The evening will include short stories capturing the essence of big issues, films showing life in other parts of the world under difficult or extraordinary circumstances, and stories focusing on one particular remarkable event or person.
Model Village
Hayoun Kwon is not allowed to film in the North Korean propaganda village, Kijong-dong, situated close to the border. In order to document her denied journey she builds a scale model and films it. The result testifies to the real state of the ghost village – a mechanism of fiction unattainable other than by imagination. Directed by Hayoun Kwon | Duration: 10′ | Year: 2014
Shipwreck
In October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Abraham, one of the survivors, walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks and vividly remembers the nightmarish experience. Meanwhile at the harbour, hundreds of coffins are being loaded onto a military ship. Directed by Morgan Knibbe | Duration: 14′ | Year: 2014
Winter
Winter is a portrait of a season – a journey through North Russia and Siberia, through the feelings and thoughts of the people who have to cope with one of the world’s harshest climates. Cristina Picchi captures a reality where the boundary between life and death is so thin that is sometimes almost nonexistent, where civilisation constantly both fights and embraces nature and its timeless rules and rites. Directed by Cristina Picchi | Duration: 12′ | Year: 2013
Autonomous
The boundaries between what is real and unreal are becoming increasingly blurred through technological advances. Is there a limit for what can be replaced? Autonomous is an intense, emotional look into a future that is already here. Directed by Per Eriksson and Alexander Rynéus | Duration: 14′ | Year: 2014
Down on the Corner
Beer, cigarettes or margarine, the corner store in Sirča has it all. It is also the meeting point of those who didn’t emigrate. For those who stayed, there is no work and no money, but a lot of humour and friendship. Down on the Corner captures everyday life in central Serbia. Directed by Nikola Ilić & Corina Schwingruber Ilić | Duration: 15′ | Year: 2013
In Guns We Trust
In Kennesaw, a small American town in the state of Georgia, a good citizen is an armed citizen. By law, since 1982, each head of household must own at least one working firearm with ammunition. Photographer and filmmaker Nicolas Lévesque takes the viewer on a stunning exploration of this town where the right to bear arms trumps every argument. Directed by Nicolas Lévesque | Duration: 12′ | Year: 2013
]]>
On Monday 16 June, the Frontline club hosted director Karen Stokkendal Poulsen and veteran European diplomat Robert Cooper for the screening of Poulsen’s new film, The Agreement.
Sir Robert Cooper and director Karen Stokkendal Poulsen in conversation at the Frontline Club.
Before Serbia could begin negotiations to join the European Union, it had to prove it could achieve a modus vivendi with the disputed territory of Kosovo. This gripping film follows negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, lead by Cooper, as they sought to reach a settlement on peaceful co-existence.
Ahead of tonight's screening of The Agreement Karen Poulsen & diplomat Robert Cooper were interviewed by the BBC http://t.co/g0TJ1EZAP2
— Frontline Club (@frontlineclub) June 16, 2014
When asked about the uniqueness of the film and how the idea for the project came about, Poulsen explained how the piece began its journey to reality:
“I was part of organising a conference . . . about democracy and fragile states and I was utterly bored. I didn’t like the conference at all, I thought it was just people talking about the word ‘democracy’ in 10,000 different ways . . . but I was kind of interested in the new European External Action Service. So I was waiting for Robert Cooper to come on stage and I could not have been more sceptical when he was about to speak.
“Then I thought, ‘Well here is actually something real. I am curious. When he’s talking I actually want to know what is behind this.’ And then I thought maybe . . . the film could be a way of meeting him and get behind what he is doing and also I thought it would be interesting to make a film about European Union policies from another perspective which you rarely see, from the inside.”
The question was then put to Cooper about the unusual nature of the request to film such negotiations so intimately and whether he needed much convincing. Cooper replied:
“The idea that someone might make a film about diplomacy seemed a reasonably good idea because there are lots of films about wars but not very much seen about diplomacy, which is an attempt not to have wars and so I thought it was worth a try. My general attitude was ‘Why not?’
“I had to get Borko [Stefanovic] and Edita [Tahiri] to agree but they were quite happy. Then I had a bit more trouble with the administration who didn’t think this was a very regular thing to do but eventually they also said, ‘Well, nobody minds.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry, we have complete editorial control,’ which actually wasn’t true!”
Cooper was then challenged on the intricacies and difficulties of brokering such a sensitive agreement. When asked about the difficulty of remaining truly impartial, he said:
“As far as I was concerned, in a way it was very easy to remain impartial because my job was to get an agreement and if I didn’t get an agreement, I failed. If one or the other side thought that I was on the side of the other then that was going to be fatal.
“To begin with the Kosovars assumed that we were somehow not on their side because not all the EU member states had recognised Kosovo, and I was happy that at the first round of meetings we had, Edita realised that actually we were neutral.”
The whole film takes place against the backdrop of a short and intense time period with an absolute deadline, ahead of the start of Serbia’s accession negotiations. When asked about whether Cooper felt this deadline had forced negotiations onward, he replied:
“It wasn’t just about a deadline. . . . The Serbs had an objective as well as a deadline. They wanted to join the European Union – this is President Tadic’s policy – and bit by bit they came to understand that this wasn’t going to happen unless they seriously moved on Kosovo.
“In a way I feel that the film . . . well, it’s a bit hard on Borko, because Borko was in a tough position. Actually it’s the Serbs who are making the concessions, that’s why he was always in difficulty, that’s why he kept us waiting for six hours . . . but he was in a difficult position. The structure of the negotiations meant that the Serbs were destined to agree things which they did not want to agree. Now, did they implement them or not? Well, that’s another story.”
Poulsen also commented on the situation particularly in the north of Kosovo and how this agreement was only a small part in what is a wider and ongoing process to improve relations between the two countries:
“The north is mainly run by fear, and there was a lot of resistance against the dialogue in general. There was a resistance against Belgrade . . . and against Brussels, but at the same time it’s very controlled and I was very surprised. . . . Although it might seem out of law it has this controlling system and the important thing for the implementation to be successful is to have somebody there that they can trust, but leaving in this agreement, telling them, persuading them, that this is the way forward.”
Poulsen and Cooper both hope to screen The Agreement elsewhere in London soon. News about film screenings and other information relating to the film can be found on their Facebook page here.
]]>Director Mirko Pincelli addresses the complexity of post conflict society, where everyday life exists somewhere between past and present.
]]>A documentary that looks at the 677 concentration camps, rape houses and prisons set up during the Bosnian war and their legacy today in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina.
Three camp survivors and three teenagers born after the war share their memories and hopes for a better future.
Two decades after the war tension remains high and the threat of violence is still present. Can a younger generation of Bosnians, Serbs, Croats and Muslims overcome their past and find a way of living peacefully together?
Director Mirko Pincelli addresses the complexity of post conflict society, where everyday life exists somewhere between past and present.
Directed by: Mirko Pincelli
Produced by: Enrico Tessarin and Velma Saric
Year: 2011
Duration: 88’
]]>
It was a full house at the Frontline Club, the audience gathering to mark two decades since the ill-fated weekend in April 1992 when first shots were fired in Bosnia. The worst carnage in Europe since World War II was about to unfold. Over 100,000 people were killed, out of whom about 11,000 in Sarajevo, which was under siege from Serbian forces for almost four years.
Ed Vulliamy, writer for the Guardian and Observer, was on the ground from the start.
By July 1992 the Bosnian Serbs “unleashed a hurricane of violence” across the land, burning Muslim and Croat villages and towns to a cinder.
Vulliamy, together with Penny Marshall of ITN, was first to discover concentration camps in the far north-west of Bosnia – Omarska and Trnopolje – into which thousands of non-Serbs were gathered like cattle. Many were killed, countless tortured and raped. Survivors were deported.
Vulliamy‘s new book The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning charts this discovery. What is even more illuminating is that he has kept in touch with many of the people he met two decades ago, who are now scattered all over the globe trying to come to terms of what has happened to them.
It is an insight into what life is like for the survivors now, long since the attention of the world’s media shifted elsewhere.
Vulliamy writes about the Bosnian war’s aftermath, revealing the human consequences as well as the traumas, joys and challenges of exile or homecoming.
His message is that only through the eyes and memories of the survivors and the bereaved – and, in different ways, the perpetrators – we can really understand the bloody catastrophe in Bosnia.
Vulliamy was keen to stress that he does not see the Bosnian war as “civil war,” as it signifies a “perpertratorless war” where all parties are as “bad as each other.”
He also offered a damning assessment of the (lack of) involvement of Western countries,in particular the UK, which he believes should have protected the persecuted, mainly Muslim and Croat population.
“It is a typical British thing, to side with the local bully. Because, after all, that is stability old boy!”
“We found concentration camps, we saw people being slaughtered and deported. We saw the mass rapes, the sexualisation of war, the shelling of civilian towns. This went on for three years before we got to Srebrenica. And somehow, this was OK, while the repulsive political and diplomatic class contrived yet another pointless peace plan.”
“This is not a prescription for Iraq, but in 1995 NATO basically sacked the UN and they bombed some Serbian forces, damaging basically a couple of chairs and a garden shed, and Karadzic and Mladic caved in immediately."
“I am convinced, and I am not the only one, that had NATO conducted moderate air strikes earlier things would have been different.”
When asked about the aftermath of war and what the ICTY – International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia – in Hague achieved, Vulliamy called it “an act of ambition and contrition.”
“It is also a great big tax free bonanza for some international community types. But, some really great people work there and prosecute there.”
What was on most people’s minds was the question of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s present and future.
Its fairly complex political structure was created in 1995 during the Dayton peace accord, which ended the Bosnian war.
Two separate entities were set-up; a Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, or Republika Srpska, each with its own president, government, parliament, police and other bodies.
Overarching these entities is a central Bosnian government and rotating presidency. And to complicate things further there exists the district of Brcko which is a self-governing administrative unit, established as a neutral area placed under joint Serb, Croat and Bosniak authority.
With a country so ethnically divided, where “ethnic-led corrupt” politics offers very little to the young people and where justice for minorities in their respective entities is still elusive – the question on everyone’s mind was: Is there hope for Bosnia?
]]>“If there is any hope of redemption in Bosnia, it comes from the extraordinary strength of will of individual Bosnians, it has nothing to do with the UN, nothing to do with the diplomatic and political strata, which have established themselves as basically parasites earning nice tax free salaries there.”
“Women have been much better at it than men. Irrespective of their ethnicity, they come together and form organisations that help victims of rape and human trafficking. They have done some amazing work.”
“One thing is for sure, Bosnia as a way of life, Bosnia as a way of enjoying yourselves will never die.”
Twenty years after the beginning of the Bosnian War, Ed Vulliamy still rages against the powers that failed to act, the perpetrators not held to account, and the international organisations continuing to profit from the fractured regions sufferings.
“It’s not just about the war but about the peace after it… wars, and we talk about wars a lot in this room, come and go… but for the people whose lives are shattered by them, they never end.”
In August 1992, Vulliamy and Penny Marshall – also in the audience last night – were the first journalists to report on the Serb-run concentration camps at Omarska and Trnopolje. Chair and Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith asked Vulliamy about this continuing controversial term, ‘concentration camp’.
“The first thing I saw were the shaven-headed inmates of Ormarska coming out of a hanger” said Vulliamy. “I think it is the right term. They were locations for the concentration of civilians for murder, rape, torture, deportation.”
Vulliamy described the international reaction at the time as “appeasement at best, encouragement at worst of continuing mass-murder”; while phrases such as ‘moral equivalence’, ‘perpetrator-less crimes’ and ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ were used to shun involvement. He explained how the truth is in the ground, with 100,000 dead – the majority of which are Bosnian Muslims – and 10,000 still missing.
During the Q&A, Vulliamy was asked whether the current economic climate could spark another conflict.
“I can’t see another war like that one, but it is a fool that predicts… I can see it degenerating into something differently nasty – crime going into a whirlwind of part-ethnic, part-drugs… I can see it degenerating with all these things exacerbated by these open wounds of war. On the other hand it may take a small incident in a place like Srebrenica… But you hear more violence than you see. The physical violence hasn’t happened yet, but it might… I think it’ll be murkier – like other capitalist slagheaps.”
Steve Crawshaw, international advocacy director at Amnesty International, asked whether there were any signs of reconciliation with the new generations.
Vulliamy said: “There is no sign at the moment that young Serbs have made any overtures. I think the reckoning will come through people falling in love, rock and roll, the social intercourse, as these monsters die off.”
Vulliamy’s great empathy for the people he wrote about 20 years ago was clear when asked about his book launch in Sarajevo last month.
“It was extremely moving… with old soldiers, old hacks, with a few comrades and renegades and alcoholics. It was great, with speeches I couldn’t understand, gifts that reduced me to tears. I’m a very, very lucky man to know these people and they’ve enriched my life more than I have words to say but my greatest wish would be that I’d never met any of them or that I’d met them by pure coincidence while on a train ride through Prijedor and not the way I did.”
In conclusion, Vaughan Smith said that for all their talk of missing monuments, perhaps Ed Vulliamy’s new book The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning, goes some way to building one.
]]>A packed house at The Frontline Club heard Matt Frei regale them with tales from his long and illustrious career. The former BBC Washington correspondent, recently poached by Channel 4 News, was on fine form as he spoke to former BBC executive Vin Ray about more than 20 years with the BBC:
“The BBC is mother, and it’s been a very good mother to me, but now and again it’s a good idea to leave mother and elope with a mistress. I’ve always admired Channel 4 because it’s a cross between current affairs and news. Newsnight with a bit more of a newsy edge at a decent hour. I’ve had my eye on it for some time, and I guess they may have had their eye on me for some time.”
The event was delivered in conjunction with the BBC College of Journalism, as part of the ongoing Reflections series in which journalists including Alex Crawford, Jon Snow, Bill Neely and Martin Bell have discussed their experiences as journalists.
Frei spoke of the time he met Bell in Serbia, during the Bosnian war, and the valuable lessons that he took from him:
“He taught me the craft of television. It’s a very strange craft because it’s more about what you deny yourself than anything else, he said: ‘If you can’t say it in one minute and 42 seconds you can’t say it. Don’t bother.’”
Delivering his reflections alongside a series of memorable video clips, he discussed some of the high and low points of his career, including his coverage of the fall of the Berlin wall:
“I was told by a famous American journalist that this was the best story I would cover, and that it was all downhill from here. He was sort of right – it was such a happy event.”
He also spoke of some less orthodox approaches to stories, including one particular experience during his time in Rome:
“Giorgio Armani was accused of bribing the financial police. I got an interview by saying I was a fashion journalist for the BBC – I said I wanted to talk about hemlines and colours. Halfway through the interview he turned to me and said, ‘You know **** all about fashion, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Did you pay the money?’ He said, ‘Yes, in brown paper bags.’”
With regard to the challenges facing the next generation of young journalists Frei expressed some optimism:
“I think the challenges are going to be the same: find a story, tell it well and make sure somebody is going to pay you for it. If you’re starting out now you have an incredible range of tools at your disposal – much better than the tools we had, and cheaper.”
The issue of social media was subsequently raised, and the question of what it meant for the future of sending journalists like him around the world – particularly in light of the numerous journalists who have recently been killed and injured whilst reporting from warzones:
“I don’t think most serious organisations are thinking social media will replace what they have. It’s just another source of information – if you can’t get into Syria but you have evidence on your mobile phone you’re going to use it.”
As the evening drew to a close he discussed his only regret, the fact that he had to cover the Iraq war from Washington:
“I never went to Iraq, and in some ways I wish I’d covered it. In some ways talking about it from Washington makes you a bit of a fraud: unless you’ve seen the impact of policy on the ground you can’t really talk about it.”
Watch the full event:
]]>Monday marks the 16th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, which has returned to the forefront again recently with Ratko Mladic’s arrest and last week’s Dutch court verdict assigning responsibility to the Dutch state for the deaths of three men who were handed over to Bosnian Serb forces.
In Washington, Hillary Clinton is set to host the latest meeting of the Middle East Quartet, which is hoping to break a deadlock and re-start peace talks ahead of the September UN General Assembly meeting.
In Brussels on Tuesday, the OECD and the European Commission launch the OECD International Migration Outlook for 2011, which is expected to feature details on recent and future migration to the EU from North Africa.
Meanwhile, the Julian Assange saga is revived as his two-day extradition appeal opens in London. Assange is fighting a 24 February ruling that would extradite him to Sweden to face questioning for alleged sexual assaults.
Hours before the Assange hearing closes on Wednesday, the long-running sodomy trial for Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim resumes following his fourth unsuccessful attempt to have the trial judge dismissed. The oft-delayed trial has been going on for over two and a half years.
The UN Security Council is also scheduled to meet in New York on Wednesday to discuss South Sudan, and, according to current UN Security Council President Peter Wittig, the UN General Assembly may formally approve the new country’s UN membership on Thursday following independence on 9 July.
A Utah court hears an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) constitutional challenge to the Utah Illegal Immigration Enforcement Act (Bill HB497) on the day that a restraining order against the enforcement of the bill expires. The law requires police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone stopped for felonies or certain misdemeanours.
Friday is the big deadline in Greece, when the government is due to repay some €2.4bn in sovereign debt bonds, a payment only possible if it receives the next tranche of its IMF/EU loan in time. Another €2bn payment is due on 22 July.
In nearby Istanbul, the fourth meeting of the Libya Contact Group gets underway, with EU diplomats publicly hoping for an increased presence from African Union members.
The role of social media in the Arab Spring is also likely to be a hot topic today, as Twitter celebrates the fifth anniversary of its public launch.
On Saturday, thousands of Shia Muslims converge on Iraq’s holy city of Karbala to celebrate the ninth century birth of Imam Muhammad al Mahdi in a pilgrimage known as Shabaniyah.
Presidential elections are held in the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe on Sunday, with incumbent Fradique de Menezes ineligible for a third term and the country’s first President Manuel Pinto da Costa hoping to return to power.
Sunday also marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
Highlights: Srebrenica anniversary and Quartet meeting (11 July); OECD migration report and Julian Assange hearing (12 July); Assange and Anwar Ibrahim hearings and UN Security Council meeting (13 July); South Sudan UN membership and Utah immigration challenge (14 July); Greek bond payment, Libya Contact Group meeting and Twitter anniversary (15 July); Shabaniyah pilgrimage (16 July); Sao Tome and Principe elections and Spanish Civil War anniversary (17 July).
]]>On 5 October 2000, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in a people’s revolution that ground to a halt 13 years of conflict. Watching half a million Serbians swarm the streets, the world had high hopes for Belgrade.
But ten years on those hopes remain largely unfulfilled, journalists speaking at last night’s event marking the anniversary of his fall.
The Frontline Club’s Forum was packed last night for a discussion that focused on the unsettling past and uneasy future of the country one audience member described as having been “spectacularly let down by just about everybody”.
On the panel were Maggie O’Kane (editorial director of GuardianFilms), Steve Crawshaw (now Amnesty International’s international advocacy director), documentary filmmaker Norma Percy and BBC News special correspondent Allan Little. O’Kane, Little and Crawshaw covered the Balkans extensively during and after Milosevic’s rule, and Percy is the producer of The Fall of Milosevic.
Chair Bill Neely (international editor for ITV News) opened by reading several of the day’s Serbian headlines: Blic alleged that “Serbia could have done three times as much” and Danas simply proclaimed, “Serbia failed”. Neely also noted that commemorations were more muted this year than they had been even three years ago. So what happened?
Presenting a section from The Fall of Milosevic, Percy spoke of her hope whilst watching the revolution:
When the main doors of parliament opened and the crowd surged in… for me, that was the moment when Milosevic was finished.
Crawshaw described a similarly uplifting moment at Serbia’s biggest mine, when miners turned to him and said:
He’s finished, we breathe differently now… we are finally living in a free Europe.
On the question of why, when it almost happened so many other times, Milosevic was overthrown then, Little reminded us that it’s not just about people: the old regime needs to give way. Just as the Soviet Union let go, Yugoslavia let go. Yet the optimism that fueled the revolution and was so apparent to Percy and Crawshaw then has faded over ten years in which Serbia has been regionally eclipsed by Croatia and struggled to come to terms with its own past.
O’Kane, Little and Crawshaw described a sense of denial amongst the Serbs they had met. There was a refusal to engage with the questions of what had happened in Croatia and Bosnia. O’Kane recalled terrified people huddled in shelters, shocked that international community was bombing them yet still somehow blind as to why:
There was a lack of willingness to acknowledge.
These observations drew the strongest reaction from the audience, with some people accusing the media of perpetuating lies about the civil war, and others insisting the people of Serbia had done all they could to acknowledge the past, and simply needed aid now. O’Kane and Little asserted that the parties involved still don’t want to look the past in the face. Guilt, collective responsibility, and genocide – these issues drew an emotional, angry response.
The legacy of Milosevic, perhaps, was with us last night: unsettled, raw, plagued by dissent. A revolution that succeeded on some grounds, but has yet to succeed on others.
]]>
The spirit of the place, however, could not be more different. There is now an air of expectation so heightened that further delay is almost unthinkable. The genie of independence is out, and it can’t be put back into the bottle of Serbian sovereignty. It is now the settled view of the western allies – the US, the EU, most of NATO – that hesitation would be more destabilising than a rapid move toward independence.
There is a view, attributed rightly or wrongly to Paddy Ashdown, which western diplomats in Kosovo reiterate, and it’s this: that some nations, by dint of what they themselves have done, forfeit the moral right to govern. They lose their claim to sovereignty because of what they’ve done. This applied to the British in Ireland in the 1920s. It applies to Kosovo now. It puts moral muscle behind the western consensus that Kosovo can’t do anything about economic development until its “final status” is resolved.
The timetable is agreed. There will be a declaration of intent by the Kosovo parliament early in 2008. The preferred date was the third week in January, just after the Orthodox New Year. Serbia’s presidential election campaign probably means that will now be delayed. So early to mid-February seems more likely.
“This won’t be a Unilateral Declaration of Independence” the incoming Prime Minister Hashim Thaci told me, with his now impressive command of English. “It will be a Co-ordinated Declaration of Independence”. Indeed: it is a measure of the extent to which the internationals are running the show that the timetable has been drawn up in Brussels and Washington and not Pristina.
After the February declaration, there will be a four month transition period, as laid down by the UN-sponsored plan drawn up by the former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari. The UN operation will wind down and the EU will send in a team to start running the police and the judiciary. NATO will keep its 16,000 strong presence and reinforce if needs be.
In May or June, if all has gone to plan, there will be a wave of recognitions. The US will recognise. Most NATO allies will follow suit. Twenty six of the 27 EU member states will recognise (only Cyprus will refuse, for reasons that have nothing to do with Kosovo).
Russia will veto Kosovo’s application to become a member state of the UN, but it’s hard to find anyone in (Albanian) Kosovo who cares about that.
In Northern Mitrovica there is much talk among local Serbs of the Hong Kong model. Serbia (belatedly and grudgingly according to western diplomats) offered the Kosovars a deal: sweeping autonomy, the freedom to run everything except foreign affairs, under formal Serbian sovereignty – two systems, one country. Like Hong Kong.
They cannot understand why this generous offer was instantly turned down. The only explanation, they conclude, is that the Albanians were under no pressure to compromise because they had secretly been promised independence by the Americans from the beginning.
In fact, the Kosovars have compromised – quite a lot. The independence they will be getting is not of the kind that prevails in the old democracies of Western Europe. For a start they’re not allowed to have their own army: a defence force of two and a half thousand lightly armed men is all they will be entitled to under the Ahtisaari Plan. They’ve also agreed to radical decentralisation that will give the Serbian populated areas strong local autonomy. And the internationals will retain widespread powers to intervene in the political life of the country. All this the Kosovars have accepted: the independence they will get is known as “supervised independence”. It will remain “supervised” until Kosovo is a mature, western-style democracy that has met all the criteria for EU membership, political as well as economic. That will take years. For the foreseeable future Kosovo will remain a most intriguing experiment: it is, in effect, going to become a little colony of the EU.
What can go wrong? There will be popular fury in Serbia. The Serbian government will be under huge pressure to act in the defence of this latest assault. It is, after all, only 15 years since Serbian public opinion walked hand-in-hand with an aspiration to redraw the borders of Serbia to incorporate two-thirds of Bosnia and one third of Croatia. I remember the unfurling of maps by bearded men in World War Two Chetnik uniforms. All the lands west of the Drina as far as Zadar on the gleaming Adriatic were to be known as “Western Serbia”.
The western gamble is this: that there will be no war because the political environment is radically different to what it was in the 1990s. For a start there is no Milosevic. There are paramilitaries on both sides who are capable of provocative atrocities, but they are no longer state-sponsored. The Albanians know they must be on their best behaviour not just for the four month transition period but for years to come. And Serbia? Serbia too wants to get on with the business of becoming a normal European country. What Serbian government will want to set that whole process back by yet another generation in order to fight an ultimately unwinnable war for a province almost wholly populated by hostile Albanians?
But it is a gamble. It is a gamble that Serbia will act rationally. Here the analogy with Ireland is invoked again, rather hopefully: Ireland, after all, joined the European Community at a time when its constitution still refused to recognise the legitimacy of the 1922 partition; technically it refused to accept the legality of British sovereignty in Northern Ireland while getting on with the pragmatic business of forging a modern, mutually beneficial relationship with the old enemy. Can’t Kosovo and Serbia, ultimately, do something similar?
]]>I recently went to Serbia soon after a fairly prolonged trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and it is stating the obvious to say there is a vast difference between the mayhem in those two countries and the situation in southern Europe.
Despite some fairly bellicose statements from opposing parties the chances of a widespread conflict of the type which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia seem remote and the region is vastly different from what it was during the fighting in the 1990s.
It remains the case, nevertheless, that the tensions and resentments which fuelled the war at the time have not disappeared and are once again coming to the fore with paramilitaries starting to arm themselves in Serbia and Kosovo and police in Macedonia clashing with an Albanian group which was found to have enough weaponry to equip a battalion, including anti-aircraft missiles.
The Serb sense of victimhood is much in evidence in Belgrade among officials and the public alike. This view holds that Serbia has acquiesced to the demands of the international community, handing over Milosevic and others wanted for war crimes to the international court in the Hague, accepting ‘unfair’ terms over the break-up of Yugoslavia, and carrying out internal reforms.
But, goes the refrain, “every time Serbia fulfils a demand from the West, another one appears”.
The handing over of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic remain pre-conditions for Serbia being allowed into the EU. The Serbs however will have you believe that there is now another condition for joining the club: that they must be prepared to lose Kosovo.
But Kosovo is also a political card for the politicians in Belgrade. According to the moderates, allowing Hashim Thaci, the former Kosovo Liberation Army leader who is likely to be the next head of the Kosovar government, to declare independence will drive Serbian voters into the arms of the nationalists.
So, the message to western Europe and the US is either stop the unilateral declaration of independence or pay the consequences.
Furthermore, the renewed interest shown in the Balkans by the Russians, part of President Putin’s recent combative stance towards the West, has given the Serbs a boost of confidence.
Boris Tadic, the ultra-smooth ‘pro-Western’ president who looks more like a US congressman than an old-style Balkan leader, told me and a group of other journalists from Western publications: “Our information is that Ratko Mladic was in Serbia in the middle of 2002. After that he disappeared and we don’t know where he is. If we knew where he and other fugitives were we would arrest them.”
This was all said straight-faced despite Mladic being sighted in Serbia just over 18 months ago and just a few hours after Carla del Ponte, the chief UN war crimes prosecutor, had apparently railed at him over supposed protection continuing to be given to Mladic by elements in the Serbian political and military establishments.
The Serbian government had announced a bounty of a million Euros (£700,000) for Mladic and officials had said they were confident of tracking him down.
This led to Ms del Ponte forecasting an arrest “within weeks” and she was now looking a bit foolish. Asked about one possible solution to the Kosovo crisis – dividing the province among the Serbs and Albanians – the president gave the standard Belgrade line: “What you are asking for is not dividing Kosovo, but dividing Serbia, because the fact remains that Kosovo is part of Serbia. We will not accept that is not the case.”
The various factions in the Balkans blame each other for undermining the peace accords at the end of the war in former Yugoslavia. But there is also the common complaint that the international community has done little to buttress political and economic progress.
The fact that the Balkans has benefited from millions in international funding with Bosnia, for instance, receiving more in economic aid than Afghanistan, is ignored.
But there is little doubt that the West, distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan, has not been particularly focused on the region and failed to see signs of cracks appearing.
There are signs this will now change. Two senior American security officials, much in evidence in Baghdad, have just been to Belgrade and Pristina.
I met David Slinn, the former British representative in Kosovo who went on to become ambassador to North Korea, in Lashkar Gar a few weeks ago. The redoubtable Slinn had been sent along with a much augmented team to show how seriously the UK government was taking its task in Helmand. He is moving on to another job soon – back to Kosovo.
]]>