Kosovo’s Serbs still not happy

Last weekend brought an update on one of the more depressing stories from 2023 – or, in its more general form, from the last decade or so. Twelve months ago, municipal elections were held in four municipalities in the north of Kosovo, producing a crisis that seems as far as ever from resolution.

The four (Zubin Potok, Zvečan, Leposavić, and North Mitrovica) are populated overwhelmingly by ethnic Serbs, who do not recognise the independence of Kosovo and prefer to regard themselves as still part of Serbia. The Serbian government continues to provide services there, and the writ of the Kosovo government runs only fitfully.

Last year’s election was therefore boycotted by the Serbs, and ethnic Albanian mayors were elected on absurdly low turnouts: fewer than 1,600 people voted out of about 45,000 eligible. Every sane observer realised that this result could not possibly be allowed to stand, but the nationalist Kosovar government tried to tough it out, with violence as the inevitable result.

For the last few months, with the prodding of the European Union, Kosovo and Serbia have been trying to work out a deal to calm the situation. They appeared to have one last month, when the Kosovars agreed to hold a referendum in response to a petition by the residents of the municipalities to unseat their unrepresentative mayors. The Serbian government and its local proxies seemed to be on board with the idea.

But it all fell apart. On Sunday, when the referendum was held, the ethnic Serbs again boycotted. Only 253 people voted, of whom only 18 voted to remove the mayors. The main Serb party, Serbian List, said that although it wanted “to replace these fake mayors,” it also “didn’t want to play games directed by” the Kosovo government. The Kosovars blamed Serbia, saying it had “illegally interfered in another country’s election process”; an electoral official described it as “an attempt by the Serb List to hold the Serb community hostage.”

So it’s back to square one. It’s now eleven years since Kosovo and Serbia reached what was supposed to be a breakthrough agreement, but on the critical issue of their border they remain as far apart as ever. My summary of the problem from a year ago remains unhappily valid:

The general shape of agreement, such as it is, between Kosovo and Serbia has not changed since at least 2013. Serbia promises, without recognising Kosovo’s de jure independence, to not obstruct it in practice, and Kosovo in return promises to grant extensive autonomy to the Serbs in the north. But neither is fully sincere, and each waits for the other to move first, resulting in repeated dead­lock. …

It makes more sense on every count to simply give the residents of the four municipalities what they want, and redraw the boundary to put them back into Serbia. There is nothing sacred about the current border; the area concerned represents only about 9% of Kosovo’s territory, and since its jurisdiction there is mostly nominal anyway, it would not be losing anything significant.

Serbia in turn would be much more likely to reconcile itself to Kosovar independence, and would get much less international sympathy if it didn’t.

Yet it is not inherently difficult. Some border questions are deeply intractable, either because populations are geographically mixed, or because access to resources is contested, or because there are strong emotional or historical or strategic underpinnings to the conflict. But northern Kosovo is not like that; as the one-sided nature of the voting shows, there is a high degree of ethnic homogeneity and the line between the two communities is relatively sharp.

A competent team of cartographers and demographers could draw a functional new boundary in a couple of days. But fear of where border revision might lead makes the international community shy away from such an obvious solution.