Serbia’s Janus-faced president wants to take Serbia into the EU, and at the same time wants to partition Kosovo. Can he have his cake and eat it?

 

Serbs have many phrases and aphorisms that borrow pastoral themes, involving goats, sheep, lambs and wolves. “Getting both, the lamb and the money,” is just one of them.

This seems to be exactly what the EU’s favorite Balkan leader, Serbian President Boris Tadic, is seeking to do now. While seeking fast-track EU integration, he wants Kosovo, or a piece of it, too. Sometimes his desire becomes so desperate that he threatens to partition Kosovo, though most of the time he argues that he doesn’t quite mean that.

 

Moreover, Tadic’s declaration that Serbia may seriously consider the partition option appears to go against his own declared taboo - of not using force in, or against, Kosovo. Yet, this attitude of Tadic is nothing new, even among those who follow the agenda of his moderate centrist party, the Democratic Party.

Even Tadic’s predecessor as party leader, the late Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, a hero to Serbia’s embattled pro-Europeans, used this methodology. This line of thinking, which characterizes so much of Serbia’s attitudes both to Kosovo and to Brussels, can be summed up as: “We could do it this way - or we could do it that way - if our interests are ignored.”

Thus, Tadic used the support of the West before the Serbian elections on May 11 in order to fracture the nationalist Serbian Radical Party, SRS, his main political foe. Now, he is using Western countries again, with an initiative at UN Headquarters in New York to accept the deployment of the EU law and order mission in Kosovo, EULEX.

 

This acceptance “with a few conditions” seems the best way to buy time and gain a better position for Serbia with the EU. Nowhere is it easier for him to play this double game than in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo.

There, above all, Tadic reveals his Janus-like face. With one face, he can be cooperative in helping the UN mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, re-establish its court in the town. With the other, he threatens partition, “if all other options are exhausted”.

Tadic and the other Serbian leaders know that they can afford to play this game on account of the lack of a Western military threat. And as long as this remains the case, he will surely continue displaying his two faces in Kosovo, leaving his final, default, position unclear.

 

On the one hand, in Brussels, he aspires to nothing more than the fastest possible EU integration for his country. But mentally he is not in Brussels, or not there alone, but in Lausanne, the Swiss city that has come to symbolize one of the most divisive events of the 20th century.

There, a forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey was signed in 1923, as a result of which millions of Greeks and Turks, young and old, had to abandon their homes and cross the border into their designated “homelands”.

Suspicions that Tadic would like to see a version of the Lausanne scenario repeated in Kosovo, with a new state border running through Mitrovica, have been fuelled by the recent interview remarks made by Serbia’s army chief, General Zdravko Ponos.

Last month he said that the Serbian army was still capable of militarily taking over the whole of Kosovo. It is true that Tadic has not issued such threats himself, perhaps because he remains preoccupied with trying to consolidate his own shaky authority over the Serbs in the north of Kosovo.

But the question about whether he will continue his “either – or” game of cat and mouse over Kosovo with the West remains open. Tadic’s own declaration about partition may be no more than pragmatic, a gesture to reassure the Serbs in northern Kosovo following his acceptance of the EULEX mission.

For ordinary Albanians and Serbs, the dilemma resides in the ultimate aim behind this declaration. Much of Prishtina’s good will towards the UN plan for Kosovo, drafted by the UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari, may in the meantime be put at risk.

If Tadic’s initiative in New York, or if his moves to speed Euro-Atlantic integrations is based on the partition of northern Kosovo, logic dictates that something needs to be done specifically in the place where Tadic is putting his finger in the pie, Mitrovica.

If Serbia’s initiative is to freeze Kosovo’s status and halt its recognition internationally, then logic dictates that the process of defrosting should start exactly in the north. If Kosovo has to be frozen, let it at least be in one piece and not in cut up cubes, as Serbia seems to want. Moreover, there is no better chance than now to see whether we all are what we claim, Euro Atlantic partners.

 

Ylber Hysa was a member of Kosovo negotiating team during Kosovo status negotiations.