War is in the air not only in an estuary of Italy, but also in a nation, Kosovo, where 852 Italian soldiers operate as interposition troops within a NATO contingent of thousands of soldiers under the command of Italian General Michael Ristuccia. In fact, on its side of the border, Serbia has just lined up cannons, massed troops and President Aleksandar Vučić has put the armed forces on high alert. Equally ominous is Kosovo’s military disposition, as barricades bisect Mitrovica to separate the city’s Serb minority from the Albanian majority
Many incidents have occurred in recent weeks, fortunately without casualties but many shots in the air, between police officers from Kosovo’s Serb minority (population 100,000) and police officers from the Albanian majority (population 1,650,000) in a crescendo of tensions on which Putin’s Russia is blowing, which certainly welcomes the opening of a second anti-Western front in Europe.
The trigger for the serious crisis is apparently almost ridiculous: in fact, last summer the Kosovar government in Pristina ordered that drivers belonging to the Serb minority must remove the Serb number plates from their cars, which they proudly use, replacing them with Kosovar ones. Of course, the Kosovo Serbs refused, because in reality they do not recognize the mere existence of the Kosovar state – just as Serbia does not recognize it – and therefore triggered the spiral of tension that has been intensifying in recent days.
A very serious and more than alarming crisis, so much so that after years of Italy’s complete disinterest in this area on the part of the indescribable Luigi Di Maio, both the new owner of the Farnesina Antonio Tajani and Guido Crosetto, owner of the defense, went to Pristina and Belgrade to initiate mediation by force. Vain.
In reality, the two adversaries, the Serbian and Kosovan governments, have every interest in escalating tensions. The Belgrade government has no intention of recognizing NATO’s 1998 war-imposed separation of the Kosovo region from the Republic of Serbia, despite President Vučić’s serious aspirations to join the European Union. Vladimir Putin has urged his historic Serbian ally to renounce his to consolidate its position and even to open a second front against NATO in the Balkans
Conversely, the government in Pristina intends to make the most of NATO’s very strong military engagement in Ukraine to pull it out of limbo through a red-hot crisis in which it has always lived.
In fact, the reality is that while the war that NATO declared in 1998 on Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, which was conducting cruel ethnic cleansing against the Albanians in Kosovo, was more than justified, ten years later, in 2008, the decision to gain independence Declaring a region that historically has never been a state was more than questionable and a harbinger of chronic instability. In terms of international relations, neither Greece nor Spain, Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia or 95 member states of the 193 UN recognize Kosovo’s independence. Including, of course, Russia and its allies, but also Ukraine, China, India and almost all countries in Asia and Latin America.
The reason for this rejection is twofold. First, almost half of the world’s nations do not accept the principle of creating from scratch a state that historically never existed, judging this as a very dangerous precedent for their autonomous regions. A unilateral secession by a new state has never been accepted by the international community. The only exception, South Sudan’s secession from Sudan, which was agreed after a war and negotiations with the state, actually Sudan, which previously exercised sovereignty there,
Second, because it was clear to many that the gruesome and millennia-old tensions and wars between the orthodox Christian Serbs, who retained a sizeable minority in Kosovo, and the Muslim Albanians who control the government in Pristina, would be uncontrollable as they are . With one aggravating circumstance: During the 1998 war, the USA hastily decided to remove the Uçk, the Kosovar autonomous organization, from its list of terrorist organizations and instead suddenly recognize it as a legitimate national liberation army. The long-term result of this move was disastrous. In fact, following the wise leadership of the moderate intellectual Ibrahim Rugova in the Kosovo government after 1998, the leaders of the dissolved Uçk managed to establish themselves in the Pristina government by conducting a terror and mafia policy in the country and practicing political assassinations of their Opponents and always finance themselves with heroin trafficking, smuggling and various atrocities.
Among these former leaders of the Uçk with dirty hands, again with an unwise choice, the United States privileged Hasim Taçi for twenty years because they considered him the most political, so much so that he managed to become prime minister after the 2007 elections and a hesitant European Union forced the choice of formal independence (albeit strongly, but again ruthlessly desired by the then foreign ministers of Germany and Italy, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Massimo D’Alema).
Hasim Taçi eventually even managed to become President of the Republic between 2016 and 2020. The presidency was abruptly interrupted by the mandate of the Special Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which eventually challenged him along with other former Uçk leaders against war crimes and against humanity. War crimes and crimes against humanity also committed by the defunct Uçk and other Islamic organizations since the day after the war ended in 1998. In fact, NATO was forced to immediately send a strong contingent called KFOR to the still-strong Kosovo In 2007, sixteen thousand units – today there are 3411 – attacked in cold blood by Muslim Albanians with many victims to protect Serbian-Orthodox churches and monasteries. NATO has therefore ordered an armed security belt in favor of the Serb minority, who live in northern Kosovo but also in some enclaves.
In other words, a restless existence of the youngest European state, contaminated by criminal and underworld ruling classes until 2020 and only now finally normalized, which has all the prerequisites to become another powder keg of the Balkans.