Kosovo – prepare for worst and hope for best

In the coming weeks and months, a majority of EU member states, along with governments from the US to Switzerland, will recognise the independence of Kosovo.

This will not change much for those ethnic Serbs - perhaps half of Kosovo’s Serb population - who live in a compact area north of the divided town of Mitrovica, abutting Serbia proper. Their lives will continue being governed from Belgrade rather than Priština.

The EU insists that it plans to deploy its policemen in the north as well, under the protective shield of NATO peacekeepers already in the region.

In practice, however, there is no expectation that the EU police will make a serious attempt to bring the north under the control of the government in Priština. Even if EU police are deployed in sufficient numbers in the north, they will get a hostile reception by the local population if they are seen as agents of an independent Kosovo.

In consequence, Kosovo’s current division will at the very least persist as a ‘soft partition’: soft because Kosovo’s Serbs will remain part of Kosovo by law and not undertake any attempts formally to unite with Serbia, and a partition because Priština government’s writ ends on the banks of the river Ibar.

Another scenario is for the north to declare independence from Kosovo and seek union with Serbia, possibly along with Bosnia’s Serb Republic. This may be purely declaratory, but it could also cause violence.

It is possible that after a few years during which things calm down, the two sides will sit down together and negotiate a formal partition. There is no reason in principle for the international community to resist this provided it does not affect the stability of Macedonia, with its Albanian minority, and of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The EU envoy to the status talks, Wolfgang Ischinger, said as much in remarks that were angrily rejected by both Priština and Belgrade but reflect a reality that will be difficult to escape for either side.

Whether soft or hard, however, partition will be bad news for ethnic Albanians displaced from the north, who will not be able to return and claim their properties. It could also be bad news for those ethnic Serbs who live in enclaves in central and eastern Kosovo since Serbs in Kosovo will be an even smaller minority if the north breaks away.

Few partitions in modern history have fulfilled the hope of stability which led policymakers to pursue them in the first place.

India and Pakistan broke apart at the cost of at least half a million lives. The two countries have gone to war repeatedly over the disputed territory of Kashmir and Pakistan has continued to be explosively unstable. Pakistan itself, the homeland of India’s Muslims, broke apart in a bloody civil war in 1971, leading to the emergence of Bangladesh.

The partition of Palestine in the late 1940s led to hundreds of thousands of refugees and failed to bring stability to the region. While Israel is a stable and largely democratic country, it sits in the middle of a volatile neighbourhood and continues to be nervous about its identity as a largely Jewish state.

The de facto partition of Cyprus has not prevented Turkey and Greece - both of them NATO members - to come to the brink of war on numerous occasions, despite population exchanges in 1923 which removed most Turks from Greece and most Greeks from Turkey. Thousands of Cypriot families on both sides of the dividing line are waiting for the moment when they can return to their homes, from which they were evicted during the Greek coup of 1974 and the Turkish invasion that it provoked.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s left millions stranded outside the new countries that were nominally their homelands, creating all sorts of divided loyalties, compounded by suspicion and accusations on the part of ethnic majorities who claim the state as their own.

The partition of Kosovo could unfold peacefully and may even lead, in the long run, to increased stability in the region. But the international community must prepare for the worst and historical precedent suggests that the worst case is far more likely than the rosy scenarios on which many policymakers base their planning.

In the coming weeks and months, a majority of EU member states, along with governments from the US to Switzerland, will recognise the independence of Kosovo.