Edward Joseph: You cannot have a democratic stable Balkans with an anti-democratic Serbia

Описание: Edward P. Joseph, Conflict Management Expert, John Hopkins University, USA on the Panel “History and future of uncompromising commitment to democracy, human rights, and media freedoms”, at the Conference “Defending Democracy and Human Rights”, December 12, 2024 Skopje.

I think it's actually very interesting, in many respects, the Balkans, and here's the key word, the Balkans have been a harbinger. It happened first in the Balkans, and then it happened everywhere else. It's actually a harbinger. Think back to the late 1980s. What was happening? The rest of Eastern Europe was a completely quiet column. You had Slobodan Milosevic, you had Kosovo, you had the end of Kosovo autonomy, and guess what I'm gonna remind you of, one of the most fundamental facts overlooked by so many officials.
The removal of Kosovo's autonomy happened before the fall of the Berlin Wall, okay? So, you had these processes in motion, which then, all of a sudden, the reawakening of history, all these ethno-national tensions, war, Russia and Ukraine, these type of aggressive power wars based on, in many respects, promoted and accentuated real differences, but then promoted and exploited by leaders like Milosevic, like Putin. So you have that, it's a harbinger. There's a harbinger here in North Macedonia.
How? When? 2006, you had a new prime minister came in. I don't want to mention the name, because it just becomes, it's unnecessary, but you had a prime minister who swiftly eroded the democratic constraints and essentially had the elements of what all autocratic powers were, to perpetual power, and then it was the wiretapping scandal and the protests, public protests, in 2014 and then the Pržino Agreement of 2015 that changed that.
So that was, again, a harbinger, a harbinger really before Orbán, before Viktor Orbán. You had that model, this electoral authoritarianism. You had that model here in North Macedonia. And so you see that.
It took the Prespa Agreement with Greece to relieve the veto on the NATO path. I want to say here, for the record, again, we're in Skopje, we're in North Macedonia.
The Prespa agreement is an outstanding agreement. It's fair, Greece made very important concessions, concessions that support the Macedonian identity and the strength and sovereignty of this country, which is very important. You now have this veto from Bulgaria. It's completely outrageous. It's against the Friendship Agreement, the so-called Friendship Agreement, which Sofia has behaved in anything but in the spirit of that agreement, and it's wrong.
So, what is the solution? The point I mentioned at the top about Aleksandar Vučić and Serbia and him saying, I am not Assad. I will put the point to you this way very clearly. You cannot have a democratic stable Balkans with an anti-democratic Serbia, okay?
So, you cannot have this democratic advancement of the region with the largest country that has these interests in subverting neighbors, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. We don't have time, but there is a solution. It's very clear the solution is Kosovo. Serbia is able to sustain this position because of the exploitation of the Kosovo issue.
It's called From Crisis to Convergence, a strategy to tackle instability in the Balkans at its source, From Crisis to Convergence. As you can see in the executive summary, it's all spelled out. Those four countries, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, have handed their leverage to Belgrade because they say, we won't recognize Kosovo until Belgrade does. That means Belgrade basically is like Sofia. They're basically giving their leverage.

Camera: Atanas Petrovski/ Igor Chadinovski
Editing: Arian Mehmeti
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