Kosovo and the Balkans - 12 June 2022
Mr Henze you are one of the few specialised experts on Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, let's talk about the Balkans and Kosovo. 12 June is a special day in Kosovo. How do you see the developments?
The situation in the 90s was marked by the massive destabilisation campaign of the Serbs. Anyone who did not want to bow to the Serbian ideas of a common Yugoslav state was accused by the Serbs of "secessionist aspirations". The communist ideology of "brotherhood and unity" was replaced by the reawakened nationalism of the Yugoslav peoples. I still remember the phrase: "All Serbs in one state". It meant that if Yugoslavia fell apart, Belgrade would annex all the territories where Serbs lived to Serbia. Later, this was called the "Greater Serbian" ideology.
And in 1999?
I myself was also in Kosovo for a short time at that time. The 15th of June was a hot day, about 35 degrees. On Saturday, the Germans arrived in Kosovo via Albania. Operation Joint Guardian began. It was the largest ground operation in NATO history and very successful. Those who knew the conditions in Kosovo from their own experience had to approve of the war, and that's what happened to me now in Ukraine. You have to look at such situations directly, otherwise you don't understand these complex situations. Under Milosevic, an apartheid system was created - in the middle of Europe.
Only an apartheid system, there was more going on, wasn't there?
Sure, the conflict intensified in 1989 when Yugoslav President Milo?evi? cancelled all autonomy rights acquired since 1963 and downgraded Kosovo back to an "autonomous region". As a result, all Kosovar political institutions were dissolved and federal subsidies were stopped. At schools and universities, teaching and courses in Albanian were banned. In the 1990s, Kosovo Albanians lost their jobs in the administration and in public enterprises and were excluded from political, social, economic and cultural life.
Against the backdrop of the economic crisis, which had hit Kosovo particularly hard since the 1980s as the most economically backward region of Yugoslavia, the disputes became even more acute. During the war, the Kosovar and especially the Kosovo Albanian civilian population became victims of systematic attacks, expulsions and mass murders.?
The Albanian language was banned in public life in Kosovo as well, and some 130,000 Albanians were forced out of schools, state enterprises and the administration, so that by the early 1990s 400,000 young Albanians were forced into emigration. Many settled in Germany and Switzerland. As a result, we witnessed the emergence of an apartheid system in Europe for the first time since the 1933-1945 period. When the Albanians developed a peaceful, pacifist resistance in response to lawlessness and oppression, only a few states showed solidarity in the early 1990s; the USA and especially the German nation felt obliged to help because of historical experiences and the long friendship between the Albanian and German nations.
Albanian pacifism, on the other hand, was interpreted in Serbia as a weakness of the Albanians. And not only there: At the peace negotiations in Dayton, which ended the Bosnian war in 1995, the Albanians were not included in the talks
This was a fundamental mistake on the part of the USA and Europe. It led to a war of aggression by the Serbs because they assumed that the West would not intervene. NATO and the world community learned from this mistake; the reaction in February 2022 towards Putin was clear and elementary.
Nothing can be achieved by peaceful means alone, was the lesson the Albanians learned. They therefore attacked with complete justification, just as the Israelis did in the 1960s, and defended themselves. This is how the rise of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the U?K, can be understood. The Albanians had the legitimacy under international law to defend themselves, just as the Ukrainians do now, and other states have the legitimacy under international law to help people and nations when they are exposed to a war of aggression.
There are also very irritating parallels between the actions of the Serbs in the 1990s and Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine, and it has a longer history in the Balkans then, as it does now in Ukraine.
As Helmut Kohl once said, those who do not know history cannot understand the present and cannot shape the future.
I have the impression that the Kosovars, and especially the Kosovar government under Kurti, have internalised the history of the Albanian nation in Kosovo very well. It is not without reason that Kurti is rightly concentrating on EU membership and not getting involved in the Russian-Serbian alternative project Open Balkans. Rugova would have acted in the same way. We appreciate Kurti's foreign policy actions in Germany and the EU. In 2022, the time of decision for Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans has come.
For too long, we, the EU and the USA have allowed the governments in the Western Balkans, and here I see in particular Albania under the Rama government and Serbia, to deviate far from the declared norms, values and rules. And there have been no consequences. One example is Albania, many European politicians, a good example is currently the Member of the Bundestag Peter Beyer, appear completely ignorant in the Balkans, here Albania, do not understand the culture, do not seem to have ventilated the historical developments and are relatively quick to side with the autocrats Rama or politicians like Tabaku or Basha in Albania who are under criminal suspicion. This means that politicians from Northern Europe demand democracy and the rule of law and then only allow themselves to be photographed with a happy or laughing face next to the autocrats, possibly even at a celebration, possibly even receiving something sponsored, or they celebrate exuberantly with the autocrats, as an ambassador from North America always likes to do in Albania.
The best example, however, is Serbia, which is still considered a promising candidate country by certain representatives in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. Yet Freedom House classifies the country as only partially "free". In Albania, corruption has increased massively under the Rama government and freedom of the press has been significantly reduced.
Serbia maintains close ties with Beijing and Moscow and, like Albania, has refused to impose sanctions against Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine war. And I recall Vucic's GAS deal with Putin, in parallel with Putin's massacres of children and women in Ukraine. For a long time, the West accepted Vucic's lavishness.??But this must stop now, as must Rama's manoeuvring in Albania.
"Close relations with Putin's regime are no longer compatible with the construction of a common future with the EU," said the EU's foreign affairs representative Joseph Borrell recently. Our German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also said: "Accession requires the willingness to support the EU's common foreign policy".
What is needed now are not only clear words from the West but also very clear actions. German Chancellor Scholz has now put it in a nutshell: "No country in the EU accession process should be under any illusion that European rules do not apply.
Belgrade must now decide where it stands. If there is no clear answer, Serbia should be put on the international sanctions list. This applies to individual politicians in Belgrade and Bosnia, the behaviour of Milorad Dodik is unacceptable, as is the behaviour of the Albanian Prime Minister Rama.?
But this also applies to ambassadors from Europe and the USA, as well as politicians from both continents, absolute distance from oligarchic structures and autocrats, no acceptance of gifts and sponsoring and support of pro - western organisations.
What do you mean by the history of Albanians in Kosovo?
Well, already at the beginning of the 20th century there were efforts in Serbia to expel the Albanian population from Kosovo. The memorandum of Vasa Cubrilovic, who had called for more systematic action by the authorities in Kosovo to expel the Albanians, actually prevailed until 1939. Tens of thousands of Muslim Albanians were deported to Turkey and Albania, hundreds of thousands should have been, that was the Serbian plan. The Serbs had a similar basic understanding of how to deal with minorities as Hitler or Stalin.
In the 1950s, Cubrilovic was an advisor to the notorious Yugoslav interior minister Jovan Rankovic. And again, tens of thousands of Albanians were expelled from Kosovo to change the ethnic composition of Kosovo in favour of the Serbs.
The Serbian military then systematically built up its positions in 1998 so that it could reach the entire territory with its artillery. And so the military foundations were in place to fulfil this dream and carry out the systematic expulsion of the Albanians. So there is a historical causal chain that leads to the war crimes of Milosovic and that could also lead to further actions by Vucic in 2022.
And how did the West react in 1998?
It was in the interest of Europe, Germany and the USA to put an end to the goings-on of the Serbs in Kosovo, i.e. to stage a genocide against the Albanian nation. Whether the fight against human rights violations or the fear of new streams of refugees was in the foreground for the acting politicians remains to be seen.?
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In the summer of 1998, Nato began to build up military structures that would make intervention and war against Serbia possible. After all, it takes at least half a year to set up the necessary infrastructure. A threatening scenario was thus built up to lend military weight to the demands for a political solution at the negotiations that were to take place in Rambouillet near Paris. Milosevic did not agree to the treaty at that time and the war of aggression by the Serbs began under the leadership of Prime Minister Milosovic and his Interior Minister Vucic, who was also in charge of the special police and security units at that time.
We Germans shut down the entire air defence of Yugoslavia at that time, so the war could be ended relatively quickly.
And where do we go from here?
There are six central answers to this question:
1.Negotiations on accession to the EU must now begin with Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkan states, for which we need a central decision by the EU Council. Most of these countries, especially Albania, have not met the criteria, for reasons that vary from country to country. However, the EU's approach to the negotiations has been too linear. The accession process is a multi-layered process in cultural, economic and geopolitical terms. Added to this is now Putin's disastrous war of aggression against Ukraine. There is no need now for an accession process in several, iterative steps; that would take far too long and would not do justice to the common goal of Europe and the world community; it would rather lead to destructive results. The individual aspects must be dealt with and clarified in parallel, including the criteria that have not yet been fulfilled.
2.Serbia must decide in 2022 whether to join the EU, the Eurasian Economic Union or the Silk Road project.
3. visa-free travel for Kosovo should be introduced immediately, there is no reason for Europe to refuse this.
4. the remaining 5 countries of the EU, including France, must now recognise Kosovo under international law. The situation is too serious, and a readjustment is needed, i.e. a clear positioning of French foreign policy with regard to the Balkans and Moldova.
5.In the context of the forthcoming accession process, the Balkan countries will also become part of the Schengen area. This is a good regulatory framework in which the border conflicts between Serbia and Kosovo can be resolved. Of course, it must be ensured that the minorities in Kosovo, as well as in Serbia, are protected in the same way. For Kosovo and Serbia, I recommend the German-Danish model for the resolution of the minority problem.
6.Kosovo, like other Balkan countries, has considerable economic and social problems. This has nothing to do with corruption, corruption exists everywhere in the world, including in Germany and the USA. The main problem is that the Balkans have never really recovered from the civil war and the loss of heads. Corruption and crime are a consequence of these destabilisations.
In 2022, 25.80% of Kosovars were unemployed, and of 15-24 year olds, as much as 48.60%, as the education system does not meet the demands of the labour market, and the employment rate is 29.30 With the Corona crisis, the already difficult economic situation will worsen. The gross domestic product shrank by 5.34 % in 2020, grew again to 9.1, % in 2021, in 2022 it will certainly drop again because of the Ukraine war and the significant price increases, worldwide .The difficult political and economic situation has led to a high emigration rate for decades and thus to additional destabilisation. We know something like this from Albania.
For the Balkans, we need a development fund jointly coordinated between the USA and the EU, all existing programmes must be concentrated, interlinked, the investment volume should be doubled, analogous to the programme in Ukraine. Active NGOs must also be included in the central coordination platform. We had very good experiences with the Marshal Fund after 1945.?
What do they say about the Open Balkans initiative?
It is a Russian-Serbian project with the goals of restoring Belgrade's domination of the Balkans and integrating the Balkans into Putin's Eurasian Economic Union. Serbia, moreover, is already a member of the Eurasian Economic Union and has also concluded significant military agreements with Russia.
Any support for the project will lead to a Russification of the Balkans, which is not in the interest of the populations in the Balkans, which is not in our interest. It is about membership of the EU and the Berlin Process rules apply.
Which politician has made the greatest impression in Kosovo?
Oh, there are some men and women. But, if you ask me, Ibrahim Rugova. I met him in Kosovo in the summer of 2002, he was
first president of the Serbian province of Kosovo, which is under UN administration. Even after he was diagnosed with cancer in September 2005, he did not give up his office to continue working on Kosovo's future. He had impressed me very much at that time, we hardly found such a politician even in Northern Europe.
For ten years, Rugova offered consistent but non-violent resistance to the brutal centralisation by the then Yugoslav President and war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and the Interior Minister Vucic. The married father of three children thus formed the political counterweight to the fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Shortly after the start of the war in Belgrade with Milosevic, he had himself photographed shaking hands. A propaganda success for the Serbs. Every politician makes mistakes, even Rugova was not infallible. He was a representative of the appeasement policy, a historical mistake. But it is forgivable, even the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had to learn this in 1938, and now we Europeans too with Putin. Rugova, however, in my impression, had quickly realised that no appeasement policy is possible with war criminals.
To this day, he seemed calm, almost shy, in the middle of the conflict in the Balkans, during the negotiations in Paris. That has inspired me to this day.??While his colleagues were shouting at each other, he looked a little unworldly, thoughtful, with the scarf he always wore. he had come to the conclusion that Kosovo must become its own state and find its future in the EU and NATO.
Mr Henze, thank you very much for the interview.
Interview in Albanian, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Albania: