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Serbian activists in the north of the country
should not be arrested for protest whistling. Moreover, they do not
need to convince anyone that they are right. But now they have the
chance to prove that they are right through the vote. Albanians in
Kosovo, who passed the "bullet to ballot" challenge, the transition
from bullets to ballot boxes, can better understand the challenge of
their fellow Serbian citizens. They too are now facing this
challenge.
1. I don't know Aleksandar Arsenijević, but this
young Serbian politician from North Mitrovica has done two actions
that a generation like mine, which has tended to the non-violent
movement against Milosevic's power and the occupation of Kosovo, can
easily understand. Even understand it.
He is recently known as the man who is arrested
for whistling in the square of North Mitrovica. The motive for
whistling doesn't seem reasonable to me. It is a protest against the
walk of any Kosovo Albanian official or the Mayor of the
Municipality, Atiq (Bosnian by affiliation). From the perspective of
an Albanian or Bosniak, his protest can also be interpreted as a
protest against the right for an Albanian or Bosniak to walk through
the streets where the majority of citizens are of Serbian
nationality.
But I think he has a right to whistle-blower, even
if it's for the wrong reason, and not be arrested. Instead of a
strong invitation with a tie of hands for an informative
conversation in the police, he should be invited every time to a
political conversation, by whoever is in power and by any political
party, especially the Albanian ones. Whistling is a signal of
trouble, but that trouble cannot be explained by whistling;
Arsenijevic and all those Serbian political and civil society
figures who protest with whistles are not only right, but they
should also have the open invitation to express their protest,
desire, proposals and projections in political conversation.
2. His second act had happened earlier. When an
action was taken to remove the Serbian flags, he expressed his
self-filmed protest against the flag policy, showing the
unobstructed Albanian flags in the middle of Pristina. In the matter
of flags, there is a little more confusion among Serbs, not only
because the flag of Serbia is the only flag of a republic that has a
royal crown as a symbol, but more because of the mixing of the state
flag with the national flag; the national one does not have this
emblem of monarchical republicanism. But Albanians, especially young
people, are not without confusion, because what for my generation
was the national flag, for those born after the declaration of
independence, is being transformed into the flag of Albania.
This work of confusion with flags could be the
introduction to a longer text - about the fluid process of
constructing identities - but in this case it serves to understand
Arsenijević from his own angle. Albanians who, after the Second
World War, considered the right to fly the Albanian flag as one of
the basic national and human rights, find it easier to understand
the same feeling that exists among the Serbian people in Kosovo if
they start from the principle that they should not You do to others
what you would not want others to do to you.
3. Arsenijevic and other activists have a wide
field of other inventive actions ahead of them. If they run out of
ideas, they can go back to our resistance of 1990 and 1991, it's a
long list of things they can do. I know this, at that time I was
among those who found creative solutions to resist.
But I wouldn't suggest they go in that direction.
First of all, I do not believe that the comparison, so
light-hearted, of the current state of the northern part of Kosovo
with Milosevic's rule is valid. The government in Kosovo, in spite
of any statement by any named Albanian, is not doing to the Serbs of
Kosovo what Milosevic did to the Albanians of Kosovo. And,
Arsenijevic with his friends or Albanian critical voices can hold
debates to prove the opposite, but these debates can consume time
and not have any substantial change, such as an international
intervention, which will create peace in that part of the country.
International intervention has already taken place; KFOR was and is
there together with the presence of the Kosovar authorities so that
nothing from the nightmare of the nineties is repeated.
Change for Arsenijević and others may be much
closer than any campaign of whistles, vuvuzelas, pots or protest
walks in the squares. They do not need to convince him that mayors
who do not have the votes of the majority of citizens do not have
legitimacy (although they have full legality); this is already
known. Instead of protesting against the lack of legitimacy, the
Serbian citizens of the north should make the change, and the change
is democratic elections.
And these represent a bigger challenge for
Arsenijević and for other residents of the northern part of Kosovo
than for anyone else in Kosovo.
First, because the residents of the four northern
municipalities must participate in the Kosovo parliamentary
elections that will be held in February of next year and in the
regular municipal elections that will be held in October of next
year. So, two pairs of elections within a year is a big challenge
for someone who, like Arsenijevici, has not participated in the
elections.
Second, because Arsenijevic has never had free
elections. He was old enough to participate (I don't know if he
participated) in the elections for the first time after Kosovo
declared independence, and all the elections that were organized in
the northern municipalities of Kosovo - the non-independent and the
independent - did not passed the threshold of the certificate of
being democratic and free.
4. The combined challenge for Arsenijević - also
as a metaphor for the Serbian citizens of the northern part of the
country - is how to participate in a democratic process in two
elections within a year, and for this to happen for the first time
in their lives.
From this point of view, the challenge of
Arsenijević was a challenge of the fellow citizens of Kosovo, even a
challenge that lasted until recently, when a degree of democratic
acceptability of the elections was finally reached. Albanians can
understand Arsenijević's challenge if they remember how violent
people, in a connection between crime and politics, stayed close to
the polling stations and sometimes with the lights off and sometimes
with them on they influenced the ballot boxes to have more votes.
than voters or that those votes allocated to other parties were
scribbled to be declared invalid.
Just as it took a while for the Albanians to
achieve a legitimate and democratic electoral process, so did the
Serbian citizens in the northern part of the country. Now they are
before the turning point in democracy, and at this turning point the
political turn towards the north must also be made. Representatives
of Kosovo's institutions - from the CEC, the executive power to
those of civil society - should talk with the political and social
leaders of the Serbs of the four northern municipalities. The
conversation should focus on only one issue: what should be done so
that the citizens of the four northern municipalities have free and
democratic elections.
And this is a conversation in which the
international community will urgently engage. The EU, which trapped
itself with sanctions against Kosovo for the developments in the
north of the country, has the opportunity to get out of that
position by providing the Democracy Fund for the four municipalities
in the North. This fund would help political parties, citizen
initiatives, election observation organizations, independent media.
So, this fund would do everything that various Western funds have
done for political life in post-war Kosovo with results that Western
aid can be proud of - political life in Kosovo is higher in
democratic standards in the region, and these standards are ever
increasing.
5. The Western challenge to Kosovo's post-war
democracy was formulated in English: "from bullet to ballot", that
is, how to go from bullets to ballot boxes. It took some time and
this was achieved. A part of Kosovo, four northern municipalities,
did not experience this; bullets killed Serbian politicians, and
recently an Albanian policeman. Now may be the time for the ballot
box.
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