| source: b92.net |
Hashim ‘’The Snake” Thaci is a war criminal and a terrorist,
according to Serbia’s government and probably every Serb this
side of Nataša Kandić agrees with this assessment. President Tomislav Nikolić has reiterated that, while being aware
that the official Belgrade must continue talking with the Kosovo Albanian
secessionists, he refused to meet with the suspected war criminal sitting in the
chair of the so-called Kosovo Prime Minister. On Friday, however, a bombshell
piece of news broke the Serbosphere: Ivica Dačić, Serbia’s Prime Minister, just
finished meeting with Hashim Thaci in Brussels! No announcement in Serbian
media, no hint that this is the new official course Serbia is taking towards
the Kosovo secession issue, just a “this-just-in” news report of the event that
just happened, followed with cries by the patriotic side of the Serbosphere, accusing
Dačić of treason, his Socialist Party spin masters patting their leader on the
back for carrying the “heavy burden” and dealing with the Kosovo issues
resolutely and the co-opted Serbian media following suit.
I will not delve into the implications. I want to dwell
on the reactions to the actual meeting from both Serbs and Kosovo Albanians.
First, let’s look at how one would expect either side to
react.
Thaci was arrested in Budapest in 2003 and let go
immediately after the intervention of the then-UNMIK head Michael Steiner. The
arrest was based on Serbia’s international arrest warrant from 1997, which hasn’t
been withdrawn by as late as 2010, according to Snežana Malović, Serbia’s Minister
of Justice in the Mirko Cvetković cabinet. All reports point towards it still being in effect.
The well-publicized report to the Council of Europe by the Swiss Deputy Dick Marty put Thaci squarely at the center of the organ extraction and
trafficking operations, but the failure of the Hague Tribunal’s investigators
to even touch the subject was as glaring an evidence as any of Thaci being
protected from high circles of European politics. The Interpol does not list him
as a person wanted by Serbia, but Malović accused the international police
agency of refusing to list him claiming he enjoys diplomatic immunity. He is a
diplomat of which internationally recognized country or an intergovernmental
agency exactly? In any case, Thaci is considered a criminal in Serbia, a leader
of the Albanian takeover of Kosovo and a devil himself. Yet, in the face of the
sentiment that should be grounds enough to refuse any dealing with Thaci and to
renew the calls for his arrest, Dačić allows himself to be summoned to Brussels
by Catherine Ashton and to shake hands with the symbol of Serb suffering and
the dismemberment of Serbia. If Barack
Obama even floated the idea of meeting Osama bin Laden, instead of assassinating
him (reportedly), Joe Biden would be nesting behind the big desk in the Oval Office
now and the Clintons would laugh. Yes, Thaci is the Serbian Osama bin Laden and
it would be reasonable to expect that a meeting with him at the highest level
would cause riots in Serbia.
On the other hand, one would expect the Kosovo Albanians to gloat
over the fact that Serbia was forced to place the resolution of the status of
their secession as the top national priority by Belgrade and that the Serbian
Prime Minister himself was forced to have a sit-down with their warlord and the
drug cartel master. Borislav Stefanović, the former negotiatior of technical terms, was an emissary, an apparatchik who
signed off on all the Albanian demands that his boss, Boris Tadić, had agreed
to from Belgrade. Forcing Dačić, however, to stoop down to Thaci’s level must
be a reason to gloat, right? Wrong.
Let’s now see how diagonally opposite to the expectations
the reactions have been.
| source: b92.net |
On Monday, while Belgrade was peaceful, as it was the entire
weekend and as if its Prime Minister didn't just shake hands with the Snake, Priština was rioting! The followers of Albin Kurti, the leader of the
Self-Determination Movement, clashed with police, trying to overrun the Kosovo Parliament
in a protest over the meeting. They accused Thaci of treason and carried banners
calling for a cessation of talks with Serbia and a move towards unification
with Albania. Kurti and his movement are an ultranationalist challenge to the
rule of Thaci’s crime ring and this wasn’t the first time they used force
against the Thaci regime. But an instance in which Thaci, despite the war crimes and terrorism baggage, got to sit at the same table with Serbia’s Prime Minister in the
process of what might end up being a recognition of Kosovo’s independence, was
not likely to become a cause for a protest by radical ultranationalists. Yet it
was.
In Serbia, only one political party – the extra-parliamentary
and now largely irrelevant Serbian Radical Party – openly accused Dačić of
treason. While the Albanians consider any conversation with Serbia a treason,
Serbs haggle over banalities such as whether Dačić shook Thaci’s hand –
allusion to Tadić’s embarrassing handshake with Thaci in Croatia after his
presidential election loss – instead of asking the Prime Minister, the
President and their media the only legitimate question here: When exactly has
it been decided and to whom exactly was it announced that the new official
course in “defending” the southern province was embarked onto? Why was the meeting kept secret until it ended? And why was Serbian media playing deaf-mute? If the Prime
Minister is meeting with Thaci, that’s a new, self-depreciating, shameful course
for Serbia. But even Vojislav Koštunica’s Serbian Democrats characterized the
meeting only as “damage to Serbian national interests.”
The media, most of which is still controlled by the
Democratic Party-imposed cadre, has done a great job of misinforming the
Serbian public and minimizing the effects and reverberations such a colossally important
event was bound to cause. The fact that no media outlet – to my knowledge –
announced the meeting is indicative of the confluence of interests that created
the context. Serbian media’s pro-Western editors, ever trigger-happy when a
chance to embarrass the new government presents itself, stayed embarrassingly
quiet and passed on the chance to call Dačić out in the run-up to the
meeting. I can understand why the
outlets close to the government or inching towards its good graces kept they air waves and presses shut, but I can only explain this momentous development on the former Tadić
regime media side by pointing towards their cue givers in Brussels who wanted
nothing to undermine the preparations for the historic event. They couldn't afford to allow a negative reaction in Serbia a week before the meeting to shake Dačić's resolve. I mean, why would, otherwise, the outlets
such as Blic or B92 spare Dačić? Only a week or so before these same outlets
blasted Dačić for misspeaking at a German World War II victims’ commemoration,
when he blamed “criminals” who have murdered Serbs in the past for blocking
Serbia's EU bid today. Now, this is attack-worthy and the Thaci meeting is
not? It wasn't a big deal that no one informed the Serbian media that there was
going to be a meeting of historic proportions? The media spin that followed was
best depicted in the quote they beat us over the head with: ‘’’I told him
(Thaci) that Kosovo is as much mine as it is his, I was born in Kosovo,’ noted
the premier.’’ You officially met with the war criminal, unannounced, almost
secretly, without regard to the official policy of the rest of your government,
that’s what you did. Who cares what you told him?...
And just to touch on the actual implications of the meeting…
Whoever waves this meeting off as a chess move, know that Serbia is several
moves behind and very uncomfortable with the clock. Talking with Kosovo
Albanian officials is one thing and regardless of the context in which the Serbian public
places the Kosovo secession, their attitudes are a reality and cannot be ignored. Talking with
Hashim Thaci, on the other hand, is out of question as a circumstance resulting
from any kind of strategic maneuvering, because it not only sends contradictory
message from the very top of the Serbian government, one that shows no coherence
and no elements of leadership, but it also departs from the set bargaining attitude,
however feeble, and, more importantly, from the self-respect position that
every negotiator must establish and project.
Treason or not, Dačić’s handshake with the Snake charts a
new course in Serbia’s politics: one that opens Serbia up for anything, one that
has no aces up its sleeve, one that goes all in against the weathered Brussels
big stack bullies who brought Serbia to its knees in the first place and who
don’t even have to hide behind a poker face anymore.
