Kosovo: The US View

Wikileaks has begun publishing cables from the US embassy in Pristina. They will take some time to digest, but a quick reading turns up little surprising.

The cables talk of the north as the gravest security threat to Kosovo. They speak of years of “rot” there and the need to dismantle the “parallel” structures and replace them with “legal” Kosovo ones. At the beginning of 2010, the US put great hopes in the ICO's “northern strategy” as it would bring local government, police, courts and customs under Pristina. The embassy worried that the Europeans were not enthusiastic enough about the need to bring the north to heel and wondered about EULEX's ability and commitment to do the job. Shortly after the UDI, the embassy warned that continue Serb resistance could lead to greater violence and even endanger the lives of peacekeepers. To assist in the imposition of the northern strategy, the embassy suggested using KFOR – under the UNSCR 1244 umbrella – to provide the context for international efforts to bring the northern Serbs to accept the rule of Pristina.

The embassy frequently complained of the unhelpful approach by the Tadić government and warned that continued lack of progress on the north could lead to difficulties with the Kosovo Albanians. The US apparently believes that Serbia's ultimate aim is the partition of Kosovo, which would unleash further ethnic violence. (The embassy does not say explicitly who would undertake this violence.) The embassy counseled leaving the UN aside except insofar as the imposition of Kosovo rule of law could be explained as being mandated by 1244. (The US seemed to take seriously its own argument that the local Serb structures were illegal under 1244 and therefore EULEX could act to remove them under the status neutral umbrella of the UN.) The embassy saw southern Kosovo Serbs' reluctant acquiescence to participation in Kosovo institutions as a sign of progress in the multi-ethnic Kosovo rather than the last hope of an isolated and desperate minority after being worked over by the local bullies.

None of this is new. Anybody watching and listening to the Americans in Kosovo would have seen and heard all this before. But it suggests that at the heart of US policy-making on Kosovo is its own kind of “rot.” It is either willful blindness or a kind of dumbness to see in the northern Serb resistance to rule from Pristina a form of “rebellion” encouraged by radicals and Belgrade. One wonders what they think now after a year in which the northern strategy became nothing more than a blueprint for the ICO to incite provocations in the north.

Speaking of ICO provocations. One can never condone violence, and the fatal shooting in Leposavić is reprehensible and unwise. But the ICO's eagerness to push Kosovo elections into the north – and apparently to employ anyone they could find to do so – is an example of how not to do peacekeeping. But of course, the US and ICO appear not so much interested in keeping the peace but more on forcing change on the ground that will fulfill “ten years of US policy.” I wish my country was not always so arrogant.