Those with knowledge of the Serbian arms deal said they knew of no specific crimes, but warned that with so little transparency and such poor oversight, problems were likely to emerge, as they did with the 2004 deal.

So no actual problems, just the hint of problems to come! It’s a whole new form of predictive journalism over there at the NYT.

All I can think of, however, is that there’s something vaguely yet deeply ironic about one country that we invaded buying arms behind our backs from another country that we invaded. Gosh, anybody would think that the international arms trade was riddled with corrupt practices that undermine efforts to establish transparency and accountability in developing countries, and clearly that can’t be right!

Kosovo will get some sort of independence, Belgrade and Moscow will cry foul, there will be a certain amount of huffing and puffing… and then, not much. The borders will stay open; the lights will stay on. The medium-term effect will be to create a sort of Balkan Taiwan, recognized by some states but not by others.

Apart from the lights staying on (regular power cuts are still the norm in Pristina, let alone the rest of the country), he’s spot on. However, given that if enough EU member states recognise Kosovo, it’s likely that all of them will, then it’s unlikely that many other states will refuse to recognise it. States that don’t recognise it are likely to do so because they don’t really care very much one way or the other, rather than because they’re deeply opposed to independence.

As for conflict between Serbia and Kosovo, that will be a storm in the proverbial teacup. Large scale conflict is extremely unlikely, given the vested interests of both the EU and NATO stopping it quickly and forcefully and, if anything, independence is likely to increase tolerance within the province, since the Albanians won’t have anything left to prove. The postscript to a recent BBC report was interesting,

After this story was published, we received this e-mail from Serb musician Ivan Ivanov in Pirot, Serbia: “I recently (7 March) played in Babuka’s club with my band from Bulgaria. Everyone knew I was from Serbia. I had an amazing time. Of course, there were a couple of benign jokes, and a few friendly shouts (”Hey, Serb, come over here”), but I can definitely say that people from Pristina, or at least the crowd that hangs out in Babuka’s place, have moved on, and are looking forward to things getting back to normal. It will take time, it will take effort and compromise, it will take a lot of good will, but it will happen. Cheers to that!

I’ll take that with a pinch of salt, but you get the idea. So, Serbia doesn’t have any cards left to play except for Russia, which is frankly a wild card that they should leave in the box the cards came in (do you see what I did? Extended metaphor!). What about Kosovo? Most of the people I still know in Kosovo - who are English-speaking but hardly members of the political elite - seem to be fairly lacking in any faith in their politicians, and none of those politicians have any real political platform beyond independence. The elections went well, which is a good sign, but once independence is declared, that political elite will have to deliver.

I don’t think they will. I think they’ll fail to implement any significant reforms, and continue to make excuses for their failure to deliver on the most basic responsibilities government. As an example, a recent report on the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network had a gem in the article “Kosovo’s Daily Bread Gets Expensive“, reporting on sharp rises in the cost of flour:

Although grain price rises on the world market have affected the whole region, Kosovo has suffered the most, partly because of its lack of reserves, and partly because the delays to defining Kosovo’s long-term political status mean the government has few control mechanisms to cope with such crises.

Bujar Dugolli, the Minister of Trade and Industry, says that the lack of grain warehouses prevents the authorities from being able to deal with the problem.

“We are renting even the ministry’s premises,” Dugolli complained to reporters last week, making it clear that the government was unable to secure any kind of storage for key commodities.

What kind of feeble excuse is that? If they’re renting the ministry’s premises, why can’t they rent warehouses? It’s not as if any future government isn’t going to need warehouses, and it’s not that difficult to do - you find a warehouse, then you offer the owner some cash. The problem is that most politicians in Kosovo don’t have any experience in actually running anything, since they’ve been substantially carried by the international community since the war. There are good politicians and public servants, but you have to look quite hard to find them.

When I was in Kosovo a couple of weeks ago, I had the good fortune to meet with Jeta Xharra, BIRN’s Kosovo director, who was running a series of televised debates in each of the municipalities as well as a regular weekly show. This was a tremendously good idea, and clearly a shot in the arm for increasing the accountability in the election process, but the candidates’ performances weren’t up to much, according to her colleage Mufail Limani:

It would be good if the top leaders spared us having to put up with such clowns and backscratchers, but the candidates selected appear to represent their parties’ genuine political offer… Many candidates, who were on Xharra’s show, realise that it would have been better if they had not appeared at all.

I predict a lot more feeble excuses to come from assorted “clowns and backscratchers”, unfortunately, and the more the excuses keep coming, the more disillusioned the people are going to become. That’s where the real problems are going to be - not in potential conflict with Serbia, but in the internal conflicts that are likely to surface as frustration grows, particularly amongst young people. Plus, of course, the concern by surrounding countries about whether this sets a precedent for their own Albanian minorities. Is there a way out of this mess? Of course there is, but I’ll leave that for another post…

This felt particularly relevant to me because I just spent a few days in Kosovo after not having visited for three years, and was interested to note that there is much less surface tension than there was. Shortly after I arrived in 1999, a Bulgarian UN staff member was shot in the street in daylight for answering a question in Serbian; while I was there, I accidentally answered people several times in Serbian, and received nothing worse than a slight look of distaste. While the Kosovars have not by any means forgiven the Serbs, they do seem to be increasingly confident that they’ve won.

And if the Kosovars have won, that must mean that the Serbs have lost. Arsenijevic nails a few things - the Albanians were the “negroes” of Yugoslavia, suffering from a lot of the usual prejudices reserved for threatening out-groups, particularly the classic fear of fertility. There’s some good observations about the cult of victimhood that seems to haunt Serbian politics, the old Yugoslav racism of “sto juznije to tuznije” and how tired the Serbs are of the endless disappointment of politics.

The article is by no means hopeful - he ends by saying “perhaps the only thing left for us is to believe that our grandchildren will be our real children” - but without understanding just how badly the Serbs have been affected by their recent history, it will be impossible for the international community to make any progress on reconciliation with or reconstruction of the country.