The Balkan powder keg

Stay tuned:

At the heart of the gathering crisis is the future status of Kosovo. The military intervention there in his first term is widely seen as Tony Blair's 'good' war - as against his 'bad' one in Iraq. The West acted to save persecuted Muslims. There was no dodgy dossier or mention of weapons of mass destruction. There was no oil at stake. Though there are these obvious differences, there is also a common lesson from Kosovo and Iraq. Wars are much easier to win than the peace. Intervention can be effective - as it was in Kosovo - in preventing the slaughter of civilians. Military action can remove dictators, as that conflict helped to trigger the removal of Slobodan Milosevic. But once a war is over, it is politics that has to deliver an enduring settlement.

Eight years after Nato drove out the Serbian forces [NATO is still providing the peacekeeping force there, under a UN Security Council mandate--sound familiar? - MC], the future of Kosovo is still contested. Europe has a massive stake in getting this right. Apart from the threat of renewed conflict, most of the overland drug and people trafficking routes go through the Balkans. Islamist terrorism is another reason for anxiety. The Balkans have been a training ground for jihadists. The European Union's long-term plan is to extend membership to all the ex-Yugoslav states, binding them into democracy, the rule of law and prosperity. Failure to peacefully resolve the future of Kosovo could be catastrophic and yet it is hard to see how success can be achieved.

The Kosovo Albanians - the vast majority of the province - want independence from Serbia. The most that Belgrade says it can tolerate is a loose autonomy. Europe, for all its pretensions to speak with one clear voice to the world, is divided. Greece and Spain have been wary of the idea of Kosovo becoming Europe's newest state. Madrid does not like to give encouragement to its own Basque secessionists. Greece is agitated about Macedonia. Britain and France and most of the rest of Europe favour an independent Kosovo under the novel concept of EU supervision designed to guarantee good behaviour towards its minorities.

Adding both complexity and peril, the future of Kosovo is entangled in the new Cold War between Washington and Moscow. America backs independence. Russia, traditional ally of the Serbs, is against. There was an attempt to come to a settlement earlier this year. It foundered when Russia declared that it would use its veto on the UN Security Council to prevent conditional independence for Kosovo.

Time is now very short. The mandate for the EU's peacekeeping force in Bosnia expires this week and it is contested whether it can legally continue if the Russians wield their veto. There is a 10 December deadline for agreement in Kosovo. It is almost universally expected there won't be any agreement. Then the really scary stuff threatens to start happening.

The Kosovans are talking about making a unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. That could set off an explosive chain reaction throughout the western Balkans as the Serb minority in Kosovo revolts and the government in Belgrade backs a breakaway by the Serbs in Bosnia. I don't like to predict the worst, but there is good reason to be fearful in a region seething with nationalist rivalries and ethnic hatreds and where thousands keep Kalashnikovs in their cupboards. One of the starkest warnings has come from the commander of the EU forces in Bosnia. He has talked about the need for Europe to be able to intervene militarily 'in the event of another outbreak of war'...

UDI by Kosovo on Dec. 10?

More after the jump...

Mark C.

Update: A pessimistic German view:

Conservative daily Die Welt writes.

"The elections do not mark the end of the Kosovo crisis, rather they mark the way towards difficult conflicts, which could become violent. The consequences will not be confined to the Balkans."

[...]

"If the north of Kosovo, which is mostly inhabited by Serbs, splits off from Kosovo and rushes into the open arms of Serbia, then the forces will be unleashed that showed their strength during the wars that marked the break up of Yugoslavia from 1991 and which could only been subdued from the outside -- with force."

"Is the EU and NATO ready for this? And where will the frontlines form? Firstly the Republika Srpska will break away from Bosnia-Herzevognia. The Europeans are involved there as they are in Kosovo -- in order to preserve a peace that was never anything more than a ceasefire [emphasis added]."

Meanwhile, inside the heart of Bosnia:

The Dayton Peace Accords called for the removal of foreign combatants from Bosnia after the Balkans war. But hundreds of mujahedeen fighters stayed, and today they are successfully spreading their fundamentalist Islamist views.

[...]

Wahhabism is quickly gaining ground in the country, with polls showing that 13 percent of Bosnian Muslims support the conservative Sunni Islam reform movement. The movement is financed primarily by Saudi Arabian backers, who have invested well over a half-billion euros in Bosnia's development -- especially in the construction of over 150 mosques. The 8,187 square meter (88,124 square foot) King Fahd Mosque in Sarajevo alone cost €20 million ($29 million), and it's also where radicals go to pray.

In trying to transform the country into a theocracy, the new preachers of fundamental Islam aren't just fighting with the Koran. In Kalesija, militant Wahhabis drove out the local imam after a fight between local Muslims and the Wahhabis. In the village of Dedici, residents took up their shotguns to defend their mosque against the attacking fanatics. Recently, the Careva Mosque (Emperor's Mosque) in Sarajevo locked its doors during prayer for the first time in its 441-year history when a group of Wahhabis tried to enter and perform their own prayer rites...

Posted by markc at November 20, 2007 10:52 AM