Edward P. Joseph, Conflict Management Expert, John Hopkins University, USA on the Panel “History and future of uncompromising commitment to democracy, human rights, and media freedoms”, at the Conference “Defending Democracy and Human Rights”, December 12, 2024 Skopje.
My message is about recommendations is be concrete with them and be proactive in sharing them, and I’ll share this with you. To answer your question, I’m gonna segue and give you the answer. You asked, Who would we talk to, to actually resolve and stabilize this?
I think it’s actually very interesting, in many respects, the Balkans, and here’s the key word, the Balkans have been a harbinger. It happened first in the Balkans, and then it happened everywhere else. It’s actually a harbinger. Think back to the late 1980s. What was happening? The rest of Eastern Europe was a completely quiet column. You had Slobodan Milosevic, you had Kosovo, you had the end of Kosovo autonomy, and guess what I’m gonna remind you of, one of the most fundamental facts overlooked by so many officials.
The removal of Kosovo’s autonomy happened before the fall of the Berlin Wall, okay? So, you had these processes in motion, which then, all of a sudden, the reawakening of history, all these ethno-national tensions, war, Russia and Ukraine, these type of aggressive power wars based on, in many respects, promoted and accentuated real differences, but then promoted and exploited by leaders like Milosevic, like Putin. So you have that, it’s a harbinger. There’s a harbinger here in North Macedonia.
How? When? 2006, you had a new prime minister came in. I don’t want to mention the name, because it just becomes, it’s unnecessary, but you had a prime minister who swiftly eroded the democratic constraints and essentially had the elements of what all autocratic powers were, to perpetual power, and then it was the wiretapping scandal and the protests, public protests, in 2014 and then the Pržino Agreement of 2015 that changed that.
So that was, again, a harbinger, a harbinger really before Orbán, before Viktor Orbán. You had that model, this electoral authoritarianism. You had that model here in North Macedonia. And so you see that.
Then, you had also a false comparison. Many people lumped Montenegro and Milo Djukanović in this, oh, yes, there’s Serbia and Vučić and so forth, but there’s Djukanović in Montenegro too, and Freedom House had them in a lower category and so forth. It turned out it wasn’t true. It turned out that Milo Djukanović, his party, he and his party suffered a defeat. What did he do? He recognized the result. His party still exists, and there’s a not so clear political formation and, of course, there is greater Serbian influence, but we see that it was fundamentally different. There wasn’t this Djukanovic, I’m gonna burn the house down. If I’m not calling the shots, I’m gonna burn it all down. No. He had been in coalition before, and he backed out. You can have criticism and so forth, but we can also have, sometimes we get into these false comparisons, Heather.
So let me, I’m gonna, you asked your specific question, and I’m gonna answer it with one of, I think, the most remarkable remarks, statements by a political figure in the Balkans that I can remember hearing in a long time, and this was by Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, just 36 hours ago. He used this phrase, it was absolutely astonishing. I couldn’t believe that he would go with this. He used this phrase. This is not the exact quote, because he used the words in the same sentence, but it’s a completely fair paraphrase. This is a completely fair paraphrase. He said, I am not Assad. I am not Assad. This is Aleksandar Vučić, well, really?
I thought this was absolutely astonishing that he would think to invoke such a comparison, and then, of course, you know, he turned it into his way, how I will not run away. It was about the protests, and he turned it into an attempt to delegitimize the protesters, but in a very strange way, you know, and it shows you, even very shrewd leaders like Aleksandar Vučić can make mistakes. It’s almost always a mistake to use those words, I am not.
We have the famous case in the United States, Richard Nixon, saying, I am not a crook, and this, you’re invoking the negative, and you invoke the negative, you’re invoking the comparison, you’re inviting people to compare you with Assad, and what is the point of that? What is the point of the comparison? Is the hollowness, the hollowness of the autocrat, the hollowness of the base of power of the autocrats, that which seems so invincible today with the command of the media, the courts, the military, you heard in the previous panel, the arrests of journalists, what seems so invincible today can vanish like that. Whereas democracies, messy as they are, inefficient in many respects, don’t often just crumble in a moment as the house of cards falls down.
And so, I think that’s really a striking reminder, and it’s striking, again, that Vučić invoked this himself, and I think, in that respect, he has invited us to make the comparison in that respect, and we should
I’ve published this, I’ve spoken about this. There is a solution to the Balkans. The Balkans are in a state of artificial suspension, and there’s no better example than this country here, North Macedonia, which has twice been held hostage by these ethno-national issues for which it is not culpable. It took the Prespa Agreement with Greece to relieve the veto on the NATO path. I want to say here, for the record, again, we’re in Skopje, we’re in North Macedonia.
The Prespa agreement is an outstanding agreement. It’s fair, Greece made very important concessions, concessions that support the Macedonian identity and the strength and sovereignty of this country, which is very important. You now have this veto from Bulgaria. It’s completely outrageous. It’s against the Friendship Agreement, the so-called Friendship Agreement, which Sofia has behaved in anything but in the spirit of that agreement, and it’s wrong.
North Macedonia has qualified, and I did some interviews here, I have my view about what the government should do on that, but it’s clear the obstacle is not within the country, and of course, that is the blockage from the reforms and all of the steps that would have propelled this country and vastly improved the corruption situation and so many other issues. So, there’s that, but closed.
So, what is the solution? The point I mentioned at the top about Aleksandar Vučić and Serbia and him saying, I am not Assad. I will put the point to you this way very clearly. You cannot have a democratic stable Balkans with an anti-democratic Serbia, okay? It doesn’t work, and in part, it’s just size. Serbia is the biggest of the WB6. It has the biggest economy of the WB6. If you take it in comparison to Montenegro, the smallest of the WB6, the Serbian GDP is 14 times bigger, 14 times. For Montenegro, its number one trading partner, both exports and imports, is Serbia, okay? So do the math in any calculation, politically, economically.
If Serbia is in this continuing neo-Greater Serbia posture, and here again, we heard it in the last panel, the pollution of the media sphere here with so many Serbian channels, I think 90 on the table, it’s an enormous problem. This is a fundamental problem.
So, you cannot have this democratic advancement of the region with the largest country that has these interests in subverting neighbors, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. We don’t have time, but there is a solution. It’s very clear the solution is Kosovo. Serbia is able to sustain this position because of the exploitation of the Kosovo issue.
Those of you who are interested, I published this fairly well with co-authors from Serbia, Kosovo, and the key, the non-recognizers. The only reason, I will tell you, this is my theory and I’ll close here and turn it back to Heather. The only reason, this whole thing, including the Bulgaria-Greece situation, because it never would have happened but for the fact that Serbia has never progressed, which gave opportunities to Bulgaria and Greece here. The only reason all of these countries are not in the European Union, the main reason, I should say, is because Europe is divided on Kosovo. That is the reason. It’s so obvious, people don’t even think about it. This is the source of the stasis in Serbia. It’s really just the four NATO non-recognizers, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, Spain. This is spelled out in our report.
Our report is Johns Hopkins SAIS, Wilson Center.
It’s called From Crisis to Convergence, a strategy to tackle instability in the Balkans at its source, From Crisis to Convergence. As you can see in the executive summary, it’s all spelled out. Those four countries, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, have handed their leverage to Belgrade because they say, we won’t recognize Kosovo until Belgrade does. That means Belgrade basically is like Sofia. They’re basically giving their leverage. It’s as if Serbia is a member of NATO or a member of the EU able to block. So, all Belgrade has to do is to act as if it is participating in the dialogue, get EU money, but it has no interest in resolving this issue. It has no interest in resolving it because it has the leverage. It continues to isolate Kosovo, to weaken Kosovo, to get de-recognitions, and yet we’re in a position where we need Serbia now even more – its lithium, the ammunition to Ukraine, which of course is financially beneficial to Serbia. They’re not doing it as a favor to Ukraine.
That is the reason, and I just have to add, of course, that doesn’t excuse Prime Minister Kurti from his own responsibilities. He has them. He has Kosovo’s Serb citizens, and he must treat them as full citizens, and that’s true, but the structural problem is not in Pristina. The structural problem is in Belgrade and those non-recognitions.
D. Tahiri
Camera: Atanas Petrovski/ Igor Chadinovski
Editing: Arian Mehmeti
Photo: Robert Atanasovski
CONFERENCE, FULL VIDEO, Streamed live on December 12, 2024:
https://youtube.com/live/1f2Eo1ZXEQ0
PHOTO ARCHIVES: #DefendingDemocracy, Panel 1: Democracy under Siege
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.994398716055531&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy, Panel 2: The Rise of Far-Right Nationalism
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.995019619326774&type=3
#DefendingDemocrcy Panel 3: Countering Authoritarianism
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.995771969251539&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy conference, Panel 4: Commitment to democracy
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.996548069173929&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy Conference (overall)
https://www.facebook.com/media/set?set=a.993726732789396&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy – workshop and meeting with the press
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.992924672869602&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy PRESS CONFERENCE
For more information on the Conference, please visit the special website DefendingDemocracy
