Cvetkovic power play in Karadzic arrest

Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic has called on the remaining Balkan war crimes fugitives to surrender voluntarily after Tuesday’s arrest of Radovan Karadzic. He hailed Karadzic’s arrest as a major step for Serbia and urged others to voluntarily surrender. Cvetkovic claimed the arrest would open the way for reconciliation throughout the region, allow for better life in Serbia and the more efficient defence of its territorial integrity. Cvetkovic will be hoping for a major rapprochement with the EU as a reward for Karadzic’s high profile arrest.

And there is no doubting this is a major PR coup for the new PM installed in June this year. Radovan Karadzic declared himself president of the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb republic) when Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded from Yugoslavia in 1992. On 11 July 1995, the UN and NATO allowed Bosnian Serb forces to seize Srebrenica, despite it having been declared a United Nations “safe area.” Serb forces killed between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in the week after the fall of the town. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled the crimes in Srebrenica to be genocide and Karadzic was removed from power by the Dayton Accords which ended the conflict later that year.

Now, reconciliation is starting to happen in Srebrenica. In 2003 a memorial service was held where security was provided in part by Bosnian Serb police while the Bosnian Serb Prime Minister spoke of “respect for the dead” and called for reconciliation. That same year the Bosnian Serb government admitted on local television station in the capital, Banja Luka for the first time its culpability for the slaughter at Srebrenica. The report revealed that the code name for the Srebrenica operation was "Krivaja 95" named for a small town in central Bosnia. The report named five detention centres where men were held and said a large number of Bosnian Muslims were executed nearby.

But while the leadership makes noises towards normalisation, the war leaders continue to resist arrest. With Karadzic nailed, the focus turns to Ratko Mladic who is also wanted for his role in Srebrenica. Mladic lived in the Serb capital Belgrade, under the protection of former president Slobodan Milosevic until he (Milosevic) was arrested in 2001. By 2004 Mladic was believed to be living under the protection Bosnian Serb military forces but hasn’t been heard of since.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch (HRW) complained that NATO did not do enough to capture Karadzic and Mladic. HRW’s European director Holly Cartner said NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia made only three confirmed attempts to arrest Radovan Karadzic in ten years despite numerous sightings of him. “You can count on one hand the number of times NATO has made real attempts to arrest Karadzic and Mladic,” she said. “Karadzic’s continuing freedom a decade after Srebrenica is a profound moral failure for NATO and the international community,

Much of that “moral failure” has now been rectified. After spending years with impugnity in the extraordinary guise of a new age medical preacher, Karadzic was arrested two days ago in Belgrade. According to the BBC, he was finally uncovered by an unnamed foreign intelligence service and was kept under surveillance by local security forces for a couple of weeks before being arrest. A statement from Cvetkovic’s office said “Karadzic was located and arrested tonight [and] was brought to the investigative judge of the War Crimes Court in Belgrade, in accordance with the law on cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.” While it may take years for Karadzic to have his day in court, Bosnian Muslims could be forgiven for celebrating in Sarajevo. Cvetkovic may also be celebrating a major bargaining tool in the upcoming battles with Brussels.

Beginning and ending with Kosovo

The new UN Governor of Kosovo has called for the international community to quickly decide the fate of the province’s plea for independence from Serbia. Western powers had promised a decision on Kosovo's future by the end of this year, but recently postponed it until after a 21 January general election in Serbia.

Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku also hoped Kosovo would soon be granted independence. ”Any political association with Belgrade simply will not work," he said. But Russia says the settlement must also satisfy Serbia, which flatly rejects independence preferring instead some sort of autonomy within Serbia. Russian ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin accused Kosovo's leaders of resorting to blackmail in threatening mass unrest in the event of more delays. However, the German diplomat Joachim Rücker, who was appointed UN governor in September, has warned against delaying the decision any further. Rücker told the Security Council “Delay will only prolong the tensions existing in Kosovo society, which will feed frustration and make the new start, when it does come, even harder to get right."

The UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) is the interim civilian administration of the country while it waits for the UN to decide on its future. UNMIK was established in 1999 by UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Resolution 1244 defined the legal status of Kosovo as a UN protectorate, while being legally an autonomous constituency of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The task before UNMIK was defined at the time by Kofi Annan as "The task before the international community is to help the people in Kosovo to rebuild their lives and heal the wounds of conflict." But Kosovo is a troubled province at the heart of the complicated life of the Balkans. As author Miranda Vickers said about the history of Yugoslavia "Everything started with Kosovo, and everything will finish with Kosovo.

Kosovo has been at the heart of Serbian life since the 13th century. The Albanians claim that they are its original inhabitants, being the descendants of the ancient Illyrians. But Kosovo came to prominence as the site of a bloody battleground of a battle between Serbs and Ottomans in 1389. The outnumbered Serbs lost the battle and the Ottoman Empire gained a crucial toehold in the Balkans. The Serbs never forgot this battle and used it as a rallying cry in campaigns throughout the centuries. In the 17th century Serbs were replaced in Kosovo by mostly Muslim Albanians who came to the fertile lands from the hostile mountains of Albania proper. In 1878, Serbia gained independence but Kosovo still lay under Ottoman rule. The Muslim peoples of Kosovo founded the League of Prizren a pan-Albanian nationalist group. The aim of the League of Prizren was to unite the four Albanian areas within the Ottoman Empire into one Albanian State.

In 1912, the Balkan states took advantage of a power struggle within the Ottoman Empire to drive the Turks out of Europe. The Kingdom of Serbia claimed newly independent Kosovo. It was determined to recolonise Kosovo and thousands of Serb families moved in. The ancient 1389 battle of Kosovo was invoked as a touchstone of Serb nationalism. Many Albanians fled into the mountains as the Serbs conducted ethnic cleansing of the areas they controlled. Serb immigration continued during the inter-war years. In 1941, most of Kosovo became part of an Italian-controlled Greater Albania. Tito found it hard to recruit Albanians in his partisan army until he promised Kosovo Albanians the right to unite with Albania after the war. But the newly independent Yugoslavia had no intention of keeping that promise. Kosovo was declared an "autonomous province" within Serbia and Albanian insurrection broke out again.

Finally in 1974 Kosovo was granted full autonomy, which gave it almost the same rights as Yugoslavia's six republics. However Serbs complained of harassment by Albanians who were demanding the status of a full republic for the province. Due to Serb emigration and high Albanian birth rate, the proportion of Serbs in the province had now fallen to one for every nine Albanians. The new head of he Serbian Communist party Slobodan Milosevic manipulated these fears. He became a hero overnight in Serbia when two years earlier he went to Kosovo to quell the fears of local Serbs amid a strike by Kosovar Albanian miners that brought the province to a halt. In a speech televised throughout Serbia, he told the waiting crowd of angry Serbs, "You will not be beaten again." He stripped Kosovo of its autonomy on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1989.

Ibrahim Rugova led a non violent resistance movement against Milosevic. He formed a political party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). However his actions were not fast enough for some Kosovars. While the war raged in Croatia and Bosnia, Serbia held tight control of Kosovo. In 1995, some Albanians impatient with Rugova’s Ghandi-like tactics formed a new resistance movement called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Tit-for-tat violence and response escalated until the West started to pay attention to Kosovo in 1998. Throughout that year Milosevic increased his troop strength in Kosovo and began a scorched-earth policy of destroying whole villages in his attempt to wipe out the KLA.

The violence continued to escalate despite the introduction of 2,000 unarmed verifiers under OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). In 1999 a group of nations known as the Contact Group (the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia) brought Kosovar and Serb negotiators together in Rambouillet, France, to agree to a peace plan. The agreement called for the KLA to disarm and Milosevic to reduce troop numbers. Kosovo agreed to sign up but Milosevic refused. In March 1999, NATO launched an air campaign against Serb military targets in Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. In retaliation Milosevic stepped up his campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo.

But the international community put Yugoslavia under increasing pressure to come to a compromise and withdraw its forces. Finally on 10 June 1999, the 77 day NATO air campaign was ended after confirmation from General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, that the full withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo had begun. That same day the Security Council passed Resolution 1244 by a vote of 14 in favour and none against, with only China abstaining.

After Serb withdrawal, the first big issue was establishing a peace framework that would lead to long-term stabilisation. The establishment of the provisional governmental institutions through fair and democratic elections in 2001 marked the beginning of a new political era in Kosovo. There is an uneasy truce with the Serb minority in the country but on the whole they are treated with respect. The Muslim majority want to push for full independence similar to Montenegro however the official Serb position remains that such an outcome is “impossible”. Even in the post-Milosevic era, dreams of a Greater Serbia exist in the minds of the power hungry leaders in Belgrade. Everything has yet to finish with Kosovo.

Montenegro splits from Serbia

Montenegro is the world's newest independent nation and the last of the old Yugoslav states to split from Belgrade.

Brokered by the EU, the Union of Serbia and Montenegro was born in 2003. The aim was to settle Montenegrin independence demands and stabilise Balkan borders. The union deal also contained the seeds of its dissolution. After three years the two republics could hold referendums on whether to keep or scrap it. And so, on May 22, 2006 Montenegro narrowly voted for independence from the union with Serbia. 55.4% of the voters had voted to secede, just above the 55% required for victory. The turnout in the May 21 poll was 86.3%.

The issue of independence divided Montenegro, with opponents arguing that Montenegro had too much to lose with its broad economic, family and political ties with Serbia. The opposition movement was a loose coalition of Serb politicians, Orthodox Church leaders and Montenegrins from the mountainous inland regions near the Serbian border. The move to secede was supported by long-standing Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic who believes that independence will strengthen his country’s chance of joining the EU. He was supported by ethnic Montenegrins and Albanians from the coastal area who feared Serbian dominance of the union.

A Serbian Government press release on June 5 confirmed the decision to transfer jurisdiction. According to the release, the decision obliges Serbia to take the necessary measures within 45 days to make Serbia the international legal successor of Serbia-Montenegro. It affirmed also that association with the EU was Serbia’s ‘strategic and national goal.’

Montenegro’s position on the Adriatic Sea means that Serbia is now a landlocked country. This fact strengthens Montenegro’s position in negotiations with Serbia. It leaves Serbia in a similar position to Ethiopia who lost its coast in the 1990s to newly created Eritrea.

The last time Montenegro was independent was 90 years ago at the end of World War I, when it was absorbed into the newly formed Yugoslavia. Podgorica will become the world’s newest capital city. In 1946 Podgorica was renamed Titograd in honour of the post-war communist leader of the country. The name of Podgorica was reinstated on April 2, 1992.

Montenegro has a population of 700,000 people. The name Montenegro means “black mountain” in Venetian language. The Montenegrin word for their country "Crna Gora" also means black mountain. It is named for the dark forests that covered the slopes of the Dinaric Alps. The earliest known independent ruler of the area was the 11th century dukedom of Dukjla. They paid tribute to the Byzantine Empire and were replaced by the Zetans in the 14th century. The Ottoman Empire was now on the march but never fully conquered mountainous Zeta. From then on, the country was ruled by a series of "vladika," prince-bishops, who formed a theocratic state. It was transformed into a secular principality in 1852 and in 1910, Prince Nikola I became King of Montenegro. Nikola declared war on the Turks and precipitated the two Balkan Wars. Montenegro doubled in size as a result of these wars. It was allied with Serbia in World War I and was occupied by the Austrian Empire.

After the war, parliament voted for a union with Serbia which was finally ratified in 1924 after a bitter civil war against anti-unionists. It became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which renamed itself to Yugoslavia in 1929. During World War II, it was occupied by Italian and then German troops. It became a separate state of Yugoslavia after the war ended. War resistance leader Josip Broz Tito kept the federation together until he died in 1980. His death brought on a slow unravelling of the six states. When Yugoslavia finally broke up in 1992, Montenegro held a bitterly fought election which voted for federation with Serbia. The election was boycotted by pro-independence factions. Relations steadily soured with its major partner as Montenegro became more independent. In 1996, Djukanovic’s government severed de facto ties and adopted the Deutsche Mark as currency (since replaced by the Euro.) In 2003, the two sides agreed to replace the Yugoslav federation in favour of a looser state union named Serbia and Montenegro. The path was finally cleared for the independence referendum.

Though Montenegro is the last state to break free from Yugoslavia, it does not necessarily mean the end of the Balkan conflicts. The prime minister of Kosovo, Agim Çeku, has signalled that they would be next in the quest for independence, saying "This is the last act of the historic liquidation of Yugoslavia…this year Kosovo will follow in Montenegro's footsteps." Kosovo is currently administered by the UN, but is seen by Serbs as the historical and spiritual heart of Serbia. The status of Republica Srpska, the Serb-controlled enclave in Bosnia also remains on knife-edge, with ethnic Serbs looking for a referendum of their own to rejoin Serbia. Such a move could start another war in Bosnia as it has provoked widespread condemnation from the Muslim majority and the West. Permanent peace still eludes this beautiful but complex part of the world.

Although the future is likely to rain on its parade, right now Montenegro justly celebrates its new nationhood.