One Heck of a Bribe

My goodness. The EU really doesn't want yet another Balkan "conflict" springing up, do they?

European Union leaders will offer Serbia a fast-track route to joining the bloc in a bid to soothe Balkan tensions over Kosovo's push for independence, a summit draft showed on Friday.

But Belgrade bristled at suggestions the move was designed to compensate it for the looming loss of the majority Albanian province. Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic insisted any such trade-off would be out of the question.

"It would be an indecent proposal, and European leaders are decent people, they have not made such an offer," Jeremic told reporters in Belgrade on Friday.

A day after signing a treaty to end a long institutional stalemate, EU leaders switched focus to challenges posed by the Balkans -- a test of the EU's hopes of strengthening its foreign policy clout -- and by globalization and immigration.

The leaders were due to say Serbia should be offered an accelerated path towards EU entry once it meets existing conditions to sign a first-level agreement on closer ties.

"(The European Council) reiterated its confidence that progress on the road towards the EU, including candidate status, can be accelerated," a draft copy of the summit communique obtained by Reuters said.{...}

Considering how they've managed to dodge letting Turkey in for quite some time, this is surprising.

I don't know if many people have been following this struggle, but the crux of the matter is this: Kosovo wants independence and they have US, EU and UN backing for this move. Serbia doesn't want Kosovo to break away, not only because there are plenty of ethnic Serbians in Kosovo, but because they believe they have a long-standing, historical claim to the area. One has to wonder why the Serbs are particularly attached to this piece of land, particularly when they are the minority. The best explanation of this claim was delivered by Sebastian Junger in his July 1998 Vanity Fair piece entitled, "Kosovo's Valley of Death." The article isn't available online, but as I happened to have it stashed away in the basement, I'll type it out for you, my devoted Cake Eater readers, because it's truly enlightening.

In 1389, as the myth goes, Prince Lazar of Serbia was visited by Saint Ilija in the form of a falcon. It was on the eve of a great battle with the Turks, and Lazar had gathered around him, on the plains of Kosovo, much of the Balkan military elite: Bosnian warlords, Albanian noblemen, and Hungarian horsemen with shamanic bones sewn into their uniforms. Lazar was understandably nervous---the Turks had wiped out an entire Serb army 18 years earlier---and wondered whether it might not be better to retreat and fight again another day. Saint Ilija gave Lazar the choice between a kingdom on earth and a kingdom in heaven; Lazar wisely choosing the kingdom in heaven, went on to meet his death at the hands of the Turks.

The battle became known as the Battle of Kosovo Polje---the "Blackbird Field"---and it occupies a particularly fevered part of the Serb psyche. It was on Kosovo Polje that a Serb leader first chose death over subjugation; it was on Kosovo Polje that the guiding maxim of the Serb people, "Only unity saves the Serbs," was first acted out in all its bloody glory.

Nearly 600 years after the battle, Slobodan Milosevic---the man responsible for igniting the entire Balkan conflict---would stand on the ancient battlefield and whip a crowd of angry Serbs into a nationalist frenzy. "Yugoslavia does not exist without Kosovo!" he yelled, instantly catapulting himself to the top of the political heap. "Yugoslavia would disintegrate without Kosovo!"

There are candidates at least as good as the plains of Kosovo for the mythic homeland. The Serbs migrated southward from Saxony and what is now the Czech republic in the sixth century A.D., and didn't settle permanently in Kosovo for another 600 years.

The high water mark of the Serb empire came in the 1330s, when a brutal nobleman named Stefan Dusan defeated his own father in battle, had him strangled and then went on to extend his empire throughout Kosovo and into Greece. He built numerous Orthodox monasteries and churches, and eventually had himself crowned emperor of the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and Albanians.

The empire didn't survive his own death, though; within decades the turks defeated the Serbs at Kosovo Polje, and 300 hundred years after that the turks put down another uprising so ruthlessly that most Serbs fled Kosovo. The void they left behind was filled by the Albanians, who drifted back down out of the mountains with their wild, hill-people ways.

Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty. In another era, Adem Jasari and Ahmet Ahmeti might well have been considered barjakars. That organization has fallen into disuse, but the clans---basically used to determine allegiances during a blood feud---seem to have survived.

Feuds in this part of the world inevitably break out over offenses to a man's honor, which include calling him a liar, insulting his female relatives, violating his hospitality, or stealing his weapons. Tradition dictates that these transgressions be avenged by killing any man in the offender's family, which creates another round of violence. As late as the end of the 19th century, one in five adult male deaths was the result of a blood feud, and in Albania today, is is said, a tradition still exists whereby you must kill one man for every bullet in the body of your dead kin.

Seen in the context of the code of male honor, the Serb police have violated just about every blood-feud rule in existence, including the killing of women---a provocation above all others. It's no wonder they have such a hard time maintaining control over Kosovo.

The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo's status. Inevitably, an independence movement was born, funded by a voluntary 3 percent tax given by the Albanian diaspora and supported by groups in Albania proper. {...}

When you take this into account, it is interesting how the EU seems to believe they can solve the pesky problem of nationalism with supranationalism. Granted that supranationalism comes with the lure of free and easy trade, but really, the Serbs just don't seem to care. They believe they have a historical right to Kosovo, and they have the added bonus of having a new and improved Russia behind them. Despite the Serbs' recent humiliations, they seem to think this is the one they can win. Given that the Russia of 2007 is much different than the Russia of 1999, they might just be right.

The months-long talks the UN organized to come to some sort of agreement over Kosovo ended on the 10th of this month, with no resolution. Everyone is sticking firmly to their opening positions. The Kosovars want independence; The Serbs don't. The two sides are not going to come to any agreement over this, and, quite frankly, all it's going to take is a few Molotov cocktails and the area will be transported back in time to 1999. Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet, but I believe it's just a matter of time. Diplomacy has failed. The UN has handed over shepherding duties to the newly formed EU diversionary force and I have a suspicion that when all hell breaks loose, they won't be up to the job and will come crying to NATO. Which, if you believe Russia's bluster on the matter, could conceivably mean the US, via NATO, will, in essence, be at war with Serbia and, by extension, Russia. This could happen before the end of the year, but my money's on an early to mid-January start.

One wonders if the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade is ready to be mistakenly bombed again.

Posted by Kathy at December 14, 2007 10:46 AM | TrackBack