Funny Moves

Milan Milutinovic, the Serbian President, walked into the office of Kosovo's Serb authorities at 11 a.m. sharp on November 18th. His visit should have led to the resumption of the Serb-Albanian dialogue on Kosovo's future status, as the ambassadors of the world's major powers were invited too. However, Kosovo's frustrated and desperate population saw the sane old script once again; the ethnic Albanian leaders and the foreign diplomats failed to turn up, while Milutinovic had a three-hour chat with the representatives of Kosovo's Romanies, Turks and loyal ethnic Albanians.

Not that anyone was too surprised with the outcome, for this course of events has become something of a ritual ever since Ratko Markovic launched the initiative for peace talks with Kosovo' ethnic Albanians. The very tone of Milutinovic's invitation, carried by Serbian television and the Tanjug news agency, suggested that it would end up as a dead letter. The Serbian president's cabinet said that Milutinovic's had extended "an invitation to continue the dialogue on a political solution to the Kosovo conflict", without mentioning the ethnic Albanian factor in any way. Apart from all that, the statement specified that Milutinovic would "personally preside over the talks", thus killing off any hope that the would-be meeting might actually result in dialogue as such. Finally, the statement said that the Serbian president invited the US ambassador in Macedonia Christopher Hill, Austria's ambassador and EU representative Wolfgang Petrich, as well as the ambassadors of China and Russia in Belgrade to attend the meeting as guests. Not only did Hill and Petric refuse to show up as the invitation was extended by Serbian television rather than Milutinovic personally, but it seems that we had been "betrayed" by our traditional allies too; the Russians sent two low-ranking embassy officials, while the Chinese stayed home.

A Serbian television prime time news report that was broadcast the same evening is another story. The report said that Mahmut Bakali and Hidayet Hisseni, ethnic Albanian political representatives, had praised Milutinovic for his statesman-like wisdom and promised to attend the talks. It would have been sensational had it not been devoid of all truth, for Hisseni and Bakali denied saying anything of the kind only 24 hours later.

Having failed to bring about the resumption of the peace talks, Milutinovic said that the ethnic Albanians "keep shooting themselves in the foot" by refusing to talk. He added that those who did turn up had "a number of objections to Christopher Hill's document, as it is in sharp discord with the Constitutions of Serbia and Yugoslavia". Milutinovic said he was prepared to visit Pristina and try to bring the ethnic Albanians to the table again. Unfortunately, his eagerness implies that these "resumption’s of dialogue" will carry on, most probably with the same outcome. The most depressing thing about it is the reasonable assumption that the key figures in this performance are convinced that they are a very shrewd bunch doing a marvelous job. They probably think that they've persuaded the rest of the world that the ethnic Albanians won't talk about peace and that they have opened up a rift among the ethnic Albanians by fabricating the alleged statement by Hisseni and Bakali.

In fact, it is highly debatable who they wanted to deceive, the Serbs or the rest of the world. They most definitely failed once again if their intention was to outsmart the world. On the other hand, every intelligent Serb knows better than to believe that Milutinovic has any real authority to make decisions, let alone to negotiate. It is less surprising that Milutinovic has agreed to embarrass himself the way Ratko Markovic did, for that's his job and that's what he is paid for.

It is quite apparent that ethnic Albanian political representatives are in no hurry to start talks on Kosovo's future status. They've been arguing about technicalities concerning the composition of their negotiating team for months. They've spent weeks deciding who should be the minister of tourism or take charge of the youth and sport department in their phantom-like Republic of Kosovo government. All this time, they've been applying the strategy proudly described by Yugoslav president Momir Bulatovic as "useful unclearness". The international community has shown more sympathy for their strategy than for the Markovic-Milutinovic traveling theater only because the ethnic Albanians still enjoy the status of Kosovo's victims in the eyes of the world. However, they are losing their credibility fast since the withdrawal of Serb police troops and the latest provocation’s by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

The real purpose of all this is to conceal the obvious fact that neither the Serbs nor the ethnic Albanians have any intention of reaching agreement on Kosovo's future status this winter, rather than persuade anybody that there is readiness for dialogue. "We and the ethnic Albanians both accept the Hill document in principle, but we will keep disputing every bit we can because there is no chance of reaching any kind of agreement this winter. We will see what happens next spring", a source close to the Serb negotiating team told the Vreme weekly. Hill and Petrich met KLA representatives twice last week, in an attempt to persuade them to accept the latest Hill plan. It is most interesting that the answer they got from the KLA was strikingly similar to what Milutinovic said. "First they told us that they are prepared to negotiate in principle and that they would study the Hill document in detail. Next time we met, they had a number of objections to the document but they did say that it could be a basis for further talks", a Western diplomatic source told Vreme.

The crux of the problem is that neither the Serbs nor the ethnic Albanians have learned anything from the clashes that raged on from last spring until late autumn. Both sides ended the conflict with the firm belief that final victory was within reach, which is why the international community has had little success in trying to bring them to the negotiating table. The winter break is therefore nothing but half-time. All the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians are prepared to do for the time being is to amuse everybody with their funny moves.