Small ‘unofficial’ referendum in northern Kosovo – not many dead.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Serb population of northern Kosovo have set up and run their own referendum on whether to accept rule by the institutions of Kosovo. The answer, to no-one’s surprise: No!

As the EU knows to its cost, referenda are troublesome. The public are quite capable of being awkward and annoying. Which explains why everyone in authority including the Belgrade leadership is busy saying that the result just doesn’t count. BalkanInsight:

But the OSCE and the UN mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, had earlier warned that the referendum had no validity and would have no legal consequences.

Serbian President Boris Tadic on Tuesday said holding the referendum was harmful to the interests of Serbia, which is currently pressing its case in Brussels for EU candidate status.

Borislav Stefanovic, Serbia’s chief negotiator in Kosovo talks, has called the referendum "completely unnecessary and meaningless". He said: "The referendum will leave no trace in history, nor will have any result.
"It has sent the wrong message that Serbs in the north cannot agree with their own country," Stefanovic told Serbian news agency, Tanjug.

Kosovo authorities predictably condemned the vote as illegal.

The problem of course is that the result is not meaningless. A small but coherent group of people have proclaimed that they do not want to be part of a country not recognised by the majority of states (representing the majority of people) on the planet. Not in itself a trivial or even unworthy position, you might think.

The Kosovo authorities’ official line that the referendum was ‘without legal effect’ and so ‘void’ is curious. Attentive readers will recall the ICJ decision on Kosovo’s own independence declaration, where the Court looked at a question tabled by Serbia:

The ICJ decision was likely in view of the strange question which the UN General Assembly posed at Serbia’s request:

Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?

Since international law loftily takes no view about declarations of independence, unilateral or otherwise. As I previously wrote:

Because in a trite sense a declaration of independence (or of anything else for that matter) has to be ‘in accordance with international law’, since it has no relevance in international law. International law does not deign to take any notice of declarations.

Thus, for example, if the town council down the road here in the UK makes a solemn unilateral declaration of the town’s independence from the UK, the rest of us will make a wry smile and go back to blogging or working.

The declaration is ‘in accordance’ with UK law – free speech and all that. But it is just that, and no more. It’s what happens afterwards that counts one way or the other in legal terms, in domestic as in international law. 

If citizens of our town en masse support the declaration of independence, put up road-blocks, stop paying taxes to Westminster and proclaim Vladimir Putin their new king with his consent, things begin to get more interesting.

Norms are being created and broken in all directions. Realities start to be created. Loyalties start to shift…   

In other words, Kosovo won its own significant ICJ victory precisely because its independence declaration in itself was deemed to have no legal effect. It was the subsequent acts of recognition (or not) which mattered.

Here there will be no need for ‘recognition’ of the results of the referendum by others. Those countries which don’t accept Kosovo’s independence see northern Kosovo as part of Serbia anyway. Those countries which do recognise Kosovo see the referendum as a futile silly noise – those pesky Serbs will have to accept that they are part of Kosovo sooner or later, or move out.

But on the whole this move (as was its originators’ intention) reaffirms in clear political terms the position of those countries (with Russia to the fore) which say that it is simply unwise to move international borders, especially those in Europe, without the consent of all concerned. And it embarrasses the general thrust of the majority of EU states’ policy in this area. Why in fact should a local population accept that it is being allocated to a new country by foreigners?

All of which drags us kicking and screaming back to the origins of the Yugo-crisis in the early 1990s, and back from there to the post-WW2 Titoist rearrangement of the internal demarcations of Yugoslav ‘republics’ and ‘autonomous provinces’, and then back to the inter-war arrangements for Yugoslav ‘governorships’ (banovine). And then back to the Treaty of Versailles after WW1, and finally then by a great jump back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Who lives within which borders? And, above all, who decides?

To be continued … for ever.