CONTENTS:
THE DECISIVE YEAR 2001
YUGOSLAV AID CONDITIONED WITH KOSOVO'S
INDEPENDENCE
IBRAHIM RUGOVA KOSOVO'S UNSURE SURVIVOR
DIENSTBIER DISCOVERS ALBANIANS EXTREMISTS
THE DECISIVE YEAR 2001
Zëri carried on page one a column by Blerim Shala who comments FRY admittance to the UN.
One day after the General Assembly admitted FRY to the UN, Montenegrin
political parties decide that they would hold a referendum in June next
year, which would determine the future status of Montenegro with Serbia.
Serb-Montenegro negotiations are expected to start right after elections
in Serbia, which are scheduled for 23 December of this year. Only after
these elections will the Serb side have legitimacy, both electoral and
negotiating. It can be seen now that next year will be crucial for
Serb-Montenegro relations. Clarification of accounts between Serbia and
Montenegro will have its influence in the developing process of finding
Kosovo's final status. Belgrade's main argument in negotiations with
Montenegro would be that international community's position, which now
after the regime has changed in Belgrade favors the salvaging the
territorial integrity of FRY, opposite realistic tendencies in the field
for disintegration of this country. Montenegrins on the other hand have
the Referendum and the people's mood that about 70% support the creating a
union of states between Montenegro and Serbia. In the developments in the
region Kosovars have to organize their own general elections in the first
part on next year. It looks like that Kosovar government will have to make
some significant decisions next
year.
YUGOSLAV AID
CONDITIONED WITH KOSOVO'S INDEPENDENCE
Zëri carried on page three a report an interview by Dimitri Sims director of the Nixon Institute for Peace and Freedom to the VOA.
Director of the Nixon Institute for Peace and Freed on Dimitri Sims evaluates that hundreds of millions aid promised to "Yugoslavia" by the US will depend on the position that "Yugoslav" president Vojislav Kostunica's takes on war criminals, Kosovo's independence and relations with Montenegro.
Sims evaluated that the Balkans issue will be on the agenda of the next US Administration. He added that there are many reasons why US has not still offered "Yugoslavia" additional aid, even though winter is coming and there is desperate need for help. He said, "First offering aid is not a very popular method in US, second Vojislav Kostunica is a person whose characteristics are still unknown," said Sims and added, "Vojislav Kostunica has to do much more in clarifying his positions on the war criminals, Kosovo's independence, and prove as to how he is going to act towards Montenegro before aid from aboard comes" said Sims.
IBRAHIM RUGOVA KOSOVO'S UNSURE SURVIVOR
Koha Ditore carried on page ten a report from the weekly Economist for recent political developments in Kosovo.
While Yugoslavia’s new president consolidates his power, this week’s Balkan focus is shifting back to Kosovo, where upcoming elections could once more alter the West’s calculations for the region.
Neither Yugoslavia’s new leader, Vojislav Kostunica, nor the most widely respected politician in Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, would relish being compared with one another, but it is hard to ignore the similarities. As citizens of the dying Yugoslav federation start considering how they might live together peacefully, these two old-fashioned academics, representing all that was fusty but comparatively decent about intellectual life in Marshal Tito’s country, have been embraced, albeit cautiously, by the more sensible youngsters on both sides of their ethnic wall who hope to escape the vicious Balkan circle of crime and war.
Mr. Rugova, a French-educated professor of literature, has never claimed to be a crowd-pleaser. But this awkward, retiring man was mobbed like a rock star by 20,000 people, at least half of them under 30, when he appeared at an election rally in the stadium this week in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Like every candidate in Kosovo’s local elections, due on October 28th, Mr Rugova refused to discuss any future for the bitterly contested province, now guarded by 43,000 peacekeepers from 31 countries, save full independence from Serbia.
Richard Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the UN and veteran Balkan trouble-shooter, fed those hopes by making a tantalizing promise, during a stopover in Pristina that negotiations on Kosovo’s final status would start in the near future. Most European policymakers, on the other hand, still believe it is too soon to bridge apparently irreconcilable differences between most Albanians and most Serbs about where Kosovo ultimately belongs.
In any case, the difference between Mr Rugova and other contenders for power in Kosovo has more to do with style than ultimate policy goals. For middle-class Kosovars who lived modestly but respectably in the 1980s, before Serbia suppressed their autonomy, and apparently for many of their children as well, the pacifist Mr Rugova is more attractive than the swaggering ex-guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
His moderate party, which led a campaign of non-violent resistance to Serbian rule for much of the last decade, is expected to win about half the vote in the forthcoming ballot. Watchers from the UN reckon that the two main ex-KLA parties, several of whose leading lights have close links with the illegal trade in guns and drugs, might get a combined total of 20% or so.
In Belgrade, meanwhile, the newly elected president has received a friendly warning from leaders of the student movement Otpor (Resistance), whose street protests were an important part of his campaign to end more than a decade of misrule by his predecessor, Slobodan Milosevic. As posters appeared around the city with the enigmatic slogan “We are watching you”, Otpor’s leaders said they would give Mr Kostunica, a law lecturer and moderate nationalist, 100 days to make good on his promises to sweep the old guard out of power and establish a democratic society; otherwise they would withdraw support and start directing their youthful anger against the new incumbents.
Given that he was propelled to power by a broad range of constituencies, from ethnic minorities to disaffected members of the security forces, the new Yugoslav president cannot avoid disappointing some of them. But after barely three weeks in office, he is not doing badly. The sound of ice breaking was audible all over the Balkans this week as he restored diplomatic relations with neighboring countries and the western world.
On a landmark visit to Sarajevo, Mr Kostunica assured the authorities, both local and international, that he was prepared to recognize unconditionally the independence and territorial integrity of Bosnia—despite the attachment felt by nationalist Serbs, including himself, to the republic’s eastern, Serb-dominated half.
The new president also admitted, more openly than before, that “crimes” were committed against other nations by the Milosevic regime during the four wars which followed old Yugoslavia’s disintegration. “I am ready to accept the guilt for all those people who have been killed,” he told an American interviewer. “For what Milosevic has done, and as a Serb, I will take responsibility for many of these crimes,” he added, in comments that seemed to mark a significant step towards convincing his compatriots to face up to the evils perpetrated in their name.
A few days later, on October 25th, Mr Kostunica and Mr Holbrooke co-starred at another ground-breaking Balkan event: a summit of regional leaders in Skopje, Macedonia’s capital, whose main importance lay in the mere fact that Yugoslavia’s leader was not a pariah but a more-or-less welcome guest.
Still, the mere fact that many people in Serbia proper and Kosovo have given their backing to respectable politicians who believe in law, not war, will not bring magic solutions to the region’s long-term challenge: finding terms on which Slavs, Albanians and others can co-exist in the southern Balkans.
Events in Serbia and Kosovo are being watched closely in Skopje, both by the Slavic majority and the ethnic Albanian minority (which officially numbers 23%, but may in fact be closer to 35%), and in Albania proper, where politics has been calmer than usual. This month Albania’s ex-communist Socialists did well in local elections, taking control of Tirana, the capital, from the right—without fomenting the chaos and bloodshed that have hitherto accompanied political rivalry in that country. Albania’s prime minister, Ilir Meta, is a careful sort, nervous about violence in Kosovo spilling over into Albania.
The ethnic Albanian-dominated areas of Macedonia have done well out of Kosovo, thanks to investment by wealthy Kosovars and a flourishing cross-border trade in everything from vegetables to building materials to drugs. Politicians in Tetovo, an Albanian-speaking Macedonian town which is abuzz with commercial activity, say they would welcome the prospect of Kosovo enjoying an increasing measure of independence under international protection. A similar mood of optimism is discernible among teachers at Tetovo’s Albanian-language university, which will open next year after the grudging consent of Macedonia’s Slavic leadership and heavy international pressure.
But the Macedonian Slavs and the country’s prime minister, Ljubcho Georgievski, are nervous about the prospect of an autonomous, let alone independent, Kosovo, whether it is led by Mr Rugova or by his gun-toting rivals. More immediately, Mr Georgievski’s government, like many others in the region, fears that the advent of a more decent government in Belgrade may prompt western governments to take their eye off the Balkan ball and start overhastily to reduce their troops.
Those fears were recently exacerbated when Condoleezza Rice, an adviser to George W. Bush, the Republican presidential contender, suggested that keeping 11,000 troops in the Balkans was proving to be one burden too many for America’s 500,000-strong army. Whoever serves, as the Balkans’ gendarme needs to stay for many years yet.
SAVA: COLLECTIVE REVENGE AMONG ALBANIANS
Koha Ditore carried on page five a report where father Sava Janjic SNV spokesperson in Gracanica accused Albanians for a collective revenge.
Spokesperson for the Serb National Council (SNV) father Sava Janjic said to the Swedish diplomat Herik Amneus UN appointee for the missing in Kosovo that Kosovo Serbs are convinced that there is a collective revenge is being undertaken towards the Serbs by Albanians report Beta Belgrade based news agency.
He said, "these acts are not seen by the majority as acts of crime, but as a matter of honorable issue by an individual and the nation as whole. For that reason there is almost to none resistance against crime amongst the Kosovar Albanians regarding the crimes committed against Serb civilians after the war, which are treated as natural consequences of the crimes committed during the war," said father Sava.
He requested from Ambassador Amneus to play an active role, "in releasing the kidnapped Serbs if they are alive, and if not at least give them a proper burial," said Sava. During the talks he noted, "lately there are more identified Serb bodies, which were considered until now as missing, something that disturbs and frightens the families of the missing, especially when in Kosovo there are more than 600 unidentified bodies".
He added, "especially disturbing is the fact that UN Mission in Kosovo has not done anything for the missing, even though there is evidence that KLA members organized or even still are holding the kidnapped Serbs in detention camps," said Sava Janjic.
He evaluates that, "the release of Dr. Flora Brovina and efforts for the release of other political prisoners in Serbia, represents an encouraging step towards cooperation with Albanian political representatives in the issue of the missing Serbs".