According to Wikipedia, 95% of the inhabitants of North Kosovo are Serbs.
The population refuses to acknowledge that they have been separated from Serbia, and pretend they’re still being ruled from Belgrade.
This situation seems outrageously unfair to me. The legality of unilateral secession aside, why did the international community tolerate what was essentially an annexation of an integral part of one country by another country? When the US, the UK, Germany and other countries recognised Kosovo, why didn’t they tie their recognition to the condition that Kosovo only take what could be reasonably considered “rightfully theirs” in the spirit of international law?
Ghetto edit:
Was it because no-one bothered to look at the ethnic composition of the region? Was it to punish Serbia for “misbehaving” during the 1990s? Was it because they figured that, since the region’s name is “North Kosovo”, it should therefore logically belong to Kosovo? These explanations seem dumb, but I can’t think of any rational reason.
As if the Balkans weren’t fragmented enough, this remarkably bad situation will only contribute to further tensions. With their asinine decision, both the nation of Kosovo and the NATO/EU powers have effectively guaranteed everlasting tensions between Kosovo and Serbia.
I think it’s because North Kosovo was part of the province and they didn’t want to partition it when Kosovo got independence, because that creates all sorts of other issues (where do you draw the line and all that). Better to just make the whole province independent, they figured.
Yep. They already had a bad experience with Bosnia-Herzegovina where after all the bloodshed the final answer was to still recognize independence along the borders of the old Yugoslav B-H as a “federation” of the different national sub-identities. In the various seccesions of the last 20+ years, IIRC the succesfully recognized ones have been those based (or at least attempted to be based) on following the preexisting post-WW2 provincial/colonial borders. Otherwise in multinational states you’d end up with a bunch of enclaves and exclaves demanding “corridors” to the homeland.
Because at the time neither Serbia nor the Kosovars recognized “North Kosovo” as being anything but a part of Kosovo? Serbia wanted all of Kosovo, Kosovars wanted all of Kosovo and “North Kosovo” was just a shorthand for the Serb-dominated areas near Serbia, not a very historically distinct region in of itself.
It is only subsequent to the declaration of independence ( Kosovo version ) that in the ensuing stalemate that it has gradually become possible politically for either side to consider a partition. Even now there are ultra-nationalist Serbs and Kosovars on either side who will howl at the thought. Hopefully their influence will continue to recede.
Missed the edit, but to put it in clearer terms, a minister in the Serbian government actually made that proposal in 2008. The rest of the government shouted him down. Serbia would not tolerate a separation of Kosovo along ethnic lines, because that would mean surrendering their claim to the rest of the region.
Right. Serbia claiming North Kosovo is equivalent to Serbia signing away the rest of Kosovo. But they claim all of Kosovo, not just the Serbian-majority parts of Kosovo.
And the problem with partitions is that demographics change, and your borders that put the majority of X on one side and the majority of Y on the other side that you so carefully drew are now, 2 generations later, out of date and there are too many or too few Xs or Ys in all the wrong places. Are you going to redraw the borders every 25 years?
Since the “International Community” decided to completely ignore the wishes of Serbia, why should it concern itself about what Serbia thought of the issue of northern Kosovo let alone give them a veto on the matter? Northern Kosovo and the native Serbs of that region was handed over to Kosovo because the Serbs had been selected as the designated evil guys, and it was commonly seen as rewarding them if they were allowed to have their wishes fulfilled.
After WW-II people in the regions around the German – Danish border were given the opportunity to choose which country they wanted to belong to. Some municipalities chose Denmark, some chose German. And that was where the border was drawn. The same model should have been applied to Kosovo, and to Bosnia as well. As it is, I expect Serbs will be (and have been) slowly expelled from the region and the rest of Kosovo. But that’s not a big international issue because they are Serbs.
Is this an argument against Kosovo independence or against North Kosovo chosing which country they want to be part of?
Well, generally just after a war is when the boundaries get redrawn and certain people are encouraged by whatever means to move from one side to another side, based on whatever metrics seem good to the winners.
But the problem is that the boundaries that made sense after the war is over might not make sense years later. So the solution is to have another war to settle the issue. Which is what happened in Serbia, and Serbia lost the war, and so some ethnic Serbs ended up on the wrong side of the border.
If you ask me what outcome I’d prefer, it would be multiethnic states that can tolerate the permanent presence of ethnic minorities, give them whatever level of internal autonomy is needed, with civil rights guaranteed for everyone in whatever area they live.
That doesn’t look likely to happen in former Yugoslavia any time soon.
Nor does Kosovo. The Albanian Kosovars are only a majority because of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Nazis and Ustashe during the second world war. And the conflict that led to thei rindependence was sparked by the murderous gang of Al-Qaeda affiliated drug lords known as the KLA who started up that ethnic cleansing again, knowing the US was up for anything that would help damage Yugoslavia further.
Oh, piffle. Speaking as someone who is the son of a second generation Serb immigrant and who actually lost relatives to the Ustashe/Nazis in WW II ( mostly in and around the Karlovac region of Croatia ), that is more than a bit of an exaggeration. The Albanian population appears to have been increasing in the area since at least the 17th century and the proportion in 1948 doesn’t seem to have been drastically different than it was in 1931. A fair bit of the growth seems to actually have been since the 1960’s due to differential birth rates.
None of which makes a bit of difference. Like I’ve always said I don’t usually give two shits about historical arguments about who was there first, whether we’re talking Arabs vs. Jews in Israel or Serbs vs. Albanians in Kosovo.The reality today is what the reality is.
I’m actually not a big fan of the KLA, who are certainly somewhat shady actors, but lets not pretend the Serbian authorities were innocents in all of this. Milosevic has to take a big share of the blame for his decision to raise the standard of ethnic nationalism as his new focus to secure power ( and Tudjman did much the same in Croatia ). And let’s not forget the long pattern of harassment and intimidation that bred tension going back to Tito’s days. If the Albanians were restless, the Serbian and Yugoslav governments were far from blameless.
As with Lemur866 I’d actually rather see a peaceful multi-ethnic state in the region. I was genuinely disappointed to see Yugoslavia break up, whatever its faults - it was once a reasonably successful state by regional standards. I blame Milosevic and Tudjman for much of the ensuing chaos. But you can’t unmake an omelet or at least not quickly. Maybe a mini-EU can one day be salvaged from the wreckage in the Balkans, but in the meantime it seems we are stuck with little ethnic mini-states. More’s the pity.
When the country was ruled by Tito’s Communists they were able to extract autonomy for Kosovo within Serbia. However, it was autonomy only on paper and what happened in late 1990’s in Kosovo is the culmination of decades of consistent pressure against Kosovo Albanians by Serbs. At one point - after Tito’s death - they forbade Albanian language in schools and for official purposes. The degree of dehumanization of Kosovo Albanians that started in early 1980’s is what prompted political elite of most-northern republic Slovenia to question the whole idea of living in a multi-ethnic state along with Serbs. What happened is that everybody else saw themselves as Kosovars at one point in future. Many agree that Kosovo miners strike in 1981 is what started the whole disintegration of Yugoslavia and the sole initiator Serbia and their political elite at the time.
As for borders, that was a good principle that was established that existing borders should be respected. Just because there’s a little community of 75K relatively homogenous that does not give or lends any rights whatsoever. Serbs were hoping that eventually international community would go for that and that’s why they started massive ethnic cleansing.
It is due time Serbs should STFU already and try, just effin try to live in peace for once.
It’s hard to say for sure because so many of the estimates come from either Serb or Albanian sources and both groups are notorious for rewriting history, but AFAIR what little data exists from other sources seems to point to an Albanian majority emerging towards the end of the 19th century.