Stand Firm on Kosovo

Slowly, but not yet surely, Kosovo is moving towards independence. Whether this is a foolish claim or a soon to be confirmed fact is highly contested. But its shadow hangs over today's meeting of Serbian and Albanian negotiators in New York to discuss the future of a territory that was the focus of Europe's most recent war.

An effort to find an agreed solution failed earlier this year when Russia said it would veto a UN plan, worked out by Finland's former president Martti Ahtisaari, to authorize conditional independence for Kosovo under EU supervision. In the face of the threatened veto, the EU wobbled. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, proposed more negotiations, which are now under way, with a deadline of December 10.

The big unknown is what happens if, as almost everyone expects, there is still no agreement. Will the Kosovo Albanians declare independence unilaterally? Will the Serb-majority districts react with their own declaration of independence and ask to stay with Serbia? Will the US and EU recognize Kosovo's move? How will Russia react? Will it recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the breakaway regions of Georgia characterized as "frozen conflicts" for even longer than the Kosovo stalemate has lasted?

Serbian politicians are playing a skillful game. Fronted by Vuk Jeremic, their UK- and US-educated foreign minister, and Boris Tadic, their pro-EU president, they have been working the corridors of the UN building this week, proclaiming the virtues of international law. They argue that UN resolution 1244, which ended the Kosovo war, talked about preserving Yugoslavia's (ie Serbia's) territorial integrity; proposed self-government, but not independence, for Kosovo; and kept the issue under UN jurisdiction. Recognizing Kosovo without UN agreement would be a violation of Serbian sovereignty as bad as Nato's recourse to war in 1999.

To back their case, the Serbian government is offering to devolve unprecedented powers to Pristina. The Albanians could run virtually everything, short of foreign and defense policy. The Serbs also promise to change their constitution to give seats in various federal bodies to Kosovo's Albanians. Behind the legal case is a moral plea: why punish the new modernizing, pro-EU Serbia for the atrocities of the dead tyrant Slobodan Milosevic? They have even called for Serbia to be given candidate-member status in the EU club as a way of keeping Serbia's radical nationalists at bay.

It is siren-voiced stuff, but the EU should not hesitate in rejecting these pleas. Let Cyprus be the warning to any latter-day Odysseus. Allowing Cyprus into the EU before a settlement of the island's Greek/Turkish dispute is the biggest mistake the EU made this century. Brussels lost its bargaining power.

The Russian position is similar to the Serbs' - combining the legal and the political. Vladimir Putin was uncompromising in a conversation with foreign Russia-watchers at his residence on the Black Sea a fortnight ago. As we pressed round him like passengers in an overcrowded lift, he told us: "Our position on Kosovo is better and more soundly based than yours. This has to be accepted, and you should not break the whole system of international law."

Asked if he would punish US recognition of Kosovo with Russian recognition of Abkhazia, Putin said: "Let's watch how people in the northern and southern Caucasus react. I know these people. They will simply say Russia dumped us under pressure from the US.

"Why do I want another Chechnya? That's all I need," he went on sarcastically. "I am not going to open a second front in the Caucasus just to satisfy the American electoral calendar ... If escalation develops because of our failure to react and a complete lack of action by us to events in Kosovo, these people will say you've betrayed us. They'll take up arms and it'll be even worse."

His arguments are plausible, and clearly designed to deter Washington from accepting, let alone encouraging, a Kosovo unilateral declaration of independence. Georgia, after all, is Bush's best friend in the Caucasus, and Putin wants westerners to know he can make things hard for Georgia if Washington makes things hard for Belgrade.

Does that mean Kosovo's supporters should back off? Some in Europe will say yes, particularly in Slovakia and Romania, which are worried about secession-minded Hungarians, as well as in Spain with its Basques, and in Greece, which fears problems in Macedonia. The rest of Europe should stand firm, and tell Belgrade and Moscow that the train has left the station. The war in Kosovo was not about spurious claims of WMD. It was not intended to bring regime change in Belgrade. Its aim was a limited and legitimate attempt by a country's regional neighbors to halt atrocities and reverse ethnic cleansing on a mass scale. It was also the first international effort to put the UN's tentative new concept - the responsibility to protect - above that of national sovereignty.

A territory where 90% of the population is repressed by overlords who speak another language and practice a different religion is not stable. To pretend that at this late stage Serbia can start to deal fairly with Kosovo's Albanians flies in the face of all recent experience. Every safeguard was built into the Ahtisaari plan to defend Kosovo Serbs, including a continued presence of international police and troops, as well as protection for monasteries and cultural sites. Under their short-sighted leadership, this generation of Serbs may not recognize that Kosovo is lost; but their successors will do so once the EU has steadied its nerves and led the way.