[AKI] Statement - November 26, 2001

[AKI News]

Advocates for Kosova's Independence
November 26, 2001

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  ** AKI Newsletter, Issue 2 **
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To no one's surprise, Ibrahim Rugova won the recently held elections in
Kosova, though LDK will share parliamentary seats with PDK, AK, and the Serb
party, which won eleven per-cent of the votes. Then, oddly, President Rugova
sent out a statement saying that Kosova should now be recognized as
independent by the international community. Internationals sputtered.
Kostunica vowed to retain KosMet (this is not an abbreviation for the name
of a life insurance company but an abbreviation for the Serbian term Kosovo
Metohija). Does Kostunica know that he lost the NATO war? Does NATO know the
FRY lost?

If this all sounds contradictory and confusing, it is. If this sounds like
once again, international powers are ignoring this high level of
semi-institutionalized conflict regarding the final status of Kosova in the
Balkans, they are. Somehow following the NATO war, which NATO "won", there
was no peace agreement. The Serbs were allowed to retain their entire army
as well as sovereignty over the province they had just been driven out of,
thus creating an imbalance of power weighted towards Serbia that now cannot
be addressed by any particular current organization. The Albanians,
realizing that their only real advantage is not military but a population
imbalance of 90 per-cent, seek the elusive referendum that was promised them
in 1999. Now it seems that "the will of the people" has been reneged on at
meetings they were not invited to. Isn't "the will of the people" the true
meaning of sovereignty in the year 2001? Or are we now promoting a
unilateral statehood based on hegemony and repression, similar to the states
involved in the Cold War? Where do charters for the UN and NATO state this
as a goal? Nowhere.

What's missing behind this hodge-podge of mismanagement is, step one:
Accountability. Actions should result in meaningful consequences. Under the
Clinton/Holbrooke expediency method embodied in the Dayton Peace Accord of
1995 this never happened. Instead, short-term deals were substituted for
just, principled, long-term strategies. Milosevic, now in The Hague, was
treated as the Balkan "peacemaker." So he suffered some consequences. But
nearly all others involved in these murderous acts still go free. The ICTY
cannot and should not be a substitute for all levels of appropriate
consequences. Certainly more than four Serb leaders were involved in killing
and torturing Albanians. But only four have been indicted. Mladic and
Karadzic go free.

In the same vein, following ten years of armed conflict during the break-up
of Yugoslavia, the Serbs were allowed to keep the Yugoslav Army - an army
that had brutally killed its own countrymen in three separate wars in
Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosova. There was no disarmament for the Serbs in 1999,
only for the Albanian KLA. Thus the FRY, the most violent nation in the
Balkans, has been allowed to remain heavily armed. Even when mass graves
were being excavated in the Serb capital, Belgrade, there was no discussion
of any consequences.

Instead, a country that drove hundreds of thousands into the mountains,
destabilized neighboring countries, deceived its own citizens, murdered
Kosovar civilians and hid the evidence in its capital is allowed to retain
sovereignty over the population it tried to drive from its jurisdiction. In
this instance, sovereignty was not used to defend and protect a group of
citizens within its borders, but the opposite. At the same time, sovereignty
for Serbs has been used by the Milosevic regime and to an extent by the
Kostunica government as a shield to hide behind, to perpetrate murder,
social chaos, crime and an ongoing injustice from which ordinary people must
feel that they will never escape. Internationals have clung to the principle
of sovereignty of the FRY (a former country that is still a country)
causing: an exhaustion of diplomacy, severe strains in the NATO alliance,
failure to promote human rights by the UN Security Council, the economic
destruction of an entire region resulting in smuggling, weapons trafficking,
and drug running.

This is not a protection of the principle of sovereignty. Sovereignty means
that a nation will lawfully defend and protect all its citizens. It is,
instead, half-hearted international intervention followed by a wish that the
problems would simply go away. Well they won't. Not until an equitable
sovereignty is redefined and redistributed among all citizens. That should
have been done in a Kosova Peace Accord in June, 1999.

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