Is fresh conflict on the horizon in Kosovo?

Tensions are rising between Belgrade and Pristina after the European Parliament approved the liberalisation of visas for Kosovo citizens yesterday.

The move “sparked nervous reactions in Serbia”, said the European news website Euractiv, and comes as a new war crimes trial gets underway in The Hague that will judge not Serbian crimes, but those of ethnic Albanians, including Hashim Thaci, a former president of Kosovo who is broadly regarded as the country’s founding father.

Against a backdrop of mistrust and recrimination, experts fear that the country’s violent past “has come back to haunt it”, The Times said.

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What was the Kosovo War about?

The Kosovo War followed centuries of simmering tensions between the ethnic Serbians, the majority of whom are Orthodox Christian, and their majority-Muslim ethnic Albanian neighbours to the south. These tensions were exacerbated by frequently shifting geographical and political boundaries during the 20th century.

Following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the formerly autonomous province of Kosovo proclaimed independence from Serbia, which responded by embarking on a ruthless crackdown on the territory’s Albanian population.

The civil war started 28 February 1998 and lasted until 11 June 1999, following an 11-week-long bombing campaign by Nato against Serbia.

After the war, the province was administered by the UN until February 2008, when Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia.

According to figures from the World Population Review, Kosovo’s 1.7m-strong population comprises:

• 92% Albanian
• 4% Serbs
• 2% Bosniaks and Gorans
• 1% Turks
• 1% Roma

Why is there trouble now?

A signing ceremony took place this week for the visa liberalisation attended by Roberta Metolsa, the European Parliament president, and Jessika Roswall, the Swedish minister of the EU representing the presidency of the Council of the EU.

Under the new rules, Kosovo citizens will be able to enter the EU without visas from 1 January 2024.

“Not everyone was happy with the news,” said Euractiv. The chairperson for the Commission for European Integration of the Parliament of Serbia, Elvira Kovac, said that the move sees the EU rewarding Kosovo while punishing Serbia.

“One side receives a prize, while the other waits two years to open a cluster,” she said, regarding Serbia’s EU accession path.

Another source of tension has revolved around number plates in Kosovo. Pristina has been devising new regulations that would require drivers in northern municipalities predominantly inhabited by ethnic Serbs to exchange their Serbian licence plates for ones issued by Kosovo.

When the measure was first announced around 50,000 people in the affected areas said they would resist the new plates “because they do not recognise Kosovo’s independence”, the BBC reported. Many residents vowed to continue using plates issued by the Serbian government in Belgrade.

Following crisis mediation by the EU, the Kosovan government agreed to push the implementation date back to the end of 2023. However, in a sign of the “deepening dysfunction and lawlessness in the region”, Ethnic Serb mayors in several northern municipalities, along with judges and hundreds of police officers, resigned in November in protest at the looming switch, Reuters said.

A return to The Hague

Unrest in Kosovo has also been stirred by a new war crimes tribunal set up to judge not Serbian atrocities, but “those of the ethnic Albanian guerrilla army whose commanders ended up running the country”, The Times said.

Four ex-commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) will stand trial in The Hague, accused of violently purging both their own ranks and their political opponents in the aftermath of the Kosovo war.

Some view the allegations against the men, including former president Hashim Thaci, “as a smear on the legitimacy of the independence struggle and its heroes”, The Times said.

Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, told the paper he had never supported the court, which he worries might help Serbia to “rewrite history”, by shifting the focus to crimes by Kosovans.

“I support accountability for the war. However, I find it unfair that the spotlight is being put on Kosovo while Serbia has not only refused to take responsibility for its crimes but denies them,” he said.

Can further violence be prevented?

A lot will depend on Russia, which has long been an ally of Serbia. Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic has refused to join Western sanctions against Moscow over the Ukraine war, and signed a gas deal with Russia last May.

An MP from Vucic’s party even tweeted in July that Serbia might soon be compelled to begin the “denazification of the Balkans” – the same term that Putin used to justify his invasion of Ukraine. The MP later apologised following a public outcry.

According to Politico, Serbia’s ultra-nationalists “are using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to galvanize their campaign against Kosovo’s independence”, with politicians on Vucic’s right flank seeing “an opportunity to tie Russia’s war on Ukraine to their desire to swallow up Kosovo, even as Vucic engages in EU-brokered negotiations to partially normalize relations”.

The simmering tensions in the Balkans are “clearly welcome to Russia”, which has repeatedly “been accused of fomenting instability and unrest” on the global stage, wrote Stefan Wolff, professor of international security at Birmingham University, on The Conversation.

But on the other hand, he added, China “has made Serbia its regional hub in the western Balkans” and “values stability in the region, which is an important transit hub and entry point to EU markets”.

In an address to the UN Security Council last year, Fergus Eckersley, the UK’s political coordinator at the UN, said that “the normalisation of relations between Kosovo and Serbia remains vital”, and he urged parties from both side to engage in dialogue “in good faith”.

The US too has been ramping up diplomatic pressure on Serbia and Kosovo after recent flare-ups in the region, the Financial Times said.

“We [are] worried about violence metastasising,” US state department official Derek Chollet told the paper this week. “The last thing any of us wants right now is a crisis in this part of the world given that we have the biggest crisis since the second world war not too far away.”