TimeFlames issuing from the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on Thursday underscored the mounting rage in Serbia over Kosovo's Western-backed declaration of independence. The embassy was unguarded when several hundred demonstrators attacked, following a protest rally by hundreds of thousands of protesters. At that larger rally, held earlier, the sharp divisions that typify Serbian politics were nowhere to be seen, as leaders from across the spectrum united in a massive show of force to protest Kosovo's secession from Serbia. As banners bearing messages such as "Kosovo is Serbia" were hoisted, the country's leading politicians were joined by the likes of filmmaker Emir Kusturica. Even Australian open tennis champion Novak Djokovic beamed his support via video link.
But the protest turned deadly when several hundred hooded protesters broke away from that 500,000-strong crowd. The smaller group hurled rocks and molotov cocktails at the Croatian and U.S. embassies. Flames licked up to the second floor of the old brick building which is located in the heart of the capital. Serbian paramilitary police, arriving in Humvees, dispersed the crowd using tear gas. But firefighters later discovered a charred body in a lower room. The embassy had been largely empty at the time and it was not immediately clear whether the body was that of a protester or an embassy employee. Speaking at the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad condemned the attack, saying he would seek a U.N. resolution "reminding the Serb government of its rsponsibility to protect diplomatic facilities."
The procession had started at the Parliament, wending its way through damp Belgrade streets to the monumental St. Sava Church, the largest Serbian Orthodox church in the Balkans. There, high priests delivered "prayers for Kosovo." The former Russian dissident and Nobel Laureate Aleksander Solzhenitsyn sent greetings from his home in the U.S. state of Vermont, calling on Serbs to "stand by your graves." (Kosovo is the site of a famous defeat at the hands of the Ottomans that is deemed a cradle of Serbian identity.)
Thursday's demonstration follows a week of orchestrated outrage, during which, among other things, no fewer than ten McDonald's outlets were vandalized, and a local supermaket chain was targeted because of its Slovenian owners (Slovenia currently holds the rotating EU presidency), as were Albanian sweet shops and bakeries. (Albania has consistently supported the secession struggle of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.) More than 80 people were injured in those protests, most of them police.
In the Serb-dominated northern part of Kosovo, meanwhile, Kosovo Serbs descended on two border posts, torching one and blowing up the other, before NATO troops from the territory's 16,000-strong peacekeeping force arrived to take control of the posts. There were no casualties. Local Serbian leader Marko Jaksic, the head of the self-styled Serbian National Council in the northern town of Mitrovica, justified the attacks, saying that Serbs will not tolerate "symbols of a monster state" on their territory.
Serb anger was intensified by the European Union's decision this week to dispatch up to 2,000 civilian experts to help administer the newly declared state, a move that most Serbs see as a form of recognition because the mission will likely replace the United Nations–approved administration in the territory. (The EU failed to reach unanimity on the issue, leaving the decision up to its member states.) Serbia's ambassadors have been recalled from the U.S., France, and other countries that have recognized Kosovo's independence.
"We are struggling for what is legitimately ours. We will not tolerate this illegal act of secession," Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic told European lawmakers in the French city of Strasbourg.
Although Kosovo's declaration of independence has been expected for months, the scale of the response — both among Serbs and by foreign governments opposed to the decision — has surprised many. It is not clear how long the protests will be sustained, but for many Kosovo Albanians, as well as U.N., EU and NATO officials in the territory, it has gone on long enough.
"Some local leaders took a huge responsibility yesterday," the French general in charge of NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo said on Wednesday after violent protests in northern Kosovo. "The leaders should think deeply of their responsibility when they trigger this type of demonstration."
But Serbs opposing Kosovo's independence will certainly take heart from the fact that Russia, China and a number of European Union members, including Cyprus, Spain, Romania and Slovakia, have refused to recognize the new state. Russia and China can block Kosovo's access to the United Nations and other multilateral organizations, and the refusal of some EU member states to recognize the country could complicate decision-making over the future EU mission in the territory. Opponents of independence fear that the move will set a dangerous precedent for separatists elsewhere, and Russia has been particularly vigorous in its opposition to what it sees as Western encroachment on its traditional sphere of influence.
The more immediate danger, however, is the prospect of a partition of Kosovo itself, and the potential confrontation that could ignite. The Serbian majority that lives in the northern part of the territory refuse to recognize the authority of the central government in Pristina, and insists on remaining part of Serbia. Belgrade supports the civil administration of that territory, and plans to increase spending on the Serb population there. While Belgrade said it did not order the attacks on border posts, Serbian Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samardzic called them "legitimate" and "in accordance with the government's policy."
The impact of the Kosovo move on Serbia's domestic politics has been to strengthen the hand of nationalists who would like to see Serbia turn away from Europe and towards Moscow. The recognition of Kosovo by many European Union members, said Energy Minister Aleksander Popovic in a recent interview, could sour Serbs on the idea of joining the EU any time soon. Popovic likened the situation to a groom discovering something unsavory about his betrothed on the eve of marriage. "What do you do then?" he asked.
There's a word that comes to mind when I think of this and that word is clusterfuck.Don't make the mistake, when in Barcelona, of assuming you're in Spain: The locals in the enchanting Mediterranean coastal city, and the triangle-shaped territory around it, cite Catalan as their national identity. In conversations across the spectrum — young and old, leftist and right-wing, gay and straight, a retired couple near Tarragona and a Moroccan immigrant in Vic — the upcoming Spanish elections are discussed as if they're taking place in a foreign country. "For Catalonia, it is better if�" was how the typical response began. Here, road signs and restaurant menus are written in Catalan. It's also the language of public education, in schools where the national history of Catalonia is central to the curriculum, while Spanish is taught for two hours a week as a foreign language. The region, officially called an "autonomous community," has broad leeway in establishing political and social policy. But polls show that some 35% want full independence from Madrid.
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Nor are the Catalans the only regional nationalist movement pressing centuries-old linguistic, ethnic and historical claims on the forward-looking government in Madrid. In the Basque country, also endowed with extensive autonomy in the post-Franco era, separatist political sentiment remains ubiquitous, and terrorist actions by ETA continue.
And it's such long-standing fissures that pop up across the continent — many of whose modern nation states folded in diverse kingdoms and peoples — that shape Europe's responses to Kosovo's historic, and potentially precedent-setting, declaration of independence. Europe is divided over whether to recognize the new would-be nation on territory that has until now been recognized as part of sovereign Serbia. These divisions forced the European Union to leave it up to each member state to decide whether to recognize Kosovo's independence.
"The government of Spain will not recognize the unilateral act proclaimed yesterday by the assembly of Kosovo," Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos promptly told reporters. "This does not respect international law." Similar opposition has been voiced from a list of smaller European countries that face internal independence movements of their own, or are longstanding allies of Serbia — or both: Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia have rejected Kosovo's independence. It's not hard to find motivation for their stance: The Republic of Cyprus, for example, fears that Kosovo independence will give weight to Turkish Cypriot claims for dividing up the island into two separate nation states. The Foreign Minister of Slovakia, which fears unrest from its large Hungarian minority, said it "does not see a way" to recognize a Kosovar nation state.
But Europe's major powers — Britain, France and Germany — have, like the United States, encouraged Kosovo's drive for independence, citing the unique circumstances of its breakaway from Serbia. Nearly 1 million ethnic Albanians were forced to flee Serb ruler Slobodan Milosevic's attempt to "cleanse" them from the Serbian province in which they constituted more than 80% of the population. In the wake of the U.S.-led war that expelled Milosevic's troops from Kosovo, the Serbs have refused to negotiate on the future status of the territory, which the international community acknowledged remained legally part of Serbia even when it was under NATO protection and U.N. administration.
For those who support Kosovo's claims for independence, it is largely a question of giving greater weight to the "on-the-ground" reality over the claims of Serbia to Kosovo as a cradle of their national identity. To opponents, however, the question is one of international law, national sovereignty and precedent. China, for example, reacted much like the Spanish and Slovaks, worried that Taiwan could be spurred to declare independence. Russia is invested on the Serbian side both for strategic and fraternal reasons. Wary of national claims in the Caucasus and elsewhere, Russian President Putin has loudly defended Serbia, which shares the same Orthodox Christian roots as Russia. Moscow also sees Kosovo as another case of NATO encroachment into traditional spheres of Russian influence, and will likely work with China to ensure that the new state is denied recognition at the United Nations.
But the issue is most volatile in in Europe, where the collapse of Yugoslavia reignited conflicts that date from the Crusades and the Ottoman advance into Europe — conflicts in which European leaders appeared incapable of intervening to stop repeated crimes against humanity. Last November, I went to Kosovo to visit Ramadan Ilazi, who was 14 when I'd met him during the war in a refugee camp in Macedonia. He supported Kosovo's independence for historical reasons, but mostly because he thought it was the best bet for a peaceful future. "I want the path with the least amount of conflict and violence, and independence is that way," said Ilazi, now 22. "There is no perfect solution. But the Balkans should work to strengthen Europe, not be a problem for Europe." The initial responses to Kosovo's independence, however, suggest that the Balkans will remain a problem for Europe for the foreseeable future.
Generally in the Balkans I am not all that sympathetic to the Serbs. While no enthic group there has what you could call clean hands (those darling little oppressed Albanians? Ran a good number of Serbs out of the south of Kosovo and burned down a number of monasteries). It was in my not so humble opinion that the Serbs have only themselves to blame for alot of the shit going on there, what with their desire to hold everyone else in the state of Greater Serbia at gunpoint. Still Shitheads A and Shitheads B is how I generally view the groups involved.
Some will of course cry about the Albanians right of self determination, okay fair enough, why don't the Serbs clustered up at the North of Kosovo get the same right? Why are they forced to remain in a Albanian state, in fortified enclaves for fear of Albanian militia when the state they want to be part of is all of 50 feet away? What are the borders of Kosovo sacred but not the borders of Serbia?
Meanwhile about half the planet is annoyed or at varying levels of freaked. No one has mentioned it yet but bet your undies that the Kurds are looking at this thoughtfully, as are the Russians in the eastern half of the Urkraine and God knows where else. Generally in most cases if I am satified we are in line with the Constitution and moral right I don't honestly give a fuck what the rest of the planet thinks, but in this case they may have a point. Where's the line here? Why does separatist group A get their own country and not separatist group B?
One last line runs in and out of my mind that sums up alot of my dissatification with this utter goat fuck of diplomacy.
If we had handled Taiwan like this Los Angeles would be glowing radioactive creator by now and so would Beijing.
