Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia)
Pyotr Iskenderov
Will the Serbian-Albanian Standoff Develop Into a Military Conflict?
[Edited]
July 13th marked the 130th anniversary of the day of
conclusion of one of the most famous and
simultaneously contradictory international agreements
related to the settlement of the problems of the
Balkans, the Berlin Treaty (Treatise).
The document drew the line under the 1975-1877 Great
Esatern Crisis.
That was known for both...victories...the Russian army
that liberated...Serbs, Montenegrians and Bulgarians
from Turkish oppression, and the inability of the
Russian diplomats to defend the victories won in the
bloody war.
In the end, instead of what seemed such a close
realisation of the dream of flying the Russian flag
over Constantinople and the Black Sea Straits,
St.Petersburg had to satisfy itself with acquiring
control of Batum. Bulgaria was re-captured by the
Ottoman Empire regardless of the fact that it had
succeeded in laying down the foundations of the future
national statehood.
However, the significance of the Berlin Congress was
more than drawing a bottom line under the 1877-1878
Russo-Turkish war. The decisions that were made or
declined at that forum laid the foundations of the
beginning of a rapid maturing of the regional problem
that currently, 130 years later, is threatening to
push the Balkans into the nightmare of a deeper
cataclysm than that of the late 1890s and early 1990s.
For the first time in history the Albanian national
movement made itself manifest.
Right from the start it had a single-valued Greater
Albanian character.
It was incorporated in the form of a set of decisions
made by the Albanian (Prizren) League aiming at the
consolidation of all the territories inhabited by
Albanians into a single state formation by using arms
and disregarding the interests of non-Albanian ethnic
elements.
The initial programme adopted by the Prisren League in
1878 stipulated that all Albanians living in the
Balkan Peninsula should wage armed struggle “for the
creation of a separate province out of all the
territories inhabited by Albanians to be run by
Turkish governors-general.”
In the follow-up versions of the programme the
sovereignty of the Turkish sultans was reduced to the
responsibility to defend Albanian interests and “the
integrity of Albanian lands” that began to be
interpreted more and more widely.
At that time the great powers decided to disregard the
danger that was becoming more and more obvious.
Albanian issue was not viewed as significant enough to
be included on the agenda of the Berlin Congress.
Its participants even doubted the very fact of the
existence of an Albanian nation (according to German
Chancellor Otto Bismarck, the chair of the Congress,
“the Albanian nation does not exist”) so they regarded
any one territory with an Albanian population only as
a fact of geography.
However, one Congress decision directly determined the
follow-up course of events in that Balkans region that
at the time was known as Old Serbia, nowadays Kosovo
and Metohia. Having encouraged the Austrian-Hungarian
occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina that were in the
sphere of Serbia’s national and state interests, the
Berlin Treaty forced Belgrade to choose as its
priority policies direction the southern vector, Old
Serbia and Macedonia.
Small wonder, as early as 1912 the Kosovo problem was
one of the front-burner issues of big European
policies.
....
The mapping of the Serbian-Albanian frontier defined
by the 1912-1913 London Conference of the great powers
on the whole remained almost intact, and currently the
leaders of Albanians in Kosovo, Macedonia, South
Serbia and Montenegro in their maps of “Greater
Albania” largely redraw the projects of building the
Balkans used by the Austrian-Hungarian foreign
ministry before World War I.
In 1912 the great powers themselves realised that by
creating an autonomous Albania that had no real
preconditions for its statehood, having simultaneously
refused the victorious Serbia a vitally important
access to the Adriatic Sea, they made prepared the
soil for new conflicts.
....
In the early 20th century Albanian supporters in the
powers of the Tripartite Union did not doubt that the
time would come to make real their project of
establishing a “Greater Albania” that was to include
the entire Old Serbia (Kosovo and Metohia) and
three-quarters of the territory of Macedonia.
All the more so that at the time anti-Serbian
sentiment was fed by both their nationalist
aspirations and the activities of their neighbours in
the Balkans, with the leading role played by certain
circles in Bulgaria. Close ties were established
between Albanian and Macedonian leaders already in
early 1990s.
That was mainly true of the Interim Macedonian
Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO). Contacts of the
kind met Sofia’s interests when it thought that giving
Albanians autonomy would make a similar Macedonian
scenario also probable, so they rendered financial and
military support to the Albanian leaders.
The situation is repeated today as Bulgaria was one of
the first states to acknowledge Kosovo independent
whereas IMRO leaders and other Macedonian political
forces engaged in internal strife that has lasted for
years embrace local Albanian parties led by
“godfathers” of independent Kosovo as their coalition
partners.
What we are witnessing in Kosovo at present is the
process of implementation of the “Greater Albania”
projects dating back to the early 1900s that were
devised with the full-fledged participation of
Austrian, German and Italian diplomats envisaging
turning Kosovo and Macedonia into a nucleus of an
Albanian state ephemerically controlled by the
European supervisors.
In the plans of the United States and the leading
European states the establishment of independent
Kosovo was to become a major stride ahead in realising
the strategy of...counteracting the Russian attempts
to regain its historical positions in the Balkans.
Small wonder, the words head of Chiefs of Staff of the
Austrian-Hungarian army general Conrad von Hetzendorf
said on the eve of World War I sound so acutely
modern. He said that Albania established at the will
of the great powers “should be taken account of as an
ally in the fight against Serbia and Montenegro.”
The architects of independent Kosovo are not perplexed
about the total inviability of the new pseudo-state
whose support has already become a burden on the
European and US taxpayers.
The Brussels conference of the Kosovo donor countries
and organisations on July 11, 2008 assessed the
initial cost of this project rooted in the age-long
geopolitical history as worth Euro 1.2 billion, with
Euro 800 000 million of initial needs to be supported
by the EU and Euro 250 million by the United States.
It is noteworthy that the bulk of this astronomic
amount will be used to pay back the state debt of
Serbia to the former Yugoslavia that Kosovo is now the
payer.
What would these investments do? The amounts the
international community already invested in Kosovo in
the last decade would give an unequivocal answer.
It’s $5 billion. This money failed to make Kosovo a
viable economy or even make it independent from the
financial and economic system of Serbia, filling the
accounts of Kosovo criminal kingpins that currently
form the province’s ruling elite.
Further developments in Kosovo can take different
forms:
1) The first scenario is the immediate explosion of
the Serbian-Albanian standoff in the province, making
it a bloody armed confrontation.
This can happen should Pristina authorities supported
by NATO, KFOR and the EU international police force
try to implement the provisions of the Constitution of
the self-proclaimed Kosovo state, taking control of
the Serb-inhabited territories.
The attack on the court building in Kosovo Mitrovica
undertaken by an international police force in March
of 2008 was a rehearsal for such a scenario. Kosovo
Serbs then showed in reality their preparedness to
defend their rights. Should such an act be repeated,
its consequence could be much more tragic.
2) The second scenario envisages the preservation in
Kosovo of the status quo for an indefinite period.
That could enable Kosovo Serbs to live in the province
according to Serbian law until Kosovo’s Albanian
authorities continue building muscle, getting armed
with the help of and under the control of NATO.
In that period the Pristina authorities would try to
lay the foundations for the implementation of the
Kosovo scenario in Macedonia, Montenegro and South
Serbia with an eye to turning the Balkans into an
arena of the struggle for “Greater Albania.”
3) Finally the third scenario is of a more global
nature.
It is all about holding an international forum along
the lines of the above-mentioned Berlin Congress to
work out blueprints of new foundations of bringing
order to the Balkans.
That would allow the players on the Balkans field to
disavow their previous unilateral decisions in an
attempt to find a solution to both the Kosovo and
other Balkans crisis.
However, as a precondition to this Russia should get
the approval of the United States and the EU
leadership to give up their support of independent
Kosovo to return the situation onto the international
legal field under the control of the United Nations.
______________________
Pyotr Ahmedovich ISKENDEROV, Senior Fellow, Institute
for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Cand. Of Sc. (History)