The WaPo on Serbia and Kosovo

i'm sitting here in belgrade, reading this wapo op-ed on serbia, and feeling woefully unqualified to comment on it, despite having spent a significant amount of time in the region since mid-2003... from what i understand, in his visit to washington, kostunica took his hard line stance against kosovo independence not because the serbian government is fundamentally opposed but as a way to save political face at home... now, what i understand and what is really the case may be two quite different things... nonetheless, it's always interesting to be smack dab in the middle of a news item and then to be reading someone else's far distant interpretation...

Deaf to the increasingly blunt messages of Western governments and to his own public opinion, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica continues to stubbornly campaign for continued Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. "Kosovo is part of Serbia," he declared during a visit to Washington this month, sounding disturbingly like Slobodan Milosevic, who used that slogan to found his nationalist regime in the late 1980s. Mr. Kostunica has been telling Western leaders that he wants his country to join the European Union and NATO, but he has repeatedly failed to meet a critical condition for moving forward, which is the arrest of Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic, a former general who is a hero to extreme nationalists.

[...]

All of this means that the West's attempt to resolve the legacy of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and position the region inside the liberal Europe of the 21st century is in jeopardy of being defeated by Serbia's 20th-century-style nationalism and Russia's 19th-century game of power politics. If so, the main victims will be not the Albanians of Kosovo -- who in any case will never again be subject to Serbia -- but the Serbs, who could find themselves isolated in Europe and dependent on the patronage of an autocratic and imperialistic Russia.

quite predictably, the wapo fails to provide the full context of the situation, so all we are left to go on is the spin... unfortunately, in this case, i can't distinguish what's spin and what's not even though i'm right here on the ground...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet