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PRISTINA, Kosovo — The former Serbian province of Kosovo declared independence on Sunday, sending tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians swarming through the streets to celebrate what they hoped was the end of a long and bloody struggle for national self-determination.
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Key Dates in Kosovo Independence Drive (February 17, 2008)
Times Topics: Kosovo | Serbia
Kosovo’s intent to be recognized as Europe ’s newest country — after a civil war that killed 10,000 people a decade ago and then years of limbo under United Nations rule — marks the final dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, 17 years after its dissolution began.
It brings to a climax a showdown between the West — which argues that the brutal subjugation of Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians under the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic cost Serbia any rights to rule the territory — and the Serbian government and its allies in the Kremlin, which counter that Kosovo’s independence is a reckless breach of international law that will spur other secessionist movements across the world.
Ethnic Albanians from as far away as America streamed into Pristina this weekend, braving freezing temperatures and heavy snow, to dance in frenzied jubilation. Beating drums, waving Albanian flags and throwing firecrackers, they chanted “ Independence! Independence! We are free at last!” A huge birthday cake was installed on Pristina’s main boulevard.
An outpouring of adulation for the United States — the architect of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Mr. Milosevic’s forces — was evident everywhere. Thousands of revelers unfurled giant American flags, carried posters of former President Bill Clinton and chanted “Thank You U.S.A.!” and “God Bless America.”
In declaring independence in Parliament, Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a former leader of the guerrilla force that just over 10 years ago began an armed rebellion against Serbian domination, struck a note of reconciliation. Addressing parliament in both Albanian and Serbian, he pledged to protect the rights of the Serbian minority.
“I feel the heartbeat of our ancestors,” he said, paying tribute to Kosovo’s war dead and to the European Union and the United States. “We, the leaders of our people, democratically elected, through this declaration proclaim Kosovo an independent and sovereign state.”
Vojislav Kostunica, the prime minister of Serbia, which has regarded Kosovo as its heartland since medieval times, vowed that Serbia would never recognize the “false state.”
In an address on national television on Sunday, he said Kosovo was propped up unlawfully by the United States and called the declaration a “humiliation” for the European Union. The Serbian government has ruled out using military force in response, but was expected to downgrade diplomatic ties with any government that recognized Kosovo.
European Union officials said that Britain, France and Germany were expected to recognize Kosovo 48 hours after the declaration, in part to try to prevent Russia and Serbia from rallying opposition to recognizing Kosovo. Recognition by the United States other European Union member states was expected to follow in the coming days.
President Bush, speaking Sunday in Tanzania on a tour of Africa, said the United States would continue to work to prevent violence in Kosovo in the wake of the proclamation, while reaching out to Serbia.
“On Kosovo, our position is that its status must be resolved in order for the Balkans to be stable,” he said. “We also believe it’s in Serbia’s interests to be aligned with Europe, and the Serbian people can know that they have a friend in America.”
In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said in a recorded statement that the United States was “discussing the matter with its European partners.” The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, appealed for calm, while NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the alliance, would respond “swiftly and firmly against anyone who might resort to violence.” The Vatican called for “prudence and moderation.”
Ulrich Wilhelm, the spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germany would decide its next steps on Monday. “The last open question of the breakup of Yugoslavia must be answered now, because it impedes the security, stability and economic development of the entire region.”
Kosovo played a central role in the collapse of the Yugoslav federation built by the Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito after 1945. When Tito died in 1980, Western observers expected strife between Yugoslavia ’s two biggest rival ethnic groups, the Serbs and Croats.
In fact, it was Albanian nationalism that erupted first, leading to bloody clashes in 1981 eventually suppressed by federal forces dispatched to Kosovo. As the ’80s wore on, Mr. Milosevic used Serbs’ enormous sense of grievance that their ancestral heartland was now dominated by Muslim Albanians to come to power in Serbia . By 1989, he had successfully maneuvered to abolish Kosovo’s formal autonomy, fired tens of thousands of Albanians from their jobs, suppressed Albanian language education and controlled the territory with a heavy police presence.
It was in 1989, at massive celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, that Mr. Milosevic delivered a thinly veiled warning that Serbs would fight to preserve their lands outside Serbia proper if rival republics such as Croatia declared independence.
In 1991, that occurred, plunging the Balkans into almost a decade of wars that cost more than 200,000 lives.
en years ago this month, Mr. Milosevic’s forces moved in against the pro-independence guerrilla group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, killing a guerrilla leader and his family at their compound. As violence escalated, the stage was set for another Serb showdown with the West, prompting NATO to intervene in a 1999 bombing campaign that saw hundreds of thousands Albanians and Serbs flee.
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Key Dates in Kosovo Independence Drive (February 17, 2008)
Times Topics: Kosovo | Serbia
An estimated 10,000 civilians were killed in the 1998-99 conflict, many of them Albanians, while 1,500 Serbs perished in revenge killings that followed. Another 5,000 people were reported missing, of which half were never found.
Kosovo — a predominantly Muslim, poor, landlocked territory of two million -- has been a United Nations protectorate since 1999, policed by 16,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops.
For the ethnic Albanians who make up 95 percent of the population, independence marks a new beginning, after decades of repression and war.
“Independence is a catharsis,” said Antoneta Kastrati, 26, an Albanian from Peja, who said his mother and older sister were murdered by their Serbian neighbors in 1999. “Things won’t change overnight and we cannot forget the past, but maybe I will feel safe now and my nightmares will finally go away.”
The spirit of exaltation in Pristina was a sharp contrast to the despair, anger and disbelief that gripped Serbia and the Serbian enclaves of northern Kosovo.
Newspapers in Belgrade lamented that the Albanians “have stolen Kosovo.” On Sunday evening, about 150 protesters in Belgrade marched to the United States Embassy, waving Serbian flags.
In the Serbian enclave of Mitrovica, a divided city that has long been a flashpoint, small groups of Serbs gathered at the bridge between the Serb north of town and the ethnic Albanian south. Serbs said they were under orders from Belgrade to ignore the independence declaration and remain in Kosovo in order to keep the northern part of the territory under de facto Serbian control.
“I will stay here forever ,” said a 70-year-old engineer who would give only his first name, Svetozar. “This will always be Serbia . I am not afraid of Kosovo’s independence because I don’t recognize it.”
When a knot of Albanians tried to cross the bridge into the Serbian part, they were held back by police and 10-foot-high metal barriers wound with razor wire.
In Serbia, Kosovo police had to stop several hundred Serbian former veterans of the 1998-99 Kosovo war from crossing into the territory ahead of the independence declaration. The group, dressed in military uniforms, broke through a Serbian police cordon at the Merdare border crossing between Serbia and Kosovo before being held back.
Kosovo’s declaration created immediate ripples in the former Soviet space, where small separatist areas — one in Moldova and two in the republic of Georgia — have existed since the early 1990s.
All three enclaves receive extensive political support from the Kremlin, and exist as Russian protectorates. Two of them — Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia — released coordinated statements announcing an intention to seek recognition as independent states by Moscow, the United Nations and members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, or C.I.S., a loose alliance off 11 former Soviet republics.
Likewise, several of the European Union’s 27 member states — including Greece, Cyprus , Slovakia and Romania — oppose recognizing Kosovo without an agreement from the Security Council because they fear encouraging secessionist movements within their own borders.
In Brussels, where retaining European Union unity over Kosovo has proved as tortuous a foreign policy challenge as any dealing with Yugoslavia ’s breakup, officials on Sunday were busy drafting a statement for a foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday. Senior European Union officials said they expected it would acknowledge Kosovo’s independence declaration without explicitly endorsing it.
On Saturday, however, the European Union did overcome its divisions sufficiently to give final approval for a police and judicial mission that will help Kosovo’s government run the territory after the United Nations leaves.
While the declaration of independence raises the prospects of a new constitution and emblems of nationality, Kosovo will remain reliant on the international community, its sovereignty severely circumscribed.
Kosovo is desperately poor, with a war-torn infrastructure, an unemployment rate of about 60 percent and average monthly wage of $250. Electricity is so undependable that lights go out in the capital several times a day. Corruption remains rife and human trafficking threatens to entrench a lawless state on Europe s doorstep.
In a sign of how hard it will be for Kosovo to forge the kind of multiethnic, secular identity urged on it by foreign powers, the government held a contest for the new flag — - a map of Kosovo topped by six stars of the European Union. But the distinctive two-headed eagle of the red and black Albanian flag — displayed on the battlefield and reviled by Serbs — was everywhere Sunday, held by revelers, draped on horses, flapping out of car windows and hanging outside homes and storefronts across the territory.
