The biggest help that Albania can do for itself and the nation as a whole is to meticulously carry out the difficult reforms to join the EU. Meddling in Kosovo’s internal affairs – like a discoverer of “terra incognita” or a child who opens a toy to see how its mechanism works and then cannot return it to its previous state – receives necessary energy from strategic direction European Union of Albania and Kosovo as two independent states.
By Veton SURROI
1.
During the past few years, Prime Minister Rama has made various public proposals on how Kosovo should act in relation to Serbia.
The last proposal made in the Assembly of Kosovo on the occasion of the meetings of the assemblies of Kosovo and Albania was a kind of superstructure of an idea offered earlier by some Western diplomats and by President Osmani. In its original form, the idea states that Kosovo would have to unilaterally implement the Brussels/Ohrid Agreement. In its overbuilt form, Mr. Rama says that Kosovo “must freeze, freeze, without a deadline the bilateral dialogue with Serbia and the normalization of relations with the northern neighbor, it must aim for it through the bilateral dialogue with the European Union, severing the umbilical cord of nationalist reciprocity with Serbia and tying the umbilical cord of European reciprocity with the EU.” Kosovo must give “indisputable proof of its will and belonging to the United Europe and NATO, fulfilling, unilaterally, all the conditions for the normalization of relations with Serbia”.
The proposal of Mr. Rama is wrong on several levels.
First, Kosovo needs to normalize relations with Serbia. The non-normalized relations with the EU and NATO are not a product of the lack of fulfillment of the Copenhagen criteria for democracy and the rule of law or the lack of civilian control over the armed forces – Kosovo in this respect and in terms of convergence with the foreign policy of NATO and the EU is ahead of some of the neighbors and some of the member states of the EU and NATO. The non-normalized relations with NATO and the EU are a direct result of the state of Kosovo-Serbia relations.
Consequently, except that Kosovo needs normalization with its neighbor and to end the conflict, the unilateral fulfillment of the Brussels/Ohrid Agreement does not make a fundamental change to the current situation in relation to the EU and NATO. In the absence of a certified act of normalization between Kosovo and Serbia, EU and NATO member states that have not recognized Kosovo have no formal justification to recognize it. Moreover, even with the unilateral, full, semicolon, implementation of the Brussels/Ohri Agreement, this would not prevent Serbia from making additional demands at some point in the future, followed by the declaration that even then it will never recognize independent Kosovo.
Thus it would appear that Kosovo should bear the burden of Serbia’s unwillingness to dialogue.
2.
The justification given to this idea, whether in the original form or the overbuilt version of Prime Minister Rama, is based on the precedent of past negotiations, in Rambouillet and Vienna. At that time, Kosovo undertook to unilaterally implement the agreements, for which it had promised and won. In the first case, he won the liberation of the country thanks to the intervention of the NATO countries and the placement under international administration as a preparatory form for the establishment of permanent status. In the second case, Kosovo won support for the agreed declaration of independence along with a large part of the democratic world.
In the current case, there is no identifiable objective that would make the transformation and this for a simple reason: the normalization of relations between Kosovo and the EU and NATO (which would be the transformative moment) depends on the member states. In today’s constellation of international relations, some of the EU and NATO member states are further from the values ​​of the EU and NATO than Kosovo – it is difficult to convince them that their interest is to push Kosovo forward. Even those that are Atlanticist and Europeanist (such as Spain and Greece, for example) find it difficult to support Kosovo with non-normalized relations with Serbia.
Moreover, it is conceptually easier to explain it like this: Kosovo was able to free itself from Serbia without the will of Serbia, Kosovo has declared independence and is an independent state without the will of Serbia, but Kosovo cannot have normal relations with Serbia without the will of Serbia. Prime Minister Rama has called this last relationship “navel of nationalist reciprocity”. I believe the description is wrong, because there is no reciprocity: Kosovo has not declared that it will never recognize Serbia. On the contrary, Kosovo has expressed that it is ready to establish diplomatic relations and build good neighborly relations with Serbia.
What Mr. What Rama calls “nationalist reciprocity” is in fact the context of European reciprocity: Kosovo needs normalization of relations with Serbia for the sake of neighboring relations with it as well as normalization of relations with the EU and NATO. Serbia needs the normalization of relations with Kosovo for the sake of good neighborly relations with it as well as for integration into the European Union.
In this European context, the problem is not Kosovo. The problem is the hesitation of Serbia and the diplomatic weakness of the European Union. Serbia was reluctant to accept normalization with Kosovo as offered by the Brussels/Ohrid Agreement and the European Union tried to accommodate this reluctance with interpretive acrobatics of the validity of an agreement where one party openly expresses reservations against it.
3.
In this context of the negotiation process and as we enter a year of restructuring of EU and US policy (with the new Commission and the arrival of President Trump), it is not a good idea for Prime Minister Rama that Kosovo freezes negotiations with Serbia . Initially, Kosovo already has a tradition of being a predictable partner of the West and during over thirty years of negotiations and in very difficult moments, it has not been raised from the negotiating table. The order that should come from Kosovo is not freezing, but dynamism.
Secondly, freezing (or lifting from the table) would direct the suspicion for the failures so far towards Kosovo and not from the expressed reservations of Serbia and the diplomatic incompetence of Brussels. In Brussels, this would serve as a new exculpatory discourse, with which the Brussels dialogue has failed, because Serbia does not want to fully accept the Brussels/Ohrid Agreement and Kosovo is refusing to continue the negotiations, it has “frozen” them. indefinitely”. With this facility, the burden of pressure that objectively falls on the EU is easily transferred to Kosovo.
And thirdly, what is the credibility of Brussels in dealing with responsibility (not to mention guilt) can be seen with the fact that Kosovo is under punitive measures of the EU while it has been protected by a political and paramilitary operation to destabilize a part of the country . (Coincidentally: it is this very part of the country, which does not appear in Prime Minister Rama’s speech when he says that Albanians “stretched our arms from Konispoli to Mitrovica”)
4.
Prime Minister Rama’s latest action is consistent throughout the last ten years. He supported the idea that Kosovo should divide its territory and reach an agreement with Serbia. Beyond “fraternal opinions”, no one in Kosovo has offered a draft statute for the Union of Serbian municipalities without asking. It has proposed, without consulting with Kosovo, that NATO take under its administration the northern part of Kosovo after the riots in Zveçan and elsewhere; thus, two security zones would be created in Kosovo, with its own political consequences. It has suspended the meeting of the two governments of the country that was supposed to be held in Peja as the first country to apply sanctions to Kosovo for its actions, called “unilateral”. Recently, at the meeting in Pristina, apart from other instructions for dealing with the history of Kosovo and its complicated judiciary, he proposed the freezing of negotiations with Serbia and the unilateral implementation of the Brussels/Ohrid Agreement.
The justification for these actions was a combination between the self-declared Euro-Atlantic responsibility of a state that started negotiations with the EU and national responsibility. In both cases, Prime Minister Rama would do himself and his arguments a favor if they were part of a non-public exchange of views with his counterpart and with the representatives of the opposition in Kosovo. In both cases, the performances with spectacle and folklore exceed the good taste of intellectual conversation and the limit when the opinion of the prime minister of a neighboring country is transformed into a call for action, namely intervention in the internal affairs of the other state.
Albania’s path to the EU does not depend for one iota on Kosovo’s actions, and even less on the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue. The biggest help that Albania can do for itself and the nation as a whole is to meticulously develop the difficult reforms to join the EU. Meddling in Kosovo’s internal affairs – like a discoverer of “terra incognita” or a child who opens a toy to see how its mechanism works and then cannot return it to its previous state – receives necessary energy from strategic direction European Union of Albania and Kosovo as two independent states.
Prime Minister Rama would do Albania, Kosovo and the Euro-Atlantic path of both countries a favor if he is not more consistent in offering “fraternal ideas”. (Koha.net)
