Kosovo: Talks about talks?

Sat, Feb 04 2012

Fri, Jul 30 2010 10:00 CET

byClive Leviev-Sawyer

3485 Views 23 Comments

1 of 1

NOT QUITE FACE TO FACE: Serbia's foreign minister Vuk Jeremic, second left, arrives at the International Court of Justice at the Peace Palace in The Hague; Kosovo's foreign minister Skender Hyseni is seated at the right.
Photo: Reuters

The word "negotiations" predominated in reactions from all sides to the International Court of Justice’s announcement of its opinion that Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence was not in violation of international law. The tricky thing is that there is no consensus about the form, timing or substance of such negotiations.

Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolai Mladenov called on Belgrade and Pristina to begin a dialogue that would address specific problems related to the daily lives of their citizens. Even though Bulgaria is among countries that were the first to recognise Kosovo, the Foreign Ministry in Sofia took a carefully-considered line that reached out to Belgrade with a reminder of Bulgaria’s support for the European prospects of Serbia – support that Bulgaria also extends to all Western Balkans countries, Kosovo included.

The European Union, while divided over the issue of Kosovo’s independence, with 22 countries having recognised the state while five continue to decline to do so, also made a call for negotiations.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said that she had spoken to Serbian president Boris Tadić and Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci, proposing that there should be "a dialogue…between them to look at how we move forward into the future".

"That offer is on the table. I hope they will want to move forward and start discussions," Ashton said.

One issue is whether Serbia would work alone on a resolution for tabling at the UN on Kosovo, or whether Belgrade would work together with key players in the EU, especially given that many in the bloc would like to find a way to help push forward Serbia’s EU integration.

According to a report by Serbian daily Blic, Cyprus foreign minister Markos Kyprianou, whose country is among the five EU states that reject Kosovo’s independence (the others are Greece, Romania, Spain and Slovakia), said that the solution to Kosovo’s status "has to be found through negotiations over territorial integrity and not through unilateral statement over independence".

However, there remained no clear direction about the question of negotiations.

Franco Frattini, foreign minister of Italy, was quoted as saying that the ICJ opinion meant that "everything can be discussed regarding Kosovo except the status".

Given that the number of recognitions of Kosovo remains too few for the country to be put up for UN membership, it was little surprise that UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon stuck to carefully neutral language in addressing the question of negotiations.
In a statement issued by his spokesperson after the ICJ announcement, Ban said that he "strongly encourages the parties to engage in a constructive dialogue… [and] urges all sides to avoid any steps that could be seen as provocative and derail the dialogue".

In Belgrade
For Serbia’s leadership, there was at least domestic encouragement after a 12-hour parliamentary debate that ended with an overwhelming vote in favour of the government continuing on its current Kosovo policy.

The national assembly resolution, as reported by Serbian news agency Tanjug, said that the country’s parliament "finds it necessary to come through peaceful negotiations to a permanent, sustainable and mutually acceptable solution for Kosovo and Metohija, in accordance with the constitution of the Republic of Serbia, which would enable an historic reconciliation of the Serbian and Albanian people, as well as peace and stability in the region".

The resolution calls for national unity and announces the use of all available diplomatic and political means to preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Underlining that Serbia would "never" recognise Kosovo as independent, MPs supported the government in the process of submitting a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly, whose approval would open the way to reaching a compromise solution for Kosovo through negotiations.

Tadić said that Serbia wanted to solve the Kosovo problem through peaceful policies. Confrontation would strip Serbia of any possibility to fight for its national interests, he told MPs.

"Without the international community, we cannot find a solution for the Kosovo question. It is impossible in conditions of isolation and confrontation, especially with the greatest powers," he said.

According to Blic, Belgrade did not want any negotiations to start before the UN General Assembly session in September.

Foreign minister Vuk Jeremic was quoted as saying on July 26 that the ICJ opinion had put Serbia in a very difficult position.

"It will make our battle for our part of the country more difficult, it will draw us into a quarrel, perhaps, with a part of the international community that expects us to ‘recognise the reality," Jeremic said.

In Pristina
In the capital of Kosovo, celebrations of the ICJ ruling aside, there was little immediate manifestation of the idea that the court’s ruling meant any immediate effective change, at least going by local media reports.

Kosovo daily Koha Ditore reported representatives of international missions in Kosovo as reminding prime minister Thaci that they would remain as supervisors of independence for at least another two years.

The daily quoted Karin Limdal, spokesperson for the EU rule-of-law mission Eulex, as saying that "27 EU member states gave their approval for the Eulex mission in Kosovo; this mandate has just been renewed for the next two years, until June 2012". (Eulex had made the news on July 23 with the arrest of Kosovo central bank governor Hashim Rexhepi as part of a corruption investigation.)

This message apparently came in reaction to a claim by prime minister Thaci that Kosovo’s "supervised independence is successfully coming to an end".

Kosovo foreign minister Skender Hyseni, speaking to Austrian newspaper Der Standard, said that the ICJ opinion was a clear signal for the UN Security Council to come up with a resolution on Kosovo’s independence, which Hyseni said could open the way for the UN mission in Kosovo either to withdraw or downsize.

Meanwhile, Kosovo and its backers made calls of various degrees of vigour for the ICJ announcement to be followed by further recognitions of Kosovo’s independence. Hyseni said that Kosovo was expecting the ICJ opinion to be followed by about 35 recognitions; other reports said that Kosovo expected a figure as high as 50. Either way, the ICJ announcement saw no immediate flood of recognitions, leaving the country – at least by July 28, almost a week after the ruling, recognised by the 69 UN member states, as many as before the ruling.