Kosovo

Discussion Paper 31
Kosovo: Successes and Failures of International Civil and Military Involvement Debate held at European Studies Centre, St Antony's, Oxford, 30 March 2004
Discussion Report by Denisa Denisa Kostovicova and Dimitar Bechev

Discussion Paper 31 (March 2004) Denisa Kostovicova and Dimitar Bechev, Discussion Report: ‘Kosovo: Successes and Failures of International Civil andMilitary Involvement’ Centre for the Study of Global Governance London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global

The outburst of violence on 17th and 18th March 2004 put Kosovo briefly back in the centre of international attention with 19 people dead, another 900 injured, and 700 Serb, Roma and Ashkali houses, as well as twomonasteries and 30 churches, completely destroyed or damaged. Nearly 4,500 inhabitants of the province, belonging mainly to the Serb minority, were displaced. The events also triggered a heated response in Serbia: demonstrators took to the city streets, while the mosques in Belgrade and Nish were engulfed in flames following fire attacks. The international policy in Kosovo guided by the'standards-before-status' principle appeared to have been dealt a serious setback. Kosovo has again come to haunt policymakers and diplomats as it did in the recent past. Whether in Belgrade, Prishtina, or the Western capitals, the difficult issue of a definitive settlement reemerged as powerful as ever. The panel discussion on Kosovo co-organised by Oxford's South East European Studies Programme (SEESP) and theSouth East Europe Faculty Development Programme of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance (CsGG), London School of Economics and Political Science gathered a group of UK-based experts on the Balkans. It had two interlinked aims. First, the panel explored the political and economic causes of the persisting violence in Kosovo. Second, it looked at the dilemmas faced by various internationalactors in the Western Balkans and Kosovo in particular, as well as the implications for the future. What follows are summaries of each participant's presentation. Questions about Kosovo Othon Anastasakis, SEESP Director The Director of SEESP Othon Anastasakis opened the discussion by raising a number of questions prompted by the upsurge of violence in Kosovo. This, in his words, came as nosurprise to those following Balkan affairs. First, he asked whether the protectorates in South East Europe - characterised by him as 'semi-solutions' - were capable of tackling the problems on the ground, and whether the international community needed a different strategy for the region? Second, Anastasakis posed the question of whether state-building had been approached in an effective way. To him, theanswer was no. Neither the Albanian nor the Serb community were happy with international intervention in Kosovo. He suggested that this had wider implications for other regions like the Middle East. Third, Anastasakis asked whether the standards-before-status approach had been and remains to be the right one What kind of multiethnicity for Kosovo? Denisa Kostovicova, Centre for the Study of GlobalGovernance, LSE Denisa Kostovicova focused in her discussion on the question how the misunderstanding of Kosovo's multi-ethnicity on the part of the international community and the policy based on such a misunderstanding reinforced ethnic inclusiveness and radicalism on both sides - Albanian and Serbian. Historically, one of the key features of Kosovo's multi-ethnicity has been that ethnic groupshave lived together but separately. This is a completely different model of multiethnicity than in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is reflected in ethnic geographic distributions of the communities, negligible inter-ethnic marriage rates, as well as a scarcity of bilingualism among Kosovars. It has been more common for Albanians to

speak Serbian, although there are Serbs who are originally from...