DAR AL HARB / ISLAM - SERBIA - KOSOVO: "THE UNTOLD STORY OF KOSOVO NEGOTIATIONS"

The Untold Story of Kosovo Negotiations
By Srdja Trifkovic

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  - Ahtisaari has failed, and his supporters are getting very nervous. As Misha Glenny confided to the former U.S. ambassador in Belgrade William Montgomery on December 7, “I am seriously worried about the Kosovo situation… entre nous, I am very disappointed with Martti’s performance.”
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  - President Boris Tadic’s chief foreign policy advisor Vuk Jeremic, one of very few Serbian enthusiasts for John Kerry’s victory in November 2004, came to Washington on 18 May 2005 to testify in Congress on why Kosovo should stay within Serbia; but in his off-the-record conversations he assured his hosts that the task is really to sugar-coat the bitter pill that Serbia will have to swallow anyway.

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In conclusion, the untold news is that Kosovo will not become independent. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the Western “mainstream” will go on huffing and puffing and pretending otherwise, but there is not much they can do: Kostunica will not be duped, Serbia will not cave in, Russia will not relent, and the Albanians will not give up on what they had been promised by those who had never had the right to make the promise in the first place. They threaten renewed violence, but the threat only serves to reinforce the argument that they should not be allowed to get away with it. As Russia’s ambassador to the U.N. told his Western colleagues last Wednesday, “you may be willing to give in to Albanian blackmail, but we are not.”

As Kostunica says, once the reality sinks in we’ll finally have some real negotiations. We do not know what the end result will be, but that is in the nature of all genuine negotiations: their outcome is unknown. Ahtisaari has failed, and his supporters are getting very nervous. As Misha Glenny confided to the former U.S. ambassador in Belgrade William Montgomery on December 7, “I am seriously worried about the Kosovo situation . . . entre nous, I am very disappointed with Martti’s performance.”

Good. Very, very good.

Pertinent Links:

1) The Untold Story of Kosovo Negotiations

2) Serbianna.com

Serbianna.com is a news and media portal about Serbia and Balkans surveying the western press and providing it to the public.