Kosovo - a Precedent?

Kosovo - a precedent?

I was against the US-NATO war against Serbia when it was fought, in March-May 1999. It is not that I am a friend of Milosevic, far from that. But restoration of the freedom the Kosovar Albanians had under Tito, could have been realised in many other ways. Launching a war of destruction against the Beograd youth who guarded the bridges over the Duna river, against the automobile workers of Kragujevac and bombing the civil airport of the Montenegrin capital, is certainly not my idea of humanitarian intervention. It was more the style of US interventions under the Monroe doctrine in Latin America.

Europe shouldn't have allowed it. Even if you do NOT condemn the way that war was fought, you cannot be happy with its results, from an European point of view. European states should not be dependent on ethnic homogeneity. it is impossible: Ethnicities are mixed among each other in a pattern that reflects centuries of history. A state is judged by its capacity to guarantee and to implement equality of all its citizens before the law and by how it supports cultural freedom for all groups of people who live within its borders.

That is how Europe deals with Hungarians in Slovakia and Rumenia. That is, what Europe demands from Turkey, when we speak of Kurds and Armenians. That is, what Spain allows the Catalans and what Britain allows the Irish in Northern Ireland. That is, why everybody with a sense of civility, opposes a divided Cyprus. And that is, why dividing Belgium into two states, is so disastrous.

After 1999, with the Serb sovereignty over Kosovo confirmed by the security Council of the UN, there were plenty of opportunities left for the EU, to impose a civil construction upon Kosovars as well as Serbs, that would have preserved a federal Serb state with internationally guaranteed minority rights. But the UN rulers of the occupied province, beginning with the maverick Kouchner (now French foreign secretary under Sarkozy), denied the Serbs and the Balkan nations in general, what was already then accepted European standard. In a not so far away future, Dayton (compromises about Bosnia, 1995) and the independence of Kosova (2008), will be seen as fatal errors that may have caused new wars and ethnic cleansings.