I had already described this phenomenon, albeit in embryonic form, in my last article in these pages, in 2006.² By now, the rapprochement that I saw then has dramatically expanded and one major difference is that Serbia has become a far more normal country. Today there is a huge amount of trade between all the countries of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, although it is a partial exception within the Yugosphere because most of its citizens speak Albanian rather than what used to be called Serbo-Croatian.

In regional politics what is different now is that every week, everyone from medical doctors to central bankers to government ministers and policemen from the different Balkan states meet somewhere for discussion of mutual concerns, which serves to rebuild trust and regional networks. Much of this activity is even coordinated from Sarajevo by the Regional Cooperation Council, which opened its doors in 2008. It is true that sometimes one or more ex-Yugoslav states are not present in one or another regional organization, or that a country which was not part of Yugoslavia is involved, for example Moldova, but in essence many of the positive developments in the region are driven by a core of Yugosphere countries.

One reason why this is not obvious is that anything to do with this part of the world is often dressed up in politically neutral terms like Southeastern Europe or the Western Balkans. Croats, for example, especially dislike the name “Yugosphere” because they fought a war against Yugoslavia, but I have noticed that they are groping toward a new politically correct term—anything with the word “Adriatic” in it. Like the Slovenes, they have companies such as the food-processing and supermarket giant Agrokor, which is doing considerable business throughout the former Yugoslavia, and a Croat heads the Regional Cooperation Council. With the partial but not complete exception of their Albanian-speaking population, the former Yugoslav states have too much in common not to cooperate; and with falling populations and similar problems of economic modernization, they have every reason to do so.

Yugoslavia is, of course, not coming back. But neither was a single Scandinavian state in the cards just because the Scandinavians cooperated intensively in the Nordic Council before they either joined the EU or aligned their laws and politics with it. The same can be said for the cooperation of the Benelux countries before much of what its institutions did for the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg was subsumed by the EU. Of course people in the Balkans are not Scandinavians, and if Belgium falls apart its people are unlikely to kill one another in the way that Bosnians would. But despite all the problems I have described, there is much happening in the region that is both hopeful and unrecognized. We have to hope the Bosnians don’t tip the scales the wrong way.

As this issue went to press, it was a hopeful sign that according to a report in a Turkish newspaper, based on statements by the Turkish foreign minister, “Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia have agreed to restore bilateral ties, ending three years of frozen diplomatic relations as a result of three-way informal discussions initiated by Turkey.” Whether, as the Turkish foreign minister put it, “Balkanization will mean stabilization in the future” remains an open question.

—February 9, 2010