The West has lost its way in the Balkans

Images of Serbian nationalist militants wielding pipes and throwing stones attacking NATO peacekeepers in the city of Zvecan, in northern Kosovo, at the end of May, put the Balkan country back in the international spotlight. Violence erupted in the Serb-majority north of the country after Kosovo police escorted mayors to work who had been recently elected in local elections boycotted by ethnic Serb residents.

The news that Serbia had at the same time placed its army in maximum alert many unfamiliar with Balkan affairs asked if another armed conflict was about to break out in Europe.

The answer is no, we are not on the brink of another Balkan war. But that does not mean that the situation in Kosovo is not alarming.

Aside from the violence, what is causing concern in the region is the role that the United States and the European Union have played in instigating a dangerous new phase of Serbian nationalist militancy in Kosovo and the Western Balkans in general.

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, backed by the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy, also known as Quint.

It came after nearly a decade of international supervision under the UN Interim Administration that was established at the end of the Kosovo War. During this intervening period, Kosovo remained nominally part of the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as an “autonomous province”, but Belgrade exercised no real authority over any aspect of the governance of the territory, save for a limited presence in a handful of majority municipalities. serbia. in the north.

Kosovo also enjoyed a significant degree of self-rule during the socialist period, although its ethnic Albanian majority was the frequent target of repression. In 1989, when Slobodan Milosevic seized power in Belgrade, he imposed a new constitutional regime on Kosovo and turned the region into a veritable police state with Albanians stripped of virtually all civil liberties. This draconian rule eventually resulted in armed resistance from the Albanian community and ultimately NATO military intervention.

For the past 15 years, the US and the EU have sought to secure a normalization agreement between Pristina and Belgrade. Despite successive rounds of high-level talks, the two sides remain as far apart as ever on a deal, as the clashes on Zvecan vividly illustrate.

But this is not about equal guilt. The problem remains almost entirely on the Serb side.

The increasingly autocratic regime of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is adamant in its refusal to accept Kosovo’s sovereignty. In it latest round of talks held in Ohrid, North Macedonia, in March, Vucic refused to even sign the supposed agreement that he had “accepted”, telling Serbian citizens in a subsequent speech that he did not want to “reach an international legal agreement with the Republic of Kosovo”.

In Serbia’s regime-aligned media, ethnic Albanians, who comprise 92 percent of Kosovo’s population, are routinely targeted with ethnic slurs, while the Pristina government is branded as “temporary” local authorities. . And in northern Kosovo, with a Serb majority, Belgrade maintains a kind of clandestine occupation, administered through a network of ultranationalists and local mobsters, as The New York Times recently detailed.

But Serbia’s reactionary stance is not limited to Kosovo.

The Serbian leadership and large segments of the public that have been inundated by more than three decades of revisionist state propaganda, exist in a world of their own. Neither Belgrade nor much of the Serbian public accepts that the Milosevic regime – in whose last cabinet Vucic served as information minister – was the main architect of the Yugoslav dissolution or the ensuing decade of conflict that ravaged the region.

They falsely claim that Serbia did not wage aggressive wars against Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo between 1991 and 1999. They also falsely claim that Serbia did not orchestrate a systematic genocidal campaign of extermination, terror and expulsion against the non-Serb population of Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, which disproportionately affected the Bosnian community.

Indeed, the genocidal violence directed against Bosnians by Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb proxies was so severe that approximately half of all casualties during the Yugoslav wars and 82 percent of all civilian deaths during the Bosnian war were Bosnian ethnicity.

Postwar Bosnia has remained divided by dysfunction and strife due to the US-brokered Dayton Peace Accords and the extreme degree of autonomy granted to ethnic chauvinists under the country’s new constitution. In the Republika Srpska entity, which Milosevic’s genocidal purge carved out as a Serb-majority region and which is loyal to Belgrade, the secessionist regime of Milorad Dodik undermines even the most modest reforms, while explicitly pushing for the breakup of Bosnia. , with Russia and Russia. Serbian assistance.

In light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one would think there would be serious political and diplomatic repercussions for Serbia and its proxies due to their close ties to the Kremlin and their own expansionist machinations in the Western Balkans. But precisely the opposite has happened.

For example, in the case of clashes between Serbian nationalists and NATO blue helmets in Zvecan, the Quint condemned the country’s Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, for having sent police to escort newly elected mayors to their offices in the North.

The United States also expelled Kosovo from the NATO-led Defender 23 military exercises and threatened local officials with sanctions. Washington’s ambassador to Pristina, Jeffrey Hovenier, also said his country would no longer help Kosovo seek international recognition. By contrast, Serbia and Vucic suffered no consequences.

Republika Srpska’s Dodik has also not faced repercussions for meeting regularly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom American and European officials have repeatedly called a “war criminal.” The entity continues to receive EU funding for various development projects and although Dodik is under US and UK sanctionscontinues to openly pressure US officials in Washington.

Nor is the Bosnian Serb leader the only anti-state actor in Bosnia to benefit from a curiously high degree of Western appeasement. Dragan Covic, the leader of the hardline Croatian nationalist HDZ party who also enjoys Kremlin patronage, appears to have his interests defended directly by the internationally appointed Office of the High Representative (OHR).

Last October, the OHR used its broad executive powers to rewrite Bosnia’s electoral laws. in his favor and then, in April of this year, he modified the constitution of the Federation entity to install a government dominated by HDZ.

In Bosnia, as in Kosovo, the US and the EU seem uninterested in curbing Russian influence; instead, they have tried to accommodate militant Moscow-backed nationalists. Because? Because the West has come to the conclusion that it is not worth the time or the effort to face people like Vucic, Dodik or Covic in a region as peripheral to its interests as the Western Balkans.

Instead, the US and EU have opted for a kind of Kabuki politics, maintaining a performative stance in opposition to militant nationalists but spending political and diplomatic capital to help them achieve their goals in the fleeting hope that this will appease them. .

The result, of course, has only been a more emboldened form of nationalist extremism in the Balkans, much of it sponsored by the West.

Unfortunately, both the US and the EU seem fully committed to this course, as evidenced by their surreal reactions to the violence in Zvecan. That is likely to remain the case until domestic publics, including the Bosnian and Kosovar diasporas in the West, and their legislative allies, can effectively demonstrate why Western double-dealing in the Balkans is dangerous to stability and security. of Europe.

Until then, however, Belgrade is likely to continue fomenting chaos, knowing that Washington and Brussels will look the other way.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.