Blogger smackdown

If you've spend time around ex-Yu blogosphere, you've heard of Wim and his blog Balkan Outlooks. His ideas are fresh and genuine so I love to engage with him once in a while. Here is my reply to his last post.

Hello Wim,

On what grounds do you come up with this statement: It is clear to everybody that many Albanians want all Serbs out and that there is a big chance in 10 years no Serbs will be left in Kosovo? Who is everybody? It is clear (oops!) that Jim doesn't think so. I agree with you that Serbs are not loved much in Kosova (do you expect otherwise?), but those that attack and damage them are a very small minority or teenagers as was the case in March 2004. Without reconciliation between the two ethnicities, that small minority will continue to endanger Serbs because no Albanian will raise the voice and report such attacks. That's why I consider reconciliation and independence to be crucial for the multiethnic Kosova. The war, which in the eyes of the Albanians has gone unpunished, is the elephant in the room and people are being asked by the world to forget about it. That’s not the way it works.

I understand you’re concerned for the fate of Serbs but separation doesn't bring cooperation or co-existence. Bosnia is a very good example, as you have noted in your blog. Gerrymandering in America (thank's for the term, Jim) is a less lethal example that such splitting will create fault lines and extremists rather than defense lines for the protection of minorities. If we continue to structure Kosova as "us" vs. "them", as you suggest, then we are in deep trouble. It would be a signal that north of Iber belongs to Serbs and consequentially the rest belongs to Albanians.

One of the problems with Serbs in my country is that they don't identify with it and are in turn considered a fifth column used by Belgrade to hold Kosova back. K-Police is young and weak, but Serbs joining it will make it stronger. So far they haven't done it as one would presume from somebody genuinely worried about their security.

Theoretically I'm not against your solution. But if it happens, check back with me to see it taken all the way to Macedonia, Montenegro and Southern Serbia (or Eastern Kosova, depending on your perspective).

The principle of not changing borders by the Europeans was suggested for a very good reason. You can’t split something like Bosnia into two or three clean parts without ethnically cleansing those parts in the process. Justifying the clean up that Serbs in Krajina did based only on an ambiguous statement by Tudjman and massacres that they had endured during WWII by a puppet government of Croatia has to be the biggest irony of the previous decade. Serbs set time and again to stop the disasters and they only made them more certain in the process.