Diplomats warn over poor EU-NATO communication

NATO’s response to a possible flare-up of violence in Kosovo could be hampered by bad communication with the EU, diplomats in Brussels have warned.

Communication between NATO and the EU, which have largely overlapping membership, is good in the field but dysfunctional at the political level, according to officials and experts.

This could undercut NATO’s 16,000-strong peacekeeping force in Kosovo, KFOR, if the province’s unilateral declaration of independence, expected early next year, leads to unrest.

A potential flashpoint is the divided town of Mitrovica. Roughly half of Kosovo’s Serbs live in a compact region north of Mitrovica, on the border with Serbia proper and controlled from Belgrade. They are likely to resist the police force that the EU plans to deploy after Kosovo’s Albanian majority declares independence.

It is unclear whether KFOR would enforce the EU deployment against local resistance.

"Are we going to defend Kosovo’s outside borders or the border between Albanians and Serbs [within Kosovo]?" asks Tomas Valasek, a defence analyst at the Centre for European Reform.

A top diplomat at NATO said there was "enormous frustration" on both sides that NATO and EU policymakers were not talking to one another even though they shared the same security goals in Kosovo. The diplomat said it was "a shame that we cannot sit down and discuss openly what we’re discussing in the corridors" because of political constraints.

"KFOR needs political guidance and it can only come from the EU," the diplomat said.

The EU is going to take over the leading international role in Kosovo from the current UN administration once the status of the province is clarified. NATO is looking for political signals from the EU to adapt its role in Kosovo.

NATO and the EU have had a difficult relationship. The so-called Berlin Plus arrangements of 2002-03 gave the EU "assured access to NATO planning" and "presumed access to NATO assets and capabilities", but Turkey still blocks substantive discussions in the presence of Cyprus, which Ankara does not recognise.

Formal co-operation between EU and NATO policymakers is restricted to the operation in Bosnia; everything else takes place informally.

On the ground, however, co-operation is going smoothly. An EU official involved in the preparations for the EU mission in Kosovo said that a variety of agreements and joint procedures had been drafted and would be signed as soon as the EU received its mandate for Kosovo.

There are no plans at present to replace KFOR with an EU force on the model of Bosnia.

Richard Gowan, a peacekeeping expert at New York University’s Center on International Co-operation, said that the EU was "absolutely not ready for worst-case scenarios in the Western Balkans".

Referring to the EU-NATO relationship, a senior EU diplomat said: "Informal working arrangements are all fine and well until they are put to the test." It is very likely that the two organisations will face just such a test in the coming weeks.

NATO’s response to a possible flare-up of violence in Kosovo could be hampered by bad communication with the EU, diplomats in Brussels have warned.