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Serbian President Vucic’s speech in northern
Kosovo on Sunday has attracted a lot of attention because of this
nauseating line:
Miloševic was a great Serbian leader; his
intentions were certainly the best ones…
That’s too bad, because this unfortunate passage
obscures the main thrust of the speech, which is represented better
in this passage:
Serbia fought honorably and bravely against NATO
in ’99, protecting itself. And we lost. They were much stronger,
richer, much bigger cowards and they could drop many bombs from the
sky on our people. And we lost, just like we had lost 610 years
earlier. We were left without significant territories; Serbs
abandoned many of their thresholds not wanting to live under the
Albanian authority.
When you lose a war, you pay a price for it. A
high one; the highest. And we, Serbs, even today pretend as if
nothing had happened. We pretend that it was not us, with our own
stupidities and under the pressure of the western world, who
participated in proving our own guilt also for the conflict in
Kosovo and Metohija.
Absent from this speech is the President’s
partition proposal that has mobilized so many electrons lately. On
borders, Vucic suggests they will not be easily changed:
Because when they tell you how I want to change
borders- they’re not telling the truth, because where are the
borders today, where are they, does anybody know where they are? We
think one thing, the Albanians, bigger in numbers and stronger in
Kosovo, think differently. One part of the world thinks one thing,
the other thinks other. Actually, I want to change your rights and I
want us to do everything we can, to preserve everything we can in
Kosovo and Metohija, because our situation is not the same like the
situation thirty, fifty or sixty years ago. I want us to gain for
you all those rights you are entitled to, and which are the part of
what is called the civilized world.
Admittedly I am reading between the lines, but
this sounds to me much more like abandonment of the partition
proposal than advocacy of it. He is telling Serbs who live in Kosovo
that he will advocate for their rights within Kosovo, not for them
to leave it.
That message is also implicit here:
I’ve come to tell you what we will concretely do
and what I brought to our people in Kosovo and Metohija. We came
with a comprehensive investment plan for ten Serbian municipalities,
all ten. All four north-Kosovo municipalities: Zvečan, Leposavić,
Zubin Potok and Kosovska Mitrovica. But also for Novo Brdo,
Gračanica, Ranilug, Parteš, Klokot, Štrpce…for each place where
Serbs are majority, but also for all Serbs, where they live, and
where they are in a huge minority.
And there is this:
And there are no mythical borders. I want ones
within which live people who have rights belonging to them. I want
the ones because of which no one will be humiliated, and certainly
not Serbia.
And when I say that we want agreement, we want
compromise, not a dictation. We want to hear everything, but we also
want to be heard. Finally and first of all, I want you to live here
and to make it yours.
Throughout the peroration, Vucic underlines that
the future of the Serbs in Kosovo needs to be settled by
negotiation, not arms, and that it will take time–it will not be
settled soon.
All of this suggests to me that he has given up on
partition, at least in its more dramatic form. Why? I suspect an
ethnic map of southern Serbia tells much of the story (the map comes
to me through Sinisa Vukovic):
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