Kosovo, a young Western Balkan nation nestled into Serbia’s southern edge, encompasses a land area smaller than Connecticut and has a population of less than two million, but its geopolitical significance and bloody history have designated it among the world’s most pressing unsolved questions. For years, Kosovo has struggled with recognition — only 117 of 193 United Nations member states acknowledge its legitimacy, according to its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Now, after three rapid-fire government upheavals, continued ethnic division, unsustainable dependence on foreign nations, and political deadlock with Serbia, the fledgling country might soon face a make-or-break moment. Will this administration — with Vetëvendosje’s Albin Kurti at its helm — lead Kosovo toward a prosperous future among the nations of Europe, or is Kosovo doomed to drift in diplomatic limbo for years to come?
The Kosovo of 2021
More than two decades after Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide tore through the Balkan Peninsula, the effects of the Kosovo War remain ever-present. During the war, Serb security forces killed and displaced thousands of Kosovo Albanians; in the war’s immediate wake, returning Albanians retaliated against Serbs and Serbian officials with violence and arson.
War memories afflict even the highest Kosovo political officials, permeating the walls of the Assembly and bleeding into policy. President Vjosa Osmani, for example, has said publicly that she “can still feel” the barrel of a Serbian AK-47 rifle in her mouth at sixteen years old. Similarly, Deputy Speaker Saranda Bogujevci was medically evacuated to the United Kingdom as a child when a Serbian bullet left her critically injured. Most of the other 119 members of parliament, apart from the 20 seats reserved for national minorities like Serbs, are Albanians who lived in wartime Kosovo; thus, a majority of the Kosovar government makes political decisions in balance with this visceral trauma.
Today, both ethnic communities live in total isolation from one another. Small pockets of Serbs dot the primarily Albanian map of Kosovo, but they rarely communicate. Street signs, which by law include both the Serbian and Albanian languages, are often marred by black spray paint to display only the language of the community in which they stand. Parallel healthcare and education structures exist to ensure that Albanians and Serbs are not cared for nor educated together. Perhaps most worryingly, children of both communities increasingly do not speak the other’s language, squashing any hope of meaningful day-to-day interaction.
The International Community’s Love Child Or Headache?
Pristina is a city of flags. A stroll through the capital city would likely reveal the emblems of a dozen or more nations, not to mention the 10-foot statue of Bill Clinton that waves wistfully from a prominent city square (on, get this, Bill Clinton Boulevard). Foreign aid from Turkey has rebuilt firebombed mosques, while Sweden and the U.S. shared the cost of an extensive hiking trail west of Peja. Kosovo is, after all, a small, relatively weak state at the heart of Europe, so it depends financially on foreign nations to keep it afloat.
Kosovo’s reliance on its allies has roots in the war of the late 1990s, as do many of the country’s present-day features. On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began a 78-day airstrike campaign against Serbian military units, which ultimately forced Milosevic to relent and allow NATO forces within Kosovo’s borders. Despite also killing many civilians, the interventionists — the United States in particular — are lauded by Kosovo Albanians for ending the grueling conflict.
After two decades and a declaration of independence, however, the young nation has weaker grounds for continuing to depend so heavily on international powers. “Right now, we’re trying to help Kosovo find its own place in the world,” U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo Philip Kosnett told the HPR. “You know, we have advisors in security and law enforcement; that’s not something we oversee in most of our other embassies.”
Granted, the United States upgraded their embassy in Kosovo to a brand-new, multi-million-dollar complex in 2019, which seems to run somewhat contrary to the narrative of diminishing U.S. involvement in the region.
Still, the prevailing view out of the U.S. Embassy is that Kosovo’s future — due primarily to its location — is European.
Membership to the European Union would obviously provide a host of benefits to Kosovo and its struggling economy; Albin Kurti has established that membership is an immediate goal. However, even disregarding the multitude of ways in which the nation’s industrial and legal standards fail to meet those of the EU, five obstacles overtly dash Kosovo’s membership hopes: Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia, and Romania — the EU member states who do not recognize Kosovo’s independence.
In most of these European nations, nonrecognition is more a function of personal domestic issues than specific beliefs as to the legitimacy of the Republic of Kosovo. Spain is the obvious example; with an ongoing Catalonian independence movement, any Spanish recognition of Kosovo might signal hypocrisy or ideological surrender to the Catalan. Similar domestic issues are at play in Cyprus with the TRNC and Romania with the Székely Land.
A Troubling Precedent
Like any newborn state, Kosovo has experienced some growing pains. Since the beginning of 2020, the Assembly Building has been home to four distinct governments led by three different parties. Needless to say, the snap elections were not the product of ordinary circumstances. No-confidence motions, war crime indictments, and illicit votes have each played roles in the government turnovers and the resulting wariness among Kosovars toward their government.
In November of last year, the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office based in The Hague published an indictment accusing then-President Hashim Thaçi of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Previously, the Council of Europe, under Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty, had identified Thaçi, a former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader, as the kingpin of an organ-trafficking operation that harvested the entrails of Serb prisoners. Shortly after the Hague indictment was published, Thaçi resigned as President of Kosovo.
You wouldn’t think Thaçi was a war criminal after a road trip through Kosovo, though. Along what feels like every highway, billboards are emblazoned with Thaçi’s face and the KLA emblem declaring in protest, “Liria Ka Emer: UÇK.” That is, “Freedom Has a Name: KLA.”
“Many Kosovars view the accused KLA fighters as heroes, you know,” Lars-Gunnar Wigemark said in an interview. Wigemark was a conduit between the tribunal and Kosovo authorities as head of the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. “I had to personally hand President Thaçi what was essentially an arrest warrant, which I never expected to do.”
Why this Moment is Crucial
Albin Kurti has a make-or-break opportunity before him. Not only have previous executive wrongdoings degraded both international and domestic trust in the Assembly to the point of necessitating quick results, but a variety of converging factors have bestowed unique importance upon his Vetëvendosje government.
For one, Kosovo’s current economic system is far from sustainable. Due to the country’s meager wages — Kosovo’s federal statistics agency clocked average pay at 466 euros per month in 2020 — many Kosovars emigrate to Germany and Switzerland from autumn to summer every year. Because caring for family is a core tenet of Kosovar culture, members of the diaspora send copious sums of money back home to Kosovo. In 2020, remittances comprised almost one-fifth of Kosovo’s GDP, a far greater share than that of any other European country. As Kosnett confirmed, the high proportion of diaspora remittances to gross domestic product is a ticking time bomb. As generations pass, the money, currently an indispensable share of the economy, will dry up. The further in genealogy an emigrant family is from their Kosovo relatives, the less inclined they’ll feel to export funds.
Remittances reflect one area of Kosovo’s dependence on foreign nations for sustenance. Others are not hard to find. From European Union Rule of Law Mission assistance with Rule of Law operations to USAid donations towards infrastructure and production to NATO military aid via the Kosovo Force, the country remains heavily reliant on the international community even two decades after the war. If Osmani and Kurti — and, by extension, Kosovo — want to stake their claim among the nations of the world, they must withdraw from these protective measures to gain broader autonomy.
Moreover, ethnic tensions between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs remain a severe problem. Just last month, Dragica Gasic, a Serb woman selected by the Kosovo government to return to the city of Gjakova, fled her apartment following intense harassment. Gasic allegedly returned to Gjakova — which was among the Kosovo cities that wartime Serbian forces hit the hardest — before the government program was meant to begin. Nonetheless, it was fuel for Serb nationalists like Petar Petkovic, the head of the Serbian government’s Kosovo Office, who held a sensationalized meeting with Gasic on June 28. Kurti and Vetëvendosje must work to mend inter-ethnic relations if mutual recognition with Serbia is a priority, as it should be.
Unfortunately, bilateral relations between Kosovo and the Republic of Serbia itself are moving in a decidedly poor direction. On July 14, the Vetëvendosje government announced that it would restore reciprocity measures against Serbia, which are trade barriers in response to the slew of tariffs and NTMs that Serbia has implemented against Kosovo. Such measures include the refusal to allow Kosovo-registered license plates within Serbian borders. Initiatives like this, which Kurti included among his campaign promises, are an obvious step away from the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue that the international community wants so desperately. Among the many consequences of a failed relationship between the two states is the forfeiture of any possible EU membership for either; Germany has said they will not admit Serbia without a mutual recognition agreement, while the five non-recognizing members block Kosovo.
A Future Regardless of Recognition?
Officials from the international community and Kosovo government recoil at the question, “When do you think Serbia and Kosovo will sort it all out?” Some believe Serbian recognition is an unachievable aim for Kosovars; others offer time estimates between 15 and 40 years.
Although recognition would certainly unlock the capacity for wider-reaching reform, legitimate improvements can be made to the quality of life in Kosovo as the world waits for time to soften Serbian bitterness.
“Dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo is the sine qua non of development in the region,” said Ulrika Richardson, Development Coordinator for the United Nations in Kosovo. “But with that being said, there are areas we need to invest in immediately.”
“The first is education,” she continued to the HPR. “Because of shortages, children here are often attending school just two, three, four hours a day, not from 8:00 to 4:00 as in America. The education system here must be improved as soon as possible.”
“If you improve education, environmental action, and healthcare,” Richardson said, completing her list of the UN’s top three development concerns, “then you have the pillars of society. This country is full of young and bright people, and with that kind of development, Kosovo could have a great future.”
After all, the international community’s efforts to align Kosovo’s infrastructure and production with European Union standards are multifaceted in purpose. Even as EU membership floats in the far-off distance, everyday reform efforts bear immediate returns.
The work of the International Committee of the Red Cross reflects one such example. Its focus, according to Mission Head Agim Gashi, is primarily solving wartime missing person cases, of which 1,632 remained unsolved on July 8. These investigations — which typically consist of literal gravedigging — are ugly, but an indispensable means of healing the generational trauma that continues to hold Kosovo in a chokehold.
“I like to express the significance of our work in an allegory,” Gashi said in an interview.
“A man is walking across a bridge and loses a gold coin into the river. A few hours later, the man sees a group of boys and asks them to fetch the coin for him. After some time searching, the boys find it and give it to the man, who rewards them with a gold coin from his pocket of equal value. ‘Then why would you ask us for the coin?’ the boys ask. The man replies, ‘Now, I wouldn’t have to cross this bridge every day knowing that a coin I lost lies at the bottom of that river.’”
Kosovo faces a quandary, one in which the international community has happily involved itself. With the resulting instability comes diplomatic complications, questions of national identity, and the uncovering of boundless grief. But the fledgling nation also bears real promise for a future free of international dependence and political deadlock. All that remains to be seen is whether its leaders will take it there.
Image Credit: Peter Jones, HPR
