On the Way to Ruin

Who will take Kosovo from my rhetoric? BorisTadić, bursting into song

Photo: BETA

In the days when the agony of the failed Kosovo-related politics of the official Belgrade reaches its culmination, its key creator and his party followers are trying to veil their complete political debacle in the fog of the supposed struggle to defend legitimate national interests. Even if we disregard the abyss of nothingness in which these interests have crystallised, it has become obvious that in their attempt to manage to ensure the continuation of their own parasitical existence in the domestic political scene, even at the cost of endangering the real national interests of Serbia, those who wield power in Belgrade have got themselves into a very dangerous, gambling adventure

President Boris Tadić, first faced with the naked truth that the “Both Kosovo and Europe” politics have simultaneously endangered the European perspective of the country and the survival of the Serbs in Kosovo, and obviously deeply disturbed by the increasingly loud demands to abandon it, has said that, “a country which abandons its legitimate interests with ease is recognised by major forces as a country which is ridiculously easy to impose new conditions upon, and such a country loses its credibility in politics”.

Soon after, on the trail of the same arguments, Jelena Trivan, the vice-president of Tadić’s party, sent a grouchy message from her silicone DS lips to all those who would “recognise the independence of Kosovo, either explicitly or implicitly” that “the EU does not want in its company a country without a national strategy, or a country which changes this strategy all the time, from one election to the next”. At the same time, Trivan said that as a result, the DS will “not relinquish national goals, as defined through the struggle for sovereignty and identity and, at the same time, membership in the European Union”.

After these futile public appearances of the creators and followers of the failed Kosovo politics, the observers seem to have missed one very important detail: that the advocates of the ruling political sect in Belgrade no longer defend their persistent insistence on their own failures by presenting any reasonable arguments with which they would create at least the illusion of faith in the soundness of the national interests to which they swore until then. Their superficial convictions are now replaced by worn-out phraseology, basically consisting of pointless verbal exhibitionism, which represents the possible abandonment of persistently pushing the country into ruin as something that would make the rest of the world see Serbia as a frivolous state.

In their hypocritical and twisted logic, President Tadić and his party satraps have found the confirmation of their own political importance in what should be, according to all reasonable principles, a measure of its shallow-mindedness. Were Serbia a serious state at all, a group of political dilettantes and clowns could never find themselves in the position to decide about its destiny. Talking about the possibility of winning the elections based on a meaningless phrase such as “Both Kosovo and Europe” is illusory. Today, seven and a half years after Boris Tadić first sat in the armchair of the President of Serbia, and three and a half years after his private fan club took over the key role in running the country, we can reflect on the results of his rule with a great degree of bitterness. Decided to be indecisive, resolved not to pass any unpopular resolutions, always prepared to curry favour with and flatter the lowest instincts of the Serbian political sentiment, this handful of triumphant desperate people have put on a show for us, the disastrous results of which we are all contemptuously watching today.

Both candle and light bulb: the political credo of Boris Tadića

Photo: www.zaevropskusrbiju.rs

Instead of offering a clear solution to bridge the existing gap regarding the status of Kosovo, to find the appropriate mechanisms for resolving the question of the position of minorities, create a clear legal framework for all-encompassing negotiations, which would result in a historic reconciliation between the Albanian and Serbian peoples, Tadić and his followers set as their top strategic goal the maintenance of the unsustainable regional status quo. Instead of starting down the road of painstakingly building the foundations for future friendship and common interests with the Albanian people in order to find a long term solution to overcoming the old antagonisms, the strategists of the current Serbian regime continued down the earlier, well-travelled roads of confrontation and problem-mongering, which have pushed the situation to the edge of a conflict, and made the continued existence of the Serbs in Kosovo practically impossible.

Even this grotesquely defined politics was later altered several times under the pressure of the unbearably high costs of its blind implementation and, after the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, Belgrade admitted that the matter of the status of Kosovo was not a legal but a political matter. Later, despite putting up opposition for two years, it nevertheless agreed to engage in status dialogue with the institutions in Priština. And today, when Jelena Trivan claims that the negotiations with Priština are “one of the biggest successes of Serbia” since apparently the “entire international community was against these negotiations”, she conscientiously and unscrupulously deceives the public, since the international community was loudly against new and futile negotiations about the status of Kosovo, and it was non other than the official Belgrade which resisted for over two years the beginning of the technical, non-status related dialogue being conducted at the moment.

Just how dishonestly Tadić’s regime approached these negotiations is best described by the almost unbelievable fact that the Serbian negotiating team first accepted the agreement on the stamp of Kosovo Customs, but few days later an “explanation” arrived from Belgrade saying that this act did not mean the recognition of Kosovo Customs. The degree of hypocrisy is also clear from the fact that the Serbian regime disputed the actions of this, apparently unrecognised customs service, at only two of the total five crossings between Kosovo and Serbia!

The fact that Serbia opposed the arrival of Kosovar customs officers only at the Jarinje and Brnjak crossings is a direct consequence of the parallel implementation of Boris Tadić’s secret plan to divide Kosovo. Even though this idea is fundamentally different from the ethics and European values of the 21^st century, and despite the publicly credible rejection of this idea in key capitals of the world, the office of Boris Tadić has continued its de facto realisation with equal persistence and stupid enthusiasm. In the meanwhile, with a two-year delay, Tadić, again informally, changed the strategic goal of preserving the territorial integrity of the country to the resolution of the Kosovo problem. Even though, considering the wide spectrum of options this formulation offers, in February 2010 this probably would have been a step in the right direction. Today, this move is too little too late.

Even earlier, during the disintegration of the SFRY, based on an ingrained template, Serbia first refused to recognise the seceded republics, only to regularly change that opinion later, thus forever missing the chance to open the possibility for any future cooperation with the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Based on this fairly recent experience, they should understand that it is high time for the official Belgrade to devote itself to the task of a total Serbian-Albanian reconciliation, a task which far surpasses the mere resolution of the Kosovo problem. Instead of the blind and short-sighted insistence on failed politics in order to preserve sheer power, the preservation of which has become a goal in itself, today Serbia desperately needs the formulation of a new politics, as the herald of reason and hope. A politics which would lead to the restoration of the honour and self-respect of a fallen state, the European perspective of which, and its future as such, have been brought into serious question.