New Balls! Sir Ivor Roberts, former UK Ambassador to Bosnia during the 1990s has been inspired by the Wimbledon Tennis Championships to prematurely call Game, Set and Match on negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo. This article appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 18 July. Faults and errors abound, and his spin constantly fails to make the point! Our commentary in brackets.
The Guardian
18 July 2023
This year was a vintage Wimbledon. The array of talent and ability on display was breath-taking and the drama of some of the matches was gripping. But it seems to be an ever more difficult task to get through to the spectators present that tennis is a game between two people (ok, four in doubles) and that neither crowd nor umpire should play any role in the match. (Fault, Sir Ivor, the umpire is there to ensure fair play – something of an alien concept, perhaps, to western diplomats during the Balkans wars!)
There is a hush as the players go through an intricate routine of selecting two balls that they somehow judge to be different from the others, spend what seems like a long time bouncing the ball and then finally square up for the critical serve. Just as they are about to toss up the ball, some agitated supporter yells out “Come on!” and the moment is shattered. Concentration broken, the poor player has to start all over again. I have no doubt that the offending fans wish their favoured player well and are trying to be helpful. But they ought to realise that sometimes they can be most helpful by staying silent. [Critics are, of course, always inconvenient. Only silence and secrecy can conceal the truth.]
Diplomacy can be like that. Nowadays conflicts are fought on the battlefield but can be decided in the court of public opinion or in whispered conversations in the corridors of power. Social media and lobbyists can be more powerful than the sword. Public advocacy for one side or the other can provide an edge.[The Kosovo conflict was created by the illegal interference of the international community in the sovereign affairs of Serbia. The Western powers armed and trained the KLA Army which crossed into the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1998 seizing some 60% of its territory before the Serbian forces rallied and drove back the invaders. The West also instigated the illegal 78-day bombing campaign which led to the eventual surrender of Serbia, having sustained $100 billion of damage to its vital infrastructure.]
However, when the moment comes for serious negotiations, absolute concentration is required to reach an outcome. This is why negotiators will often retreat to a place where they can cut themselves off from media and lobbyists and give their full focus to the small print and the difficult horse-trading. [As Madeleine Albright and James Rubin made clear in interviews they gave to the March 200 BBC documentary,”Moral Combat: NATO At War”, the US post-war negotiations had one simple objective – to find a point the Kosovo Albanians would agree but the Serbs were bound to reject. This was achieved by adding a secret annex to the agreement giving Nato forces free access to all parts of Serbia and absolute immunity from all the laws of Serbia. When the nature of this annex was eventually made public, some two months after the start of the bombing, many countries declared this a condition that no sovereign state could possibly accept.]
This was how peace was achieved in Bosnia at the Dayton peace talks and in Belfast for the Good Friday Agreement. When conflicts are at match point, negotiators must be allowed to work without distraction.[Meaning interference. The Dayton talks were imposed unilaterally by the United States on a wave of international outrage generated by the false claims of a genocide at Srebrenica. Hague Tribunal Indictments were immediately issued against Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic to deliberately exclude them from the Dayton process. Not a shred of evidence had been gathered to support the indictments. Even so, US Chief Negotiator Richard Holbrooke had to admit that Dayton would not have succeeded without the massive contribution made by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.]
After almost a quarter of a century of intransigence and deadlock, we may finally be reaching that point in the long-running Kosovo dispute.
For those not born at the time, and there are many such, Kosovo was a part of Serbia that had [come to have, thanks mainly to the machinations of Tito] an Albanian majority and fought for its independence, culminating in Nato’s intervention in 1999. [Since the 1970s, the Albanians in Kosovo had increasingly sought to drive Serbs out of Kosovo by intimidation. After Dayton, the western powers decided they could ensure an independent Albanian Kosovo by supplying and training a KLA army to seize Kosovo by force. This was a long-premeditated invasion, not a spontaneous independence movement.]
Since then, many countries have recognised Kosovo as an independent state, but Serbia and others have not and a substantial Serbian minority remains within Kosovo. For decades negotiations have failed to make much progress towards a resolution. And yet until there is an agreement, neither Serbia nor Kosovo will be able to join the European Union. [There is in fact very little appetite for EU membership in Serbia. The latest opinion poll in October 2022 showed only 22% in favour. Those countries that have recognised Kosovo as an independent state have done so in defiance of the UN Charter, international law, and all the accepted requirements for the recognition of new states. In practice it seems the ‘rules-based’ new world order has only one rule – ‘we make it up as we go along’.]
For the past year or so both the US, the EU and the UK have been making a concerted effort to persuade and cajole the two sides into agreement on a settlement. [For this read ‘consensus through coercion – there are many ways for us to make life very difficult for Serbia and we will not hesitate to use them. If you play ball, we will make life easy for you, but that’s no guarantee we will keep promises we make along the way’.]
There is a real prospect that their efforts will be rewarded and that the two leaders, President Vučić of Serbia and Prime Minister Albin Kurti of Kosovo, will agree to the painful and politically difficult compromises necessary. It is an important and historic moment. [It will get us off the hook and we can cease to pretend that we have any further interest.]
Unfortunately, there are people in the audience who are making a din and creating a distraction. Foremost and most troublesome are the mob at the “Russia end” of the stadium. Russia does not want to see a deal struck over Kosovo. Russia’s only role in the region is as the champion of hard-Right Serbian rejectionists who say they want to fight to the end to defend Serbia’s stake in Kosovo. This is not because Russia cares much about Serbia – history shows that it doesn’t – but because it is an important front in their confrontation with the West, a confrontation they are currently losing. [The din and distraction has been raised by people aware of the serial cynicism of the western allies in the Balkans over the last three decades. The massive, US-orchestrated propaganda which sold the world an entirely false view on what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s; the UN’s illegal creation – under huge duress – of The Hague Tribunal (ICTY); the UN decision to hand over control of the ICTY court to the Americans in the full knowledge that the US has always been on the side of Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanian separatists. This meant the ICTY was not answerable to anyone and became a law unto itself.]
Once Belgrade and Pristina reach agreement, Russia’s influence in the region is over and its global status is further diminished. We can therefore expect to see Russia creating provocations and incidents that will make peace less likely. [Russia’s role in the Balkans has been consistent with its view that western intervention was not as impartial ‘honest brokers’ but principally to secure their own interests.]
Unfortunately, there are also catcallers on the Western side. The observation in Rebecca West’s book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about the English propensity to take sides in the Western Balkans, still holds true and there seems to be no finer example of this than Alicia Kearns, the chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. She is of course entitled to her opinions – but it is another matter if her partisan views, as someone who holds an important and influential position, sway Kurti to believe that he has international support for resisting compromise or hanging out for a better deal – and senior negotiators have told me that this is precisely the effect that her interventions are having. [It’s OK for the west to break all the rules and attempt to impose its solution, but everyone else must shut up. Forget democracy. ‘Seasoned diplomats and negotiators’ must be allowed to fudge their way to a deal that is wrong on all counts.]
The seasoned diplomats and negotiators will have all the facts and information they need to help Vucic and Kurti reach a deal that they can just about stomach and sell to their people. Opinion and emotion from the sidelines will be as helpful to their aims as Kremlin meddling. As they serve for the match – and the prize here is massive – silence from the audience would be appropriate. [He means convenient. No, a thousand times no. The truth must out.]
Sir Ivor Roberts is a former British ambassador to Yugoslavia, Ireland and Italy
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