Unfinished Business for Blair

In Tribune, London, 8 December 2006

Kosovo Independence - There's No Alternative

It is sad to see the ruined fragments of the former Yugoslavia. You can travel from the Arctic Circle to the Moroccan border with Spain without showing a passport. But to travel from Skopje to Pristina, which was once as trouble-free as going from Manchester to Leeds, is a time-consuming bureaucratic business. The only hope for the sundered Balkans is for the separate states to start cooperating and eventually to join the European Union.

For that to happen, the last piece of the Balkan jigsaw has to have clear and guaranteed shape-and that is an independent Kosovo. Recognition must precede cooperation and reintegration.

Occasionally overlooked in the wake of the Iraqi debacle is the fact that Tony Blair's foreign policy was not always bad. Without the Prime Minister's strength over Kosovo, Slobodan Milosevic would probably have escaped with the ethnic cleansing– and remained in power. Certainly, Clinton ungoaded by Blair would not have supported action-and, since it was on behalf of Muslims and there was no oil involved, not even a belligerent Bush would have been that fired up about a genuine humanitarian issue in an oil-free niche of the Balkans.

But now as Blair approaches the end of his premiership, Kosovo is still unfinished business. Europe and the UN are hedging about independence, almost eight years after Milosevic's killers beat an ignominious retreat. Accepting that he certainly is not going to see a happy ending in Iraq, the Prime Minister Blair's last mission, should he choose to accept it, should surely be to ensure recognition of Kosovo's independence.

In a recent interview, Kofi Annan told me that the UN was treading water on the issue so as not to give Serb nationalists leverage in the forthcoming elections. This is the wrong approach. You do not cure nationalist illusions by pandering to them. Belgrade's claims to Kosovo were always about as well founded as London's to Calais, which may have been written on Mary Tudor's heart but has long been erased from any serious map of Britain.

The founders of the regime in Washington that Mr. Blair admires so much declared that governments derive their "just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

In the modern democratic world, there is no way that the international community can force Kosovo back under Serbian rule against the wishes of some ninety per cent of its population. Over twenty years ago Milosevic ago instituted a form of Apartheid against the majority of its population, and followed it up with a bout of ethnic cleansing and mass murders, whose victims are still being exhumed from mass graves in Serbia.

The only right the Serbs had to Kosovo was that of conquest, in the early twentieth century. And the problem with the right of conquest is that he who conquers last has the last laugh. Milosevic lost. More pertinently, the Kosovars will not, and nor should they, be forced back into the state that deprived them of all their rights, including the right to life.

If there had been an effective reformist government in Belgrade, it would have spent the years since the overthrow of Milosevic apologizing to the Kosovars and trying to kiss and make up. But instead of trying to win hearts and minds they have directed a haze of irredentist claims against Kosovo and its government, the latest of which involves railroading through a reaffirmation of Serb sovereignty over the province in a Floridian-style vote on a new constitution.

It is true that the Kosovars have not exactly made a stellar success of self-government hitherto. However, almost every such objection, no matter how accurate, could equally be levelled against Serbia, whose government had in addition waged recent aggressive and genocidal war against its neighbours. By the same logic, having proven unfit for self-rule, perhaps Serbia should return to Ottoman suzerainty?

Some so-called socialists now claim to be deeply concerned about the problem with minorities in Kosovo. It would, one cannot help thinking, have helped their case if they had shown similar concern when Milosevic's regime was ethnically cleansing minorities, Albanians, Bosniak Muslims and Croats, but even so, there is indeed a serious problem with how Kosovars treat the minorities they see as accomplices of Belgrade.

The occasional obsession with it by those who see the likes of Saddam and Slobodan as socialist saints and martyrs is on a par with concentrating on how the Czechs (genuinely) mistreated the Sudeten Germans while forgetting what Nazi Germany had done before. The one does not excuse the other–but it puts it into perspective. There is certainly room for a continuing international presence and protection for the minorities, Serb, Roma or whatever, with a strong message to Kosovo that there would be financial and political consequences for a failure to ensure their safety.

But we return to the same point. There are no conceivable circumstances short of extermination or expulsion of the Kosovars that would bring about a restoration of Belgrade's power in the province. Tony Blair should make himself useful in his exit, and effect the independence wanted by an overwhelming majority of Kosovo's inhabitants.