SERBIANNA.COM

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Kosovo Independence: A Costly Supposition

By M. Bozinovich

In 1927 London Times remarked that "Everyone knows that Albania happens to be an independent state today, simply because the Powers did not quite know what to do about it when the Turkish Empire broke up." The Turkish ambassador to Vienna himself has warned the proponents of independence, Austria and Italy, that annual cost would be 15 million gold franks (about $1.5 billion). In 1923 French diplomat M. Hunger corroborated this figure with a remark that the amount corresponds to the country's economy. In other words, cost of the government in Albania equals the value of all the goods produced. To recoup the tribute paid to Albania, both Italy and Austria had bouts with deep diplomatic and military involvement in Albania, all without any profit and with dangerous and deadly geopolitical outcomes for the region.

Kosovo might be of similar fate simply because the proponents of Albanian nationalism want to grant it independence yet it is unclear whether they are also willing to pay an exorbitant tribute to the Kosovo Alabanian government whose taxable base of less then 2 million people earning average of $30 per month cannot yield not 1% of required costs to run that country.

Case in point is the $2 billion cost of American presence on only one-fifth of the province. Multiplied by 5 sectors that Kosovo is split into, the cost approaches $10 billion annually and even that presence is insufficient to provide complete security to the area. Factoring in the taxable base and potential revenues that Kosovo government may acquire from various kinds of legitimate enterprise, the independent Kosovo entity may cost foreign sponsors at least $5 billion annually to sustain it in addition to value-depleting activities exported out of there such as drugs, prostitution and weapons that may never be eradicated.

On a diplomatic realm, moreover, given that the independent Albania has since 1913 steadfastly exported territorial claims to its neighbors, such a track record hardly lends any credible assurances that any future "conditional independence" to Albanian Kosovo would saturate the ceiling to the Albanian nationalist ambitions in the Balkans. In fact, the track record of Albanian nationalism strongly indicates that it has no ceiling and that any conditional agreement may be precisely that, conditional for that moment.

On the other hand, the difference between Albania then and Kosovo now, is that Turks who ruled Albania then were happy to relinquish the prohibitively expensive control because by doing so they enhanced their state whose existence is not dependent on fate of a remotely located Albania. A colonial power then sees a simple cost-benefit calculus because the value of its existence is located elsewhere.

The American envoy to the Rambouillet talks in 1999, interestingly enough, made a similar argument to then president of Serbia, Milutinovic, asking him rhetorically what profit does Serbia have from that gluttonied province.

As oppose to a colonial region that Albania was to Turkey, Kosovo is an integral part of the Serbian state and Serbia's sovereignty over it is a deed of existential ownership against which costs of maintaining are subtracted. In other words, to a sovereign state, a province has value against which costs of running it are subtracted. That Albanians are a majority in Kosovo province is a fact not inconsistent with that sovereignty.

Therefore, recognizing independence of Kosovo would have to clear a myriad of complicated value issues in order to have Serbia sign off on its deed.

Bill of Sale

Kosovo value to Serbian state is derived from intangible and tangible variables.

While the intangible value, such as spirituality, geopolitical security, viability of the border, national and cultural heritage, may never be adequately remunerated hence no sign-off on independence, the tangible value that Kosovo Albanians have to pay to the Serb state in order to acquire the province for themselves may be prohibitively expensive for them and would be in addition to costs of running a state.

First is the value of the physical property the Serbian government and Serbian Church own. To that property, compensation has to be made for property abandoned by non-Albanians forcefully removed from the province since 1945 as well as cost of providing shelter to them discounted at present value.

Additionally, vast swaths of land confiscated from the Serbian Church after 1945 by communists, especially in Metohia region, must be accurately compensated to the Church then use those property boundaries to settle illegal squatting because vast number of villages, many of them Albanian, have illegally sprung up since 1945 on land that isn't theirs.

Furthermore, independent Kosovo state must pay restitution for their war crimes during WWII because their predecessor state expelled 100,000 Serb families out of Kosovo during WWII and confiscated their land as well as monetary restitution to the next of kin whom that state has murdered or wounded because they were not ethnic Albanians.

Moreover, present value compensation must be made for past Serb government investments into infrastructure of Kosovo, made since 1950s when the communists initiated a fund for rehabilitation of underdeveloped areas that Kosovo Albanian majority received from Serbian tax money. Furthermore, back taxes on property and income owed by Kosovo residents to Belgrade since entrance of NATO in March 1999 to the date of the recognition of independence of Kosovo assessed at, say, average levels of LIBOR for that period plus, say, 2% administrative cost, must be paid.

Finally, restitution for Kosovo Albanian WWII war crimes, government investments into infrastructure, back taxes and illegal squatting are legitimate settlement issues even in the future integration of Kosovo as an autonomous region within Serbia.

The delusional, impotent and pragmatic

Regrettably for the Albanian nationalists, UN Resolution 1244 provides no legal room for any creative interpretation of the document that would support Kosovo Albanian independence. The resolution is explicit in "Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act and annex 2," where Serbia-Montenegro is the successor state to the mentioned Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia the "other States of the region".

Faced with unshakable legal foundation, Kosovo independence arguments rest on creation of a political pressure mass that will hopefully prompt an unscrupulous administration, especially if such removes Bush from power in Washington this November, to unilaterally violate a UN resolution and grant independence. These illegal arguments stress that:

(1) The will of the people that can be manipulated by political propaganda and intolerant political atmosphere, has precedence over a legal document signed by all nations (as argued by Albanian financed US Senators such as Lantos, Biden or McCain);

(2) Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo is only "notional" as London Guardian and Independent feed to their readers;

(3) Irrespective of the Resolution, independence is, in the long run, inevitable as BBC argues as well as other scribes that in some way have come under influence of the Albanian nationalists. Similar inevitability argument can also be made about winning a lottery or claiming that, say, Upper Volta soccer team is bound to win the next World Cup;

(4) Kosovo Albanians are supposedly native peoples so therefore have a primary claim on the land (although they never explain why every toponym in Kosovo is of Serbian origin);

(5) Kosovo Albanian government is committed to a multi-ethnic state but Serbian interference must be checked with independence, although never explaining where did the 400,000 Kosovo Serbs go since Albanians got their self-rule in 1999;

(6) Independence is a prerequisite for stability in the region otherwise Albanian extremists will perpetrate more violence, as argued by Kosovo Albanian government;

It is indeed very hard to conduct a meaningful public discourse on Kosovo's status, let alone understand it, if the analysis starts from any of the listed fictitious premises.

Meanwhile, perhaps yielding to these pressures, NATO has, in the last 5 years, bended backwards to transfer as many powers to Kosovo Albanians as possible short of independence: it has established a legislative body, executive and recently a judicial one. These 3 are primary functions of a sovereign state with a final one being a standing army.
Remarkably, Kosovo Albanian government, granted the self-government they 've desired since 1945, did nothing to enhance multiculturalism or religious tolerance in that province. In fact, the Kosovo Albanian government is pivotal in causing religious hate.

NATOs engagement in creative reinterpretation of the Resolution 1244, unfortunately, has not stymied Albanian violence. As an impotent party to protect Kosovo Serbs from, now, institutionalized Albanian violence, the sooner this alliance finds an acceptable exit out of there the sooner the intolerance and ethnic pogroms may stop.

For this to happen, a pragmatic approach to the problems of Kosovo that is in line with the legal UN documents must bind all parties as a starting premise to resolution of the status.

However, both NATO and Belgrade remain skeptical of one another: NATO of Belgrade because it never brought anything pragmatic and solution oriented to the table, and Belgrade of NATO because the only thing it brought to Serbia was bombs.

Now that NATO is willing to listen to Belgrade, pragmatism of good faith must prevail.