The less often a country appears in the news headlines, the more likely that it is a peaceful, happy sort of place. But is this true of Kosovo? Its declaration of independence from Serbia in February, and its subsequent recognition by the US and 20 of the European Union’s 27 member-states, were big news at the time. Now Kosovo gets less attention, driven from our TV screens and newspapers by other events in Georgia, or Afghanistan, or Sudan.

An authoritative report by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) makes clear that Kosovo since February has had its fair share of good news as well as bad news. On the plus side, in spite of two outbreaks of politically motivated violence in northern Kosovo in the month after the February 17 declaration of independence, the overall security situation has “remained remarkably stable”, the report says.

Moreover, Kosovo’s ethnic Serb minority has not fled the breakaway province since independence. That suggests fears of severe discrimination, or worse, at the hands of the Albanian majority were overdone. Meanwhile, democratic elections have been successfully held for a Kosovo-wide assembly as well as for municipal assemblies and mayors.

On the other hand, corruption, human trafficking and shortcomings in the judicial system are serious problems. Above all, the Serbs of northern Kosovo are in some ways even less integrated into Kosovo’s life than they were before independence. “The separation of the Kosovo Serbs increased through the establishment of parallel political institutions and the strengthening of parallel social institutions such as education, health care, social welfare and pensions,” the OSCE says. 

In other words, the Serbs are doing pretty much what the Kosovar Albanians used to do when they were under the thumb of Slobodan Milosevic, the deceased Serbian autocrat, in the late 1980s and 1990s. Of course, Milosevic treated the Albanians far worse than the Albanians are treating the Kosovo Serbs. And this time round, the Serbs of northern Kosovo are receiving encouragement from neighbouring Serbia to make little or no effort to integrate with the majority population.

But this cannot disguise the fact that the construction of “parallel institutions” among ethnic groups that see themselves under threat is a well-established practice in Kosovo - as in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other places in what used to be communist Yugoslavia.

Northern Kosovo, in fact, appears at risk of turning into Europe’s next “frozen conflict” - or, to put it less felicitously, a “pre-frozen conflict”, since at least there have not been any serious clashes there since March. It is good that a degree of calm has settled on Kosovo over the past six months, but no one should be under any illusions that it will stay that way indefinitely.

September 10, 2008 2:59pm in EU | Comment