NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2008
Kosova's independence
Kosova's declaration of independence in February was greeted by massive celebrations in Prishtina, the country's capital. The joy in the streets reflected the long-standing desire for independence from Serbian domination on the part of the overwhelming majority of Kosovars.
Four months after Kosova's declaration, however, the country is still struggling to emerge from the twilight status in which it was forced to languish since 1999, when an armed uprising of the Albanian population precipitated the intervention of NATO and the withdrawal of the Serbian army.
In the intervening years, Kosova remained formally a province of Serbia and was administered by a large and inefficient United Nations bureaucracy. Little economic development took place and Serbia was permitted to actively manipulate the small remaining Serbian community in its effort to achieve a partition of the northern part of the country. This state of affairs served to intensify hostility between Albanians and Serbs and contributed to events like the large-scale inter-ethnic violence that took place in March of 2004.
The Movement for Self-Determination, an organization formed to oppose the political stasis imposed upon Kosova by the international community, held a large protest in February of 2007 which was fired on by police. Two demonstrators were killed and Albin Kurti, a former leader of the mass student movement of the 1990s and organizer of the event, was arrested. Kurti was held under house arrest until February of this year, when his trial was suspended amid widespread public denunciations of the political nature of the charges.
Kurti and his organization have been the most trenchant critics of the incomplete character of Kosova's current status. As they point out, the February declaration of independence is explicitly based on an acceptance of the recommendations of a report by diplomat Martti Ahtisaari. The independence sketched out for Kosova in the Ahtisaari report is a highly conditional one, in which it continues to remain under European Union supervision and is subject to a de facto internal partition between the Serbian north and the Albanian south.
Furthermore, Serbia is largely absolved of responsibility for the 1999 violence and the decade of repression that preceded it. As Kurti writes in an essay in The Case for Kosova, edited by scholar Anna Di Lellio, "There is neither penance nor regret in the Serbian political and intellectual establishment for the 12,000 killed, 3,000 kidnapped, thousands raped, one million expelled and 120,000 houses destroyed in Kosova. There has been no justice for the victims."
--Sympathizer
|
