Kosovo: Impossible Independence

• United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244/99, under which Kosovo was entrusted to the UN, calls for establishing democracy, multicultural society and “substantial self-government” for this province torn by inter-ethnic violence. Not independence!

Kosovo: Impossible Independence
Statement by Ambassador of Serbia
Dusan T. Batakovic
For the Canadian Media
Ottawa, 17/02/2008

            United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244/99, under which Kosovo was entrusted to the UN, calls for establishing democracy, multicultural society and “substantial self-government” for this province torn by inter-ethnic violence. Previous rebellions of Kosovo Albanians, in 1968 and 1981, have shown that their claims were never motivated by human rights or democracy, but built on purely nineteenth-century nationalist dreams, supported and tacitly orchestrated by Enver Hohxa, lifelong Stalinist dictator of communist Albania (1945-1985). Despite the fact that the 17 February decision of the provisional institutions of Kosovo on proclaiming independence is both illegal and illegitimate in regard to the constitution of Serbia and the still valid UN Security Council Resolution 1244, the UN Charter and the Final Helsinki Act, it should be noted that this decision might create a dangerous precedent for separatist movements all over the globe.

After an armed rebellion started by Albanian guerrillas (the KLA), failed negotiations at Rambouillet, and 78-days of NATO bombing of Serbia (and partially of Montenegro, the second member-state of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), peace was established eventually in June 1999. Since then, despite certain, though insufficient, efforts of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and an unprecedented international military presence (a 45,000 strong “Kosovo Force” or KFOR for a province of 10,800 sq km and less than two million inhabitants, today scaled down to a still high contingent of 16,000 NATO-led troops), the Albanian-dominated provisional institutions of Kosovo (president, government and parliament) not only  failed to prevent  large-scale persecution of Serbs and other non-Albanians, but gave tacit approval to all kinds of ethnically motivated crimes.

The return of displaced Albanian refuges in 1999 was followed by the expulsion, according to the UNHCR, of 246,000 Serbs, Roma, Goranies (Muslim Slavs), and other non-Albanians by Albanian extremists in the following months, while more than 40,000 houses and flats were burned to the ground or usurped by Albanians, including many illegal immigrants from Albania who plundered the property of exiled Serbs or Roma. More than 1,300 Serbs are considered missing and another 1,300 killed after 10 June 1999. The provincial capital of Pristina lost a quarter of its pre-war population — 40,000 Serbs prior to the war have been reduced to less than a hundred inhabitants (presently 86 persons) heavily guarded by KFOR soldiers. The same appalling fate met the large, at least 10,000 strong Roma population of urban and suburban Pristina, which is today the only ethnically cleansed provincial capital in the whole of Europe. As of February 2008, more than 60 percent of Kosovo Serbs are displaced persons (a euphemism for 200,000 refugees living in both Serbia and Montenegro since 1999), as well as 70 percent of Roma and 70 percent Goranies. Albanians in Kosovo became a ninety percent majority only after ethnic cleansing perpetrated in the years following June 1999, a figure still unreliable since Albanians refuse to organize a population census in the province.

In addition to this appalling human rights record, 156 Serbian Orthodox churches, of which one third were important monuments dating from medieval times, were leveled to the ground or burned by local Albanians, while the largest wave of ethnic cleansing after June-December 1999 took place in March 2004, where thirty five churches and monasteries were destroyed or damaged, while 4,000 Serbs were displaced from strategically important areas and others saved only after aggressive KFOR action. Kosovo Albanians, who were obviously promised independence prior to the UN-sponsored talks, did not seriously engage in UN-sponsored status talks where Serbia offered them largest possible autonomy, but proceeded towards independence.

Lacking legitimacy and parliamentary approval from any of Kosovo's significant non-Albanian communities (including 140,000 Serbs who are a constitutive nation, in Kosovo as elsewhere in Serbia, not a minority like others), the decision of the de facto mono-ethnic Kosovo provisional assembly does not represent the will of a multiethnic society. It is rather an entirely Albanian project, based on false promises to please Western countries while in reality founded on ethnic discrimination and orchestrated reprisals against other national and ethnic communities, as confirmed many times by the international Kosovo Ombudsman, various reports to the UN and certain international human rights groups.