Shared Poverty

Despite typical verbal slips by politicians regarding centuries of a shared life, the separation between the two ethnic groups is clear from the fact that there is practically no mixed marriage or kinship (while at the same time, if that is any consolation, other ethnic groups are also isolated), and the greatest interpersonal revulsion begins with that.  Namely, Albanians and Serbs most often refuse possibilities of marriage with the each other (95 percent of Albanians, 74 percent of Serbs), after which follows “mixed” friendships (82%:44%), life in the same settlement (40%:64%) or in the  neighborhood (23%:72%).

As head of the negotiating team, Ph.D. Ratko Markovic should be aware of the fact that Albanians of Kosovo have no faith in the President of Serbia (99 percent; at the time of the research it was Slobodan Milosevic), in the Serbian Parliament, in the Army and the Police (98%), in the President of Yugoslavia and the judiciary (96%), in “Serbian” media (from 87 percent who do not believe Radio Television Serbia, to 59 percent who do not believe Nasa borba), in social policies (56%) and in the health system (38%).  Of course, faith in their politicians, media and parallel institutions is proportionally high.  At the same time, the Serbs of Kosovo do not show the same enthusiasm in the faith they place in “their” media, while the only local leader who enjoys more than half the voters’ confidence (58 percent of Kosovo’s Serbs) is Bishop Artemije.  Both sides accuse each other's politicians and intellectuals of bad relations in Kosovo, somewhat less the leaders of either nationality, while Serbs add to the list of culprits their favorite — the world conspiracy, namely foreign secret services.

Finally, the most important thing — that which Kosovo’s Albanians and Serbs share, as do other Balkan peoples, with the Slovenians at the top of the list — is the question of their statehood.  In the aforementioned opinion poll jointly conducted last year by the Forum for Ethnic Relations from Belgrade and the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology from Pristina, the greatest differences are evident on the question of the status of Kosovo.  Of 11 offered models, which were the topic of ethnically closed discussions, Albanians accept only independence of Kosovo (98 percent), international protectorate until a permanent solution is found (68%), joining Albania (60%), and special status with international borders (51%).  On the other side, Kosovo’s Serbs only support a “solution” in the way of stopping autonomy of Kosovo, and are against every other option.

Hence, if the message “let’s discuss everything” in its entirety reads “let’s discuss everything, except...” it is not difficult to be a pessimist where the result of the negotiations is concerned.  The attitude of the international community — which publicly oscillates between autonomy for Kosovo within Serbia, to the status of a third republic — does not make a decision less easy for those Albanians who accept the necessity of negotiations.  In any case, in the two years of peace negotiations between the USA and North Vietnam — concluded in Paris exactly twelve years ago — Americans “softened” Le Duk Toa’s negotiations platform by throwing more napalm and bombs than in all the previous 15 years prior to any “peaceful American” showed up there.  Their client here has the ambition of proving himself a worthy student.