Europe Must Break the Kosovo Stalemate
Pristina/Brussels, 21 August 2007: Europe risks a new bloody and destabilising conflict unless the EU and its member states now accept the primary responsibility for bringing Kosovo to supervised independence by April/May 2008.
Breaking the Kosovo Stalemate: Europe’s Responsibility, the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the key role of the EU in ensuring Kosovo’s safe transition from its current limbo as an international protectorate. The preferred strategy of bringing Kosovo to supervised independence through the United Nations Security Council has failed, following Russia’s declared intention to veto, and a new round of negotiations between Pristina and Belgrade will most likely lead nowhere. This leaves the EU – with the most to lose from renewed violent conflict in the Balkans – before crucial decisions.
“The EU has a ticking time-bomb in its own backyard”, says Alexander Anderson, Crisis Group’s Kosovo Project Director. “The sooner the EU, or a significant majority of its member states, declares itself ready to back an independent Kosovo, the better the chances of forestalling disaster”.
Pristina and Belgrade have recently started four months of talks mandated by the six-nation Contact Group (France, Germany, Italy, Russia, UK, U.S.). But Serbia will not accept independence, seeks to delay indefinitely and is laying the foundation for what would be destabilising partition. The EU and U.S. should maintain the integrity of the Ahtisaari plan – the blueprint for supervised independence crafted by the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, after a year of painstaking negotiations.
By 10 December – if, as is overwhelmingly likely, no agreed solution emerges from those talks – the EU, U.S. and NATO need to be ready to start coordinated action with the Kosovo government to implement the essence of the Ahtisaari plan, including the 120-day transition it envisages. That period should be used to accumulate recognitions of the conditionally independent state from many governments; to adopt and set in place the state-forming legislation and related institutions foreseen by the Ahtisaari plan; for the Kosovo government to invite the EU and NATO to take up new responsibilities and for those organisations to do so; and for the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to withdraw in an orderly fashion. In April/May 2008, Kosovo would be conditionally independent, under EU and NATO supervision.
Not all EU member states need to recognise Kosovo during the transition or even in April 2008, but a failure to reach a united position in support of Kosovo’s conditional independence would highly discredit the EU’s Common Foreign Security Policy and European Security Strategy and have very disturbing consequences for Europe.
“Europe tragically failed the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Now it has a second chance to show it can be an effective actor in the Balkans”, says Sabine Freizer, Crisis Group's Europe Program Director. “If it is incapable once again, it would almost certainly lead to bloodshed and renewed regional chaos that would blow back into Central and Western Europe in the form of refugees and stronger organised crime networks”.
