I've met James Pettifer half a dozen times on the Balkans conference circuit, and corresponded with him occasionally; he was kind enough to send me a copy of this book shortly after its publication in 2005, since when it has sat accusingly on my bookshelves. But I was planning to go to Kosovo next week (in the event, my plans have changed and I will go only to Montenegro and Albania) and so picked it up a few days ago.
It is an autobiographical account of what it is like to be a reporter of conflict; the physical difficulties of transport and communication in the field, the problems of getting copy into the paper, convincing sceptical editors, and overcoming opposition and interference from the British foreign policy apparatus. It is also the political story of the movement of Kosovo from miserable subjection to the verge of independence, and I don't think I have read a better account of the 1991-99 period; I really regretted that apart from a couple of vignettes from 2001, he does not take the story further.
Pettifer is a romantic. His story is full of geography, both human and physical; his Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia are steeped in history. This is both good and bad. I found myself in roughly equal measure deeply impressed by his insights into the interconnections between key figures and events across the region, and frustrated by his paranoia about continental western Europe (the "Euroids") and the British intelligence services (though if even a quarter of what he alleges is true, there are some very serious questions to answer, for instance about the Macedonian arms plot of 1993). His sympathies, like Rebecca West's, are absolutely clear, but that certainly does not make this a bad book. (I do wish someone had proof-read the Slavic names for him, though.)
Pettifer can be a difficult personality. I have seen him walk out of a conference before it began in protest at the presence of another participant. One wonders to what extent his difficulties with his various editors in London and elsewhere were personality clashes as much as professional issues. Having said that, I am impressed by the nice things he says about many people who I also count as friends, both in the region and among the foreign correspondents.
Anyway, if you want an insight into Kosovo that gives a very different perspective than the usual diplomatic histories, you could do a lot worse than start here.
On a lighter note (and not featuring me), Andorra is not in Africa.
Kosovo has declared independence, after years of restraint; and it seems likely that the international community by and large will recognise it - most of the EU member states will decide to do so at tomorrow's regular meeting of foreign ministers, and various other international actors have been lined up at least to facilitate the process. It's no big secret that I've been in favour of this for a long time; I'm glad that we appear to have a fairly soft landing for this process, though of course there are many pitfalls ahead. As one of my Kosovo friends said last year, this was one of the least unexpected developments in the Balkans in the last two decades: the ground had been well prepared, and the choreography is being duly executed.
The unexpected good news is that the Greek Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, has lost his bid for re-election, by quite a narrow margin but none the less he is out. There's still some way to go - in particular the two remaining more moderate candidates must now compete for Papadopoulos' hard-line votes - but the prospects for a Cyprus settlement suddenly look a bit better. As usual the Cyprus Mail has a trenchant commentary (written before the election took place) as part of its regular Tales from the Coffeeshop series; you may have to concentrate to interpret the columnist's nicknames for the personalities involved - eg: 'The ad contained the following statement by the five-star, luxury hotel suite freedom fighter: “My history does not allow me to be silent.” As if there is anyone in Cyprus who does not know his history as a windbag.'
There is a possible connection between the two events. The two situations are more closely linked than may be immediately apparent; certainly I have always been conscious of the similarities. Papadopoulos is practically the only Greek Cypriot president who could not even manage a modest lurch towards a settlement, and the voters have duly taken note. It may possibly be that a crucial bloc of Greek Cypriot voters realised that his policy towards the Turkish Cypriots was dangerously similar to the Serbian policy towards the Kosovars, which has so visibly and catastrophically failed today. Sometimes the 'domino effect' can be a positive one.
For somewhat complex logistical reasons, although I actually had business in Kosovo I flew into Macedonia, where the airports now proclaims its historical links with a local hero who was well-known for travelling, though better known for what he did while he was travelling.
The one thing that caught my attention in Kosovo was this poster expressing sympathy for the victims of the Blacksburg massacre, erected by the students of Pristina university - there were lots of these, all over the centre of town (and possibly elsewhere; I was laying low nursing my cold when I wasn't doing essential meetings). On an earlier visit to Kosovo I was struck by posters expressing solidarity with the USA after the 9/11 attacks.
And time for a few shots of Skopje the next morning before setting off on my tourism trail for the rest of the trip. Here are two pictures of the ancient fortress overlooking the city centre, with mosques baths and churches visible in the foreground:
I rented a car for the rest of the trip from Avis in Skopje, and would strongly recommend them - dealt with me efficiently by email, and made no problem about my wanting to return the car to the airport rather than the city centre.
2) Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams have agreed to govern Northern Ireland together, starting in a few weeks' time. See Slugger O'Toole's quick links to everyone's statements here.
I've been expecting both of these to happen for some time, and in neither case is the story over yet. But it's a big day none the less.
------------------
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
For the second time time this month I review a book on Kosovo given me by the author. He has done two important things with this book: first, it's a pretty good comprehensive review of all the available academic and thinktanky literature on Kosovo as of late 2004, including also the full text of the key international documents on Kosovo's future - UN Security council 1244, the Constitutional Framework, and the Serbian government's proposals; second, I suspect it is the first book by a Greek author published in Greece which advocates Kosovo's sovereignty in international law, subject to numerous conditions and restrictions, most of which I agree with (apart from the unworkable idea of total demilitarization).
Unfortunately there are two major problems with the book as well. The first is that the initial chapters contextualising the Kosovo problem seem to be trying to strike a balance between glib journalistic analysis of the situation and getting into the more theoretical aspects of international relations, and the argument therefore seemed to me to fall between two stools, not really clear which audience was being addressed. The second, which I suspect is not the author's fault, is that the book is effectively two years too late. There is no reference at all to either of the reports of Kai Eide, the Norwegian ambassador to NATO, appointed to assess the situation in Kosovo by the UN, published in late 2004 and late 2005, which have completely altered the international political context; still less to the mission of former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari as the UN Special Envoy to resolve Kosovo's status.
There is a very peculiar introduction by the author's employers, a military think-tank near Athens, stating that the decision to publish the book was based on a rigorous independent academic assessment from which the author was excluded; further (and the bold face is as in the original text), "It should be emphasised that the opinions, arguments and analysis contained in this study are wholly the author's." These seem to me to be bizarre stipulations; it should be taken as read that any think-tank's publications are peer-reviewed, and that the named author alone takes political responsibility; and I am really puzzled that the publisher feels moved to emphasize these points. Perhaps I am not sufficiently aware of the nuances and procedures in the Greek academic world, but the fact remains that if the Defence Analyses Institute had approved this text even twelve months ago (and preferably eighteen months ago) it would have been a lot more timely.
Iain King is an old friend of mine; I don't think I've met his co-author, but the two of them together have written a fairly damning indictment of the international efforts to put Kosovo on its feet since the NATO campaign against Serbia and Yugoslavia of 1999. From the very beginning, international officials conceded to thuggery on the ground, committed by both the ethnic Albanian majority and by the remaining ethnic Serbs where they could manage it. UN officials retreated into a colonialist mentality, failing to implement their mandate and questioning their own ability to do so. (Kosovo's electricity supplies now are in worse shape than they were before the conflict.) The highest ever per capita expenditure by the international community on post-conflict reconstructiuon has delivered indifferent results.
They have a list of prescriptions as to what could be done better in future. To me, the two key points - confirmed by this book - are, first, that any such international mission needs to move fast to establish the rule of law as a matter of extreme urgency; and second, that the end goal must be clear right from the beginning. The determination to put off deciding on Kosovo's future independence led directly to the discrediting of the UN mission within Kosovo and the violence of March 2004, and has exacerbated uncertainty in the wider region.
There were one or two other points that occurred to me when reading. In Bosnia, politicians were reined in by the international community when they lied about what was actually in the peace deal. No such measure was ever applied or even threatened in Kosovo, with the result that nationalist fantasies continued to be peddled by the top leadership until the start of this year. Freedom of speech, sure, but malicious lies about the basis of government should at the very least have been countered by the UN.
King and Mason make the argument, though I feel they are not completely convinced, that holding elections in Kosovo before the moderates were in a position to win was a mistake. In my view that is wishful thinking. While in these circumstances elections do often simply confirm the hold on power of local thugs, at least they are now in by virtue of the ballot box rather than by force and it becomes thinkable that they can be removed. And anyway, the first elections in Kosovo did, in fact, remove from power many of the KLA-linked structures that had gained local ascendancy during the war.
I think this is the first book-length piece on the Kosovo protectorate, and it's a thorough analysis, drawing of course among other sources from the work my own colleagues have been doing over the years. My one minor quibble are that some of the Serbian names are misspelt - the famously impaled Mr Martinović is Martimovic, Nenad Radosavljević has acquired an extra l in his surname, and Slaviša Petković's first name is spelt Slavisha, as if in Albanian. But those quibbles apart, it's a good book.
6) Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia, by Richard CaplanRichard Caplan has featured here before. This is a good, brief (but very expensive!) book on all aspects of the European Community's recognition of the successor states to the former Yugoslavia in 1991-93. It is particularly timely as just this last week (in a development so far ignored by the international press) the EU has been at it again, imposing dubious conditions on the forthcoming independence referendum in Montenegro; and of course the question of Kosovo, which seems likely to end in some kind of conditional recognition of its independence, continues to bubble away.
This is a carefully structured book, even if there is a rather merciless assumption that the reader already knows not just the background but also most of the foreground historical narrative. Caplan explains what the European policy was and how it developed, steps back for two chapters to consider the theory and practice of the recognition of independent states, and then comes back to look at the practical consequences of the EU's actions, ending with a consideration of the effectiveness of conditionality in general in international relations and of the effectiveness of "conditional recognition" in particular.
It's all good: the most argumentative chapter is the fourth, on the actual consequences of European Community recognition. Caplan is right to say that there is a conventional wisdom that the EC's "early" recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, driven by the fiendish Germans, started the war. He is also completely right to say that this is utterly wrong, and provides effective refutation of many such statements (eg, Lord Carrington, who blames EC recognition for "torpedoing" the peace conference which he chaired; but that had broken down in October, two months earlier).
The Germans, like the other eleven, were very keen to keep Yugoslavia together at first (those who believe it was broken apart by external conspiracies, rather than by the evil policies of Milošević, are never quite able to explain the motivations of the supposed conspirators). What turned opinion in Germany, and perhaps more slowly in some other EU member states, was the violence of the Yugoslav People's Army in Slovenia and Croatia, though as it turned out that was a pale shadow of what was to come elsewhere. Europe's recognition of Slovenia and Croatia in December actually came in December 1991, six months after the fighting started, so therefore cannot have caused it.
Indeed, there is a good case that the recognition of Croatia in particular helped to regularise the situation there and achieve a ceasefire that lasted for more than three years - a point first made to me way back before I got into the Balkans by the Norwegian scholar Asbjorn Eide, and repeated with convincing detail here. On the other hand, the ostensible purpose of the delay in recognising Croatia - ensuring a better minority rights regime for its Serbs - failed completely; they were already in open conflict with Zagreb and therefore not interested in the EC's proffered constitutional bells and whistles.
Caplan does not make such a good case for the defence on Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he considers EC recognition to have been the spark that set the conflict going. In my own view, he fails to make a good case which is there to be made. Again the dates simply don't check out; the fighting started in Bijeljina, a town I have since got to know rather well, in the first days of April and had spread to Sarajevo before the European recognition had been decided. To an extent, of course, this is pedantic; once Croatia and Slovenia had been recognised by the EU, the BiH leadership (of whom I am not a big fan) faced the choice of remaining in a federation dominated by Milošević, with the likelihood of a pro-Milošević coup before too long in Sarajevo as had already happened in Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro, or else going for such international support as they could get as an independent state, despite the consequent risk of a civil war. There is much to criticise about the way Izetbegović handled the situation, and one could also argue that the EU's recognition of Slovenia and Croatia thus "caused" the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But the fact is that the responsibility lies with Milošević, whose policies had driven Slovenia and Croatia to secede and who had overseen the arming and organisation of secessionist Serbs in BiH (a former acquaintance of mine features in this narrative), much more than with Izetbegović, still less the Europeans.
On Macedonia and Kosovo, Caplan makes the very good point that delaying recognition probably increased rather than decreasing ethnic tensions there, particularly as for Macedonia the delay was over an issue (the name of the country, of its largest ethnic group, and of their language) which was purely an irrational hang-up of the Greeks, but one which the other eleven states failed to confront properly (and have failed to this day). Kosovo is a slightly different matter; while I agree that the distinction between former autonomous provinces and former constituent republics is a rather spurious place to draw the limit for units of self-determination, the fact is that Kosovo (or at least Rugova's government of the time) was much farther from satisfying one of the key criteria for international recognition: it did not have control over its own territory, even to the imperfect extent that Croatia and Bosnia did over theirs.
There's a lot more in this book. Caplan makes a good argument overall that although the process may have appeared arbitrary and purely political, in fact by invoking international law the Europeans constrained their own freedom of action in significant ways, and their intentions were certainly to minimise the likelihood of present and future conflict. His discussion of the use and effectiveness of political conditionality in the last chapter is equally fascinating. Conditionality in general is much rarer than I had realised, and if it doesn't always appear to be very effective, at least it doesn't seem to be harmful. The conditions placed on the new Balkan states were heavier than those that were placed on Eritrea and Bangladesh, and (though Caplan doesn't make this point) that was probably a good thing in the end.
Where conditionality fails, it is either a) because the local circumstances are unfavourable (though even then, if it can tie into the agenda of an opposition party that can be helpful) or b) because the international community does it unconvincingly. The Europeans' attempts to use conditionality suffered more from the second problem than the first. Their refusal to contemplate even the slightest hint of the use of force basically concentrated negotiating power in the hands of those who did not have such scruples. Even deployment of the unarmed European Community Monitoring Mission to Bosnia in 1991 was considered to be too interventionist. Civilised and enlightened western statesmen are often squeamish about threatening the use of force, but you have to wave the stick as well as the carrot sometimes.
Finally, I was very struck by Caplan's observation that conditional recognition actually has a long history in this part of the world: minority rights regimes in the new states were part of the treaty-making process after the first world war that led to the independence of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; and it goes back still further, to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, when Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Montenegro were recognised subject guarantees of the rights of minority religious communities. 128 years on, Montenegro is going through the same process all over again, as is Kosovo. I hope something has been learnt in the meantime; and I am more hopeful after reading this book.
Veton is a friend of mine, the leader of a small but impressive political party in Kosovo, a former journalist and well-known commentator, whose tone is so characteristic that I think if I had been given samples of the text from this book and asked to guess the author it would not have taken me long. He kindly gave me a copy of his new book on Monday night, and I finished it today while sitting in Pristina airport waiting for confirmation that my plane home had got lost in the fog (symbolic, perhaps).
It's a quick read, only 160 pages, with an introduction by Tim Judah. In a combination of fictionalised commentary and of semi-fantasy which reminded me most (and I'm sure it's not accidental) of Ismail Kadarë, Veton explores the coming negotiations over the future status of Kosovo through the lens of the experience of ordinary Kosovo Albanians and Roma who were affected by the war, but also exploring the (real but imagined) personalities of Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and the UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari, and their (fictional) advisers.
He's at his best in describing life in wartime Kosovo and the Kosovo Albanians' attitude to their neighbours. Time has already overtaken his account of the negotiations, fictional though it is, with the death of President Rugova (though he does hint at this in the text, written mostly last November as far as I can tell) and more importantly with this week's statement from the Contact Group which clarifies the terms of the talks very helpfully.
I have to say I will come back from this trip a lot more cheerful about the future of Kosovo (and indeed of Macedonia, where I have also spent some time) than I was when I came.
Still, if the weather improves, I should be home by this time tomorrow. If.
( scenery )
Just a few pictures from the rest of the trip: ( Tetovo )
( Pristina, Skopje )
Ako pogledate Evropu, postoji samo jedna granica koja sa istorijskog, geografskog, lingvistickog, etnickog i svakog drugog stanovišta ima smisla: to je granica izmedu Francuske i Engleske.
When you look at Europe, there is only one border that makes sense for historical, geographical, linguistic, ethnic and all other reasons: that is the border between France and England.
( Long interview in Serbian )
John Norris is a colleague of mine, but previously worked as director of communications for Strobe Talbott, then the US Deputy Secretary of State. This book is an insider's account of the April-June 1999 negotiations behind the scenes of the Kosovo crisis, largely from the perspective of Talbott's entourage. John is as modest on the page as he is in real life, and does not use the first person, either singular or plural, even once as far as I can tell.
There are two big policy lessons that come out of the book for me. First, it was a very big mistake for NATO (and especially the US) to rule out the use of ground troops right at the start of the conflict. Wars are not about being nice to the other side. Much better to have said "We'll use them if we have to", which is always the real policy position; NATO's initial determination not to use ground troops made the air campaign look half-hearted to the Serbs. I have always believed that it is very significant that Milosevic's unexpected acceptance of the first draft of the mediators' peace terms happened within a few hours of the first serious meeting at the White House to discuss a ground war. Serbia's intelligence services are dilapidated but I'm sure they picked up what was going on.
Second, as I was saying earlier, the role of Russia is of crucial importance to multilateral diplomacy, or at least it was here. Just understanding what was going on in Yeltsin's Russia was difficult enough. John adds to the stock of stories that I've already heard about disjointed, rambling phone calls from Boris Yeltsin to Bill Clinton, and adds an account of a meeting with the foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, which was interrupted by a phone call from the newly appointed prime minister Stepashin to tell him if he was being sacked or not (he wasn't). The Russian army then shifted troops from Bosnia to Kosovo without telling anyone else, except President Yeltsin, who omitted to let the foreign ministry know about it. I'm still myself getting to grips with the power structures in Moscow; I hope that the professional diplomats out there are doing the same.
There are some interesting personal vignettes of people I know, or know of: Wesley Clark being gradually cut out of the decision-making matrix as his relations with the Pentagon deteriorated; Richard Holbrooke likewise, as Talbott and his team got tired of his undermining them; Vladimir Putin's late but suitably sinister appearance in the narrative; the negotiating back channel that almost opened up between Robert Gelbard and Bogoljub Karic; President Ahtisaari of Finland, accidentally locked into a small room during a break in negotiations, reassures Talbott that "One of the good things about being president is that they never let me go missing for very long".
And in general it's a pretty good picture of the blow-by-blow coalition-building that is the essence of international diplomacy. Here of course the emphasis is on two quite different but crucial coalitions - the US and European coalition with the Russians that in the end imposed terms on Milosevic, and the coalition of different interests within the Washington/NATO power structures, especially the uneasy relationship between the US military, US allies (specifically the British military) and the diplomats, which while not quite as dysfunctional as the equivalent relations in Moscow still sounds pretty tense. The third aspect, the US relationship with NATO and the EU, gets somewhat less coverage than one might have expected - presumably because this was mainly finessed by the regular US diplomatic missions in European capitals rather than by Talbott's team - but it's there nonetheless.
I think the book's one weakness is that, while we get a very good sense of the size of the trees, we don't really get a feel for the forest. By the time the story properly gets going, NATO's air war on Kosovo has been going for several weeks, and the uninformed reader might have difficulty working out how we got there; likewise the account of what happened after the crisis of the Russian troops in Kosovo had been resolved covers five years in about as many pages, an abrupt shift of gear after the minute-by-minute narrative of the previous chapters. The odd expository paragraph is dropped in here and there but it might have been better for the general reader to consolidate them properly at the beginning. Since I'm living and breathing this stuff every day, it didn't really detract from my enjoyment.
Edited to add: this link is supposed to give you the recording but I can't make it work for me.
The title makes it sound as if this is a book restricted just to the one event, the Milosevic trial. In fact it's not, and what you get is a very good quick summary of the entire Yugoslav crisis from the beginning, and then also an account of the politics of the establishment of the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, before we get to the dramatic events surrounding the fall, arrest and prosecution of Milosevic. There have been surprisingly few books written since the immediate aftermath of the Bosnian war that covered the developments of the years afterwards - Tom Gallagher has had a go but it expanded into a trilogy of academic hardcovers without him really meaning it to.
We got to know the author well in 1997 when we were living in Banja Luka; I reckon I'm on first name terms with about half of the people he thanks in the acknowledgements section. Chris always struck me as a fun person, who doesn't let his sense of humour leak into his journalism perhaps as much as he should. Of course the appropriate tone for much of the testimony of the victims of Milosevic's wars is restrained outrage, and Chris does this very well. His depiction of the towns of Prijedor and Kozarac, which were very much part of my patch at the time, is totally accurate. The only factual error I caught was that Zoran Djindjic was kicked out as mayor of Belgrade in 1997 very shortly after he got the job, rather then hanging on until 2000.
I think this is a particularly good book to use as ammunition against the wingnuts who see the entire thing as a massive conspiracy against the Serbs. He doesn't quite address the ludicrous US reservations about the new International Criminal Court, but since he's not really writing for that audience I suppose it's fair enough. I see a couple of other reviewers have picked up on the fact that the book ends half-way through, before Milosevic has started defence let alone the trial being over. Well, I hear rumours that the timescale for the rest of the trial may not quite be what people have expected so far, so Chris may be able to produce an updated edition before too long...
Points of interest:
- Haradinaj wanted to be an astronomer when he grew up! but circumstances turned him into a guerilla leader and then politician.
- His significant other is (or was) a Swedish-speaking Finn - they get everywhere!
- Ali Ahmeti appears at an early stage as helping with arms imports into Kosovo, but then drops out of the narrative. (I remember Haradinaj being questioned very closely on this point at a conference we were both at in Paris when Ahmeti emerged again in Macedonia in 2001.)
- KLA got no help at all from Albanian government structures, until late 1998 when the US clearly signalled that it was OK to turn a blind eye to gun-running across the border.
- Haradinaj thinks KLA had basically lost the war in September 1998 when Holbrooke brokered the deal to bring in the OSCE unarmed Kosovo Verification Mission, which gave them enough breathing space to regroup for the spring offensive which as it turned out was also backed by NATO. In fairness the Serbs breached the letter and spirit of the Holbrooke agreement much more egregiously.
- KLA had no central command structure at all. Various individuals were declared to be overall commanders at different times but this had no practical effect. This therefore made it difficult to negotiate even with allies like the Americans, never mind anyone else.
- Haradinaj very keen to stress importance of treating minorities decently - deplores summer 1999 violence against non-Albanians. It would be interesting to check if this is in the Albanian original text.