Tim Judah

27 October 2006, Balkan Insight - Follow the press and you could be forgiven for thinking the future of Kosovo was a mystery. Will it be independent, somehow remain part of Serbia, or be divided? Will its status be decided by the end of the year and if not, when? Listen to Vojislav Kostunica or to Agim Ceku, prime ministers of Serbia and Kosovo respectively, and you might conclude nothing was clear and everything was left to play for.

In fact, more has been decided about the future than ordinary Serbs and Albanians realise. Barring unforeseen developments, several matters are clear.

Neither the Serbs who want to stop Kosovo's Albanian majority from attaining independence nor the Albanians who demand it will be happy.

Furthermore, the way the situation develops over the next year remains fraught with risks and looks likely to bequeath a so-called "frozen" conflict to the future.

Interviews with Serbian and Albanian insiders and diplomatic sources have revealed it is now possible to predict the outline of future developments in Kosovo.

The future international mission will borrow heavily from the model used in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1995.

As for the resolution of Kosovo's final status, that is now likely to be delayed until next March. This will follow a weak UN resolution that does not mention the word "independence".

Following this, Kosovo's parliament is expected to declare independence, after which some countries will recognise the new state. Others, such as Russia and Greece, will probably not - to start with.

The Kosovo government will not have any authority in those northern districts where Serbian government institutions will continue to operate, however.

As various countries recognise the new state, the Serbian police in the north, who today form part of the Kosovo Police Service, are expected to start taking orders from local Serbian authorities instead.

The exact details of the plan of the Kosovo status negotiator Martti Ahtisaari, which he will present to the UN by the end of the year, remain to be seen.

But Enver Hoxhaj, a member of the Kosovo negotiating team, says that "the real talks have now begun [and] are not between Pristina and Belgrade but between the members of the Contact Group".

Comprising the main international players involved in the former Yugoslavia, two members of the Contact Group, Britain and the US, are taking a lead in supporting Kosovo's independence, while Russia is against.

But while the parties wait for Ahtisaari to release his recommendations, detailed planning has already begun on the international institutions that will succeed the current UN mission in Kosovo, UNMIK.

A ten-person team has been assembled to work in what is called the "Planning Team for the International Civilian Office", led by Torbjorn Sohlstrom, a Swedish diplomat, aged 32. Last December, he became the personal representative in Kosovo of the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. Now he has a new role.

For now, the ICO team answers to Solana. Nine of the ten members are from EU countries while one comes from the US. Solana's office funds the office to the tune of 890,000 euro.

Sohlstrom says the future ICO will resemble the Office of the High Representative, OHR, in Bosnia and Herzegovina in several key respects.

This means that when UNMIK is phased out, most of its powers will devolve to Kosovo's elected authorities. However, it is widely expected that Ahtisaari's plan will set conditions on Kosovo's sovereignty, which is where the ICO and the EU come in.

Sohlstrom says the head of the new mission will be "double-hatted", as is the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That means the International Civilian Representative, as he is being called, will both head the ICO and at the same time act as EU Special Representative.

Technically, the ICO will not be an EU body, to enable others, such as the US, to participate. At the same time, the EU in effect will run a new mission, helping to oversee the rule of law. The current NATO-led force will remain in Kosovo. So will the OSCE.

As befits the delicate political situation in Kosovo, Solhstrom plays down the powers that the International Civilian Representative will wield, stressing that Kosovars will run their country.

"We don't want a situation where the international community has to intervene very often," he said.

Solhstrom says the new mission head will intervene only in such areas as "decentralisation, religious and cultural heritage, minority rights and security". In other words, in everything that matters.

The headquarters of the ICO will be in Pristina but it will probably have an office in Serb-controlled north Mitrovica from where it will work to try to reintegrate the north back into Kosovo's institutions.

If local Serbian leaders have their way this will be a hopeless task.

According to Serbian sources have revealed that since May 385 former Yugoslav army officials have been paid to organise a Serbian civil defence force.

Local Serbs say the Kosovo Protection Corps, which is supposed to be an unarmed force exercising only civil defence functions such as shoveling snow in an emergency, is a Kosovo Albanian army in waiting. They claim - somewhat improbably - that their force will do nothing more than provide extra firemen for Serbian municipalities, for example.

Asked whether Serbs in the north of Kosovo planned to declare a breakaway Serbian republic in Kosovo, Dragisa Mijovic, mayor of Zvecan, said a declaration was unnecessary. "There is no need to declare anything because we are already functioning as a part of Serbia," he said.

Asked what might happen on the border between the north of Kosovo and Serbia proper, Mijovic said they would ensure that "there won't be a border".

The mayor said that “probably” it would run along the Ibar, the river that divides the Serbian northern half of the divided town of Mitrovica from the Albanian southern half.

If the mayor's predictions come to pass, the existing de facto partition of Kosovo will soon be cemented. Where that leaves Serbs who live in scattered enclaves in central and southern Kosovo is unclear.

Diplomatic sources say if the north of Kosovo severs remaining ties with Pristina after Kosovo declares independence, much will depend on the stance taken by Serbia.

In the short term, diplomats concede they may be powerless to do much. They hope to secure Kosovo's eventual reintegration, however.

"It is difficult to believe that Serbia would not like at some stage to move forward on the Euro-Atlantic integration track," said one diplomat. "It won't to be able to do so by actively undermining the [Kosovo] settlement."

As for a seat at the UN, it seems that Kosovo will not secure this automatically or quickly. It will require a two-thirds vote from the General Assembly meeting next autumn. Veton Surroi, the veteran politician and Kosovo negotiator, said they take nothing for granted.

"We will have to fight for every vote," he said.

Tim Judah is a leading Balkan commentator and the author of "The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia" and "Kosovo: War and Revenge", both published by Yale University Press. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.