[ALBSA-Info] The Independent

[Agron Alibali]

 The Independent (London), October 30, 2000 


LEADING ARTICLE: INDEPENDENCE IS THE LOGICAL
CONCLUSION OF THE KOSOVO WAR 




WHO IS afraid of independence for Kosovo? Independence
has been the Great Unmentionable for most of the
alliance of democratic nations which rescued the
Albanian majority in the province from Slobodan
Milosevic in the war last year. 

That taboo should be broken, even if this may not be
the most diplomatic moment to do so from the point of
view of providing succour to Vojislav Kostunica, the
newly-elected president of Yugoslavia who ousted
Milosevic earlier this month. But the democratic
Serbia which is emerging from the wreckage of
dictatorship will not in the end be helped if its new
friends around the world tiptoe delicately around the
truth. The new Serbia must be able to look reality in
the eye, and the reality is that Kosovo is effectively
an independent state already. If the US State
Department is, as we report today, trying to reopen
the issue of independence, it is right to do so. 

The way to bolster the new democratic forces in
Belgrade is not to hold out false hopes of putting
either Yugoslavia or Greater Serbia back together
again, but to hasten the process by which all the
former republics of Yugoslavia can benefit
economically from integrating with the European market
and, ultimately, joining the European Union. 

The people with the most right to fear Kosovo's
independence are clearly the Serb minority there, now
much less than one tenth of the population. But the
results of the weekend's local elections provide them
with some limited comfort. That the party of the
pacifist Ibrahim Rugova should have prevailed over the
successors of the Kosovo Liberation Army - whose
leaders elbowed Mr Rugova aside during the war -
suggests that the Albanian people are content to
pursue the less aggressive of two possible paths to
statehood. 

Of course, the Serbs were unrepresented in these
elections, because they boycotted them, and they need
continued protection against the tyranny of the
majority. In the long term, they are more likely to
obtain protection if the legitimate desire of the
moderate majority of Albanians for national
self-determination is recognised. 

An independent Kosovo, landlocked, tiny and poor, has
not been possible in the history of the Balkans to
date. Nor was it a war aim of the Nato alliance in
last year's bombing campaign. But it is possible and
indeed desirable now, provided the values for which
that war was fought are respected, namely those of
defending the human rights of a minority against its
more numerous neighbours. 


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