Kandic for Politika: Crimea and Kosovo cannot be compared

Following the secession of the Crimea from Ukraine, a number of comparisons between Crimea and Kosovo have begun to emerge. However, the U.S. and European administrations, along with the majority of American and European experts of international law, international non-governmental organizations and two or three local human rights organizations, believe that theCrimea and Kosovo cannot be compared.

The U.S. administration holds that Kosovo is a precedent, and that Serbia lost the legitimacy to govern Kosovo because of the violence it committed against the Albanian population, while Ukraine has not been repressive against the population of the Crimea. Professor Marc Weller, whom journalist Zorana Šuvaković quotes in her article of March 16, 2014, in the daily Politika, is of the same opinion . In her text, Šuvaković equates the Crimea of 2014 with the Kosovo of 1999, and Moscow with Washington, but stops short of comparing  responsibility for any hypothetically possible  grave humanitarian situation in the Crimea,  with the experience in Kosovo. Professor Weller believes that the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo was caused by the extreme repression by the Serbian forces, while in the  Crimea, only Russia’s military intervention could bring about a humanitarian disaster. Šuvaković opts for an old Serbian option, which no politician in Serbia has officially disowned – namely, that the grave humanitarian situation in Kosovo had been created by NATO and the United States. According to her, Serbia and its armed forces are effectively innocent. It is reasonable to assume that Šuvaković is referring to Politika’s opinions and information, according to which during the NATO bombing   the columns of Albanians were virtually every day fleeing American bombs while being escorted by the Serbian forces who were “guarding” them.

Serbian politicians tend to avoid the subject of Ukraine and the Crimea. The future Prime Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, casually remarked: “We respect territorial integrity under international law, but do not let those who have trampled it here lecture to us.” He added that “Serbia, on its path toward the EU, respects its obligations, but will not have a hostile attitude towards Russia.” These words raise important questions, such as whether Russia would help Serbia overcome the “Kosovo knot” if it recognizes Kosovo in order for the United States and Europe to accept the annexation of the Crimea. But nobody talks about that, because the new/old government has yet to decide whether it is better to complete the sober process of coming down to earth with the acceptance of the US-EU explanation that Kosovo is indeed a precedent, or to continue to maintain some kind of balance of opposite viewpoints until the topic of the Crimea wears out.

The hot potato has been thrown to the media. Politika leads, in its usual old way. It has translated the question of whether the Crimea constitutes a parallel to the Kosovo case into a question of “patriotism”, in which there is no room for facts.

In its March 23, 2014 issue, Politika published two articles that reveal the daily’s return to the rhetoric from the era before the fall of Slobodan Milošević, thereby revealing its expectation that the new Prime Minister of Serbia will remain on that course. The article by Dragan Vukotić, “The Kosovo model returns to the West like a boomerang,” had been announced as the theme of the week that commemorated the “15^th anniversary of the NATO aggression”.  Vukotić sarcastically criticizes the U.S. policy regarding Kosovo, mocking it, in retrospect, for having failed to foresee that “the crimes on the ground would have escalated as a result of their [the NATO] bombs”. He interprets the annexation of the Crimea as Putin’s just retribution for the bombing of FRY and the secession of Kosovo.

Then, on the same day and on the same occasion, Politika gave space to journalist Bojan Bilbija to thank Aleksandar Vučić for restoring  the term “aggression” to the media. Since 2012, the word “aggression” has been back in the media, Bilbija asserts, but points out that “we had to wait until last year for one of the state officials to utter it again. Aleksandar Vučić was the one to do it.”

Facts

The Crimea is not Kosovo. Kosovo did not merge with another country, nor did the countries that took part in the military intervention in Yugoslavia turn Kosovo into a colony. The Russian intervention in the Crimea cannot be justified by referring to Kosovo. The Ukraine did not commit crimes against the Russians in the Crimea, while in Kosovo the lives of all Albanians were threatened by Serbian forces. Kosovo became independent because Serbia fought for its territory against civilians. The ICTY has convicted nearly the entire leadership of the former government of Serbia for its implementation of the plan designed to modify the ethnic balance in Kosovo through , among other methods, deportations, murder, forcible relocation and persecution of ethnic Albanians.

In Kosovo, during the 78 days of NATO bombing, Serbia’s police and army, with the permission of generals and all state institutions, killed 6,500 Albanian civilians and 1,136 members of the KLA, and then transferred the bodies of more than 2,500 Albanian victims to Serbia and hid them in mass graves around the country. But it was the Serbs who remained in Kosovo who paid the highest price for these crimes. In the period between June 10, 1999 and the end of 2000, about 850 Serbs and 260 Roma, Albanians and members of other ethnicities were killed in Kosovo in connection with the war.

According to the data of the HLC and HLC-Kosovo, in Serbia (excluding Kosovo) and Montenegro, NATO bombs killed 275 people, of whom 180 were civilians (among them three officials of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade), 90 were members of the Yugoslav Army (VJ), and five were members of the Serbian Ministry of the Interior.

In Kosovo, NATO bombs killed 484 people, of whom 267 were civilians (209 Albanians and 58 Serbs, Roma and others), 171 were members of the VJ, 20 were members of the Serbian MUP, and 26 were  members of the KLA, among whom 19 detainees of the KLA who died in the  “Dubrava” prison on May 19, 1999.

The data of these two organizations show that during the NATO bombing, in the period between March 24 and June 9, 1999, 8,823 people were killedin Kosovo: 6,996 civilians, of whom 6,643 were Albanians, 157 were Serbs, and 196 were Roma and other non-Albanians; and 1,136 members of the KLA and 691 members of the VJ and MUP of Serbia.

Nataša Kandić

Project Coordinator of RECOM / Human losses in the Yugoslav wars