gives “absolute” support to Serbia and fuels tensions with Kosovo

Kosovo is a place marked by old wounds They open with extreme ease. the republic of Albanian majority (95% of its citizens are of that ethnic group) proclaimed its Serbian independence in 2008 after decades of difficult coexistence. The fact that, 23 years after the first NATO bombardments, there are still some 4,000 soldiers in the country serving as peacekeepers, gives an idea of the unstable which is still the balance.

In fact, the independence referendum itself is still under discussion by the international community. Of course, Serbia does not accept itand continues to consider Kosovo a province of its own, although, in practice, interacts with the Pristina government as if it were a foreign state. Among the countries that do not recognize the independence of Kosovo is, without going any further, Spain. Fearful of comparisons between the Kosovar and Catalan cases, the governments of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mariano Rajoy and now Pedro Sánchez They have refused throughout these 14 years to accept that the Kosovar Albanians can have their own state.

[Kosovo, el otro conflicto abierto en Europa que coloca a España y a Rusia en el mismo bando]

We are obviously not the only ones: within the European Union, for various reasons, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Cyprus do not recognize the Pristina government either. this circumstance has caused almost comical momentssuch as when Kosovo and Spain shared a qualifying group for the Qatar World Cup 2022 and the commentators of Televisión Española were forbidden to say the name of the country, having to constantly use the very long euphemism “The Kosovo Football Federation Team”.

Anyone who knows anything about history is aware of the danger of these ambiguities in the Balkan area. Countries that are not countries, states that are not states, nations that are many nations and that see how minorities and majorities fight among themselves to bring the ember to their sardine. If it is estimated that there are 95% Albanians in Kosovo, it is because there are still 5% of Slavic Serbs. A minority that, supported by the neighboring country, is not willing to let itself be carried away by the wishes of others.

The license plate war

The latest episode in this disputed neighborhood has to do with the obligation of the Government of Pristina, established last July, that all kosovo cars bear the distinctive emblem of the country. Until now, the Serbs had kept their license plates Serbs as a sign of identity. The Albanian majority may not have been aware of how badly their compatriots were going to take the move… or, on the contrary, it may have been a clumsy provocation.

The fact is that the protests have been growing since then and the situation, for such an apparently absurd reason, is reaching a dangerous point of tension. On December 10, a former Serbian policeman was arrested, accused of assaulting Kosovar policemen in one of the demonstrations against the new law. The action provoked a thunderous reaction in the form of barricades on the roads and Serbian military forces stationed on the border between the two countries. Since then, things have not improved..

On Tuesday, the Serb citizens of Mitrovica they erected new barricades in protest and again confronted the Kosovar agents. Mitrovica is a city in the north of the country where both ethnic groups coexist, a matchbox about to catch fire. In anticipation of a counteroffensive by the Pristina government, the Belgrade government decided to continue the escalation on its own: the Serbian defense minister warned of a probable attack on the Slavic minority, while announcing that both its police and its army They went to a state of “high alert”.

The strings that Putin pulls

Obviously, the “license plate war“It’s just any excuse to get muscle. Serbia continues to aspire to dominate the weakest links in the former Yugoslavia and doesn’t miss an opportunity to prove it. With one hand, it asks to join the European Union, while with the other it encourages coexistence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, endorsing orthodox ultranationalists. His policy of putting one foot in Brussels while keeping the other in Moscow is sometimes desperate. In fact, Aleksander Vucic’s government He has repeatedly expressed his rejection of any type of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, a country that, by the way, does not recognize the independence of Kosovo either.

[Serbia solicita a la OTAN el despliegue de sus tropas en Kosovo tras un repunte en las tensiones]

whatIs, therefore, Putin behind these incidents on the border? Strictly speaking, it does not seem necessary to blame him for each specific action that occurs in the area. What is clear is that if Serbia dares to continue entangling with its neighbors, it is because it knows that it has significant political and military support behind it. Vucic and Putin maintain an excellent personal relationship and during these months they have reached different commercial agreements regarding natural resources such as the famous Russian gas. There is no shortage of those who, ironically, call Vucic, “little Putin”playing on the fact that the Serbian president is almost two meters tall.

Will Serbia dare to use its army to “defend” a supposedly persecuted minority? It would be a huge mistake. At another time, perhaps such an action could go unnoticed, but not now. The entire West, and certainly all the NATO countries, know that they cannot afford another source of international instability. Nor is Russia willing to help. anyone given his compromised position in Ukraine. Any attempt to militarily destabilize the Balkans would be met with the same forcefulness that was lacking in the early 1990s.

The ideal, of course, would be not to have to find out what the limit of patience of all parties is, but if there are four thousand NATO soldiers in Kosovo it is for something. Pristina has already asked for their help in case of conflict and there is no doubt that they would receive it when the time came. The problem is that one starts these fights to measure forces and then it is not easy to adjust to the channels. More than anything because they are movements that go from the bottom up and not from the top down. If the Serb minority or the Albanian majority make a false step, it is not lost on anyone that the mess could be important.