Happy Independence Day!

Well, technically that was yesterday, but my internet connection has been out since the middle of last week, and obviously time stops when the internet goes down.

It feels strangely anti-climactic to watch an independent Kosovo paraded on-screen - a mere 9 years after it actually became independent. Everybody’s a winner - the Albanians get their country, the Serbs get another raison de martyre and our governments get to distract us from Afghanistan and Iraq (ooh, contentious lefty jibe!). The real losers are the Kosovo Serb communities that are left - the Kosovar Albanians don’t really want them hanging around, but the Serbian authorities would probably prefer them to stay in limbo to keep the issue live (hey, that reminds me of this great joke about the Palestinians!).

Independence is clearly not a solution to any of Kosovo’s long-term problems, and might even give us a few new ones, but this feels like the inevitable conclusion of a process that started long before the 1999 NATO bombing. Still nobody seems to be prepared to point out in public that Kosovo has no economic prospects of any kind, which I’ve always thought is pretty essential for economic development. I don’t have anything insightful to contribute to that discussion, but I do wonder how long it will take before the Kosovo authorities start blaming the EU for the lack of progress?

Good luck, Kosovo - you’ll need it.