Tirana and the Balkan Summit Conference in Skopje

AIM Tirana, November 6, 2000

Will Albania participate at the summit conference of the leaders of the Balkan? And will Albanian president Meidani meet Yugoslav president Kostunica?

These two questions took up a large space in the press of Skopje and Tirana before the meeting. The answer was participation of Meidani at the Balkan summit conference and a casual handshake of Meidani and Kostunica in the hall of the summit conference in the presence of Turkish prime minister Edjevit.

Albania was quite reluctant about urgent organisation of this informal summit at the time when the regular official summit conference of the leaders of Balkan had already been planned for February next year. However, it seems that in Tirana it was calculated that its absence from the summit would be like swimming against the current and that it would lead to misunderstanding, so a different approach was chosen - application of a direct method, in other words, stating bluntly what was on its mind although it might sound very sharp.

Meidani in fact articulated loud the same things which had also been articulated by Western leaders and the things which are nowadays just whispered. Kostunica, therefore, heard from Albanian president the demand that Milosevic be sent to the Hague and that war criminals be persecuted. Meidani demanded from new Yugoslav officials a clear condemnation of Milosevic's chauvinist regime and the crime he had committed. On the other hand, Kostunica did not even mention the name of his predecessor in his speech. Meidani also demanded liberation of Albanian prisoners who are still held in prisons in Serbia and data on the persons disappeared in Kosovo.

The Albanian president, in his speech which was estimated as very sharp, demanded that Serbia pay to Albania for the damage done to it by laid mines on its territory on the border with Kosovo and victims caused by explosion of mines. Meidani confirmed the known stand of Tirana that Kosovo had the right to self-administration and self-determination and to be a sovereign unit in European federation. The observers present in Skopje underlined that Meidani's stands announced a very difficult problem that new leadership in Belgrade would have to face. According to the observers, the sharp stand of the Albanian president seems also to be connected with the fact that Tirana wished to avoid any misunderstanding with Kosovo Albanians, especially a few days before the elections there. The meeting of prime minister Nano with former president Milosevic in Crete in the autumn of 1997 caused quite a turmoil in Tirana and Pristina and it had its political price. This can partly explain the hesitation of Tirana.

Albanian and Yugoslavia have no established diplomatic relations. Belgrade broke them off after NATO had started the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. At the press conference held after the summit conference Kostunica declared that diplomatic relations between the two countries would be re-established. Albanian foreign minister Milo declared in an interview in Tirana that Belgrade was expected to make the first step since Belgrade was the one that had broken the relations off.

Changes in Serbia, departure of Milosevic from the political scene were welcomed with restrained optimism in Albania. Later on, the first statements made by Kostunica concerning Kosovo cooled this initial enthusiasm. What caused wonder and content at the same time was the statement of the new Yugoslav president uttered a week after his victory, on October 12, in an interview given to Italian TV. Kostunica said that from then on regional instability would move to the south of the Balkan and especially to Albania where according to him a form of a civil war between the South and the North had been legalised. This is a thesis launched several times before, especially during the unrest in 1997, but it proved to have been wrong, because the differences between the South and the North were not that prominent and regardless of certain differences, they cannot be the cause for a clash between the North and the South. This thesis is rejected in Tirana by the parties of the entire Albanian political spectre. It is believed to be the result of the efforts of certain Balkan circles to create instability in Albania and as another confirmation that the new leadership in Belgrade still has a long way to go in order to move away from old dogma and prejudice.

In any case, the fact that the two presidents have avoided a direct meeting during the summit conference is an indubitable indication of a difficult climate that exists in bilateral relations with Kosovo in between.

Kostunica has repeated the demand for implementation of OUN Resolution 1244 for Kosovo in which Belgrade sees only the article which speaks of sovereignty of FRY, while Albanian president Meidani made it clear that Albania did not see the future of Kosovo inside Serbia, and even went a step further and made an allusion to the possible independence of Montenegro. In this sense, the president of Albania warned his colleague in Belgrade that after completion of the period of diplomatic festivity occasioned by his inauguration as president, he would have to face the questions that could not be avoided. It seems that Tirana has a trump card in its hand, and this is that the rise and fall of Kostunica's predecesor Slobodan Milosevic was linked to Kosovo.

On the other hand, the main leaders of Albanian political parties in Kosovo, such as Thaci from Democratic Party of Kosovo, Ramush from the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo and Albanian media in Kosovo, welcomed Meidani's stand at the summit conference. Moderate veteran of politics Bakali sent a greeting to Meidani in which he stressed that “complaints that you were sharp should be disregarded, but it is better if at the very beginning our stands are presented about what we expect from democratic forces in Serbia than to curry favour with the new authorities in Serbia”.

It seems that Albania is concerned because of some kind of Western euphoria observed after the fall of Milosevic. There is also a growing concern that possible focusing of attention on Serbia could make Kosovo and even Albania itself sink into oblivion. And moreover, there is the same feeling of fear that exists in Kosovo that Kostunica's coming to power might be perceived by some European countries, especially in Europe, as a golden key for solving the problem of Kosovo. That is where some of the reasons should be sought for scepticism observed in Albania concerning the phenomenon called Kostunica.

AIM Tirana

Arjan LEKA