WHEN I wrote a piece entitled “Kosovo’s march to freedom” (Dawn, 26 September 2006) I received a number of emails from Kosovar and Albanian intellectuals expressing gratitude that Pakistanis understood their aspirations and also their concern that their freedom may be delayed by the competitive moves by major powers on the Balkan chess board.

One common idea that informed all the messages was that independence could be delayed but not denied.

As I write these lines it is a heady day in the capital, Pristina, as large crowds ecstatically celebrate declaration of independence by Kosovo’s parliament. A predominantly Muslim population – 90 per cent of a total two million – occupying an area of 10,877 square kms is now a free European nation.

It was in 1989 that, driven by an outright racist ideology, Slobodan Milosevic annulled Kosovo’s autonomy. Kosovo occupied a central place in the mythology he had created to mount his bloody campaign for Greater Serbia and even his failure in Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina did not stop him from contemplating a ‘final solution’— another brutal ethnic cleansing – in Kosovo. In Feb 1998, the Serbian army carried out massacres of Muslims in the Drenica valley.

The Balkan wars of 1912-13 and the First World War extracted a heavy price from the ethnic Albanians. Half of them were left outside the new Albania in neighbouring countries. Kosovars suffered discrimination when incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and subsequently even in the successor state of Yugoslavia.

It was however the disastrous transition from Tito’s communism to Milosevic’s fascism that set the region ablaze.

Behind the memorable declaration of Feb 17, 2008 lies a long period of deft political negotiations involving the United Nations, the United States, the European Union (EU), Serbia and Russia.

The UN Resolution 1244 was always precariously poised between recognition of Kosovo’s desire for freedom and the claims of the nation state of Serbia, now one of six sovereign entities to come out of former Yugoslavia.

Efforts to go beyond resolution 1244 never succeeded as Russia was not on board. The EU attached high priority to preventing another regional conflagration. The basic plan was put together by the former Finnish president Ahttsaari whose great gift of statesmanship I grew to admire as Moscow-based Pakistani ambassador to Finland. The Kosovo negotiations became an outstanding example of how the factor of time could be used in managing and resolving conflicts rooted deep in history.

Kosovo’s Muslim leader, Ibrahim Rugova, was more of a pacifist than even Bosnia’s venerable Alija Izetbegovic. As elected president of autonomous Kosovo, he clung to his faith in non-violence in the midst of the worst carnage that continental Europe had known since the end of the Second World War till his death.

Inevitably Kosovo produced its own army of liberation, the KLA, to fight the Serbian army but in the end it was a decisive Nato intervention that defeated Milosevic.

Since then the general consensus in the international community has been that the option of returning the province to Serbia did not exist. It was a protectorate of the United Nations for more than seven years. The basic question for Kosovo and EU has been replacing the UN interim administration mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) by an effective interim ‘rule of law’ EU presence in Kosovo that Serbia might accept and that enables both Serbia and Kosovo to anchor their final destiny in the European Union.

There is not enough space here to even summarise the painstaking diplomacy undertaken by the EU since it accepted Ahtisaari’s ‘Comprehensive Proposal’ for a ‘supervised independence’ for a multi-ethnic Kosovo with extensive safeguards for the small non-Albanian minorities. EU leaders expanded the proposal to suggest a loose Serbia-Kosovo association or union. Kosovo itself proposed a treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual respect in September to govern post-independence bilateral relations with Serbia. These and some other initiatives were rejected by Belgrade as it remained implacably opposed to Kosovo’s independence.

Serbian nationalists have traditionally maintained that the Balkan’s crisis of the 1990s was primarily engineered by western capitalists to pursue a neo-liberal economic agenda. They, however, failed to prevent secession of even tiny Montenegro – 13,812 square kms and a population of little more than 650,000 – making it even more unlikely that Kosovo, where 13,000 people had died fighting Milosevic’s army, would remain a Serbian province.

In fairness to Belgrade, its position became more flexible in the post-Milosevic era as it offered Kosovo autonomy ‘broader than anything seen in Europe’ and even a solution on the Hong Kong model.

But it was always a case of too little too late. The latest election in Kosovo brought the Democratic party of Kosovo to power and its leader, Hashim Thaci, a former KLA fighter, unambiguously defined the national goal as independence.

It has often been said that the wars of Yugoslavia began in Kosovo and would end in Kosovo. But the curtain has still not come down on regional tensions. About 60,000 Serbs dominate five municipalities of Kosovo north of Ibar River.

Serbia will probably incite them to break away though its chances of intervening militarily are minimal. It may also punish Kosovo with denial of electricity and land-based communication links.

It will probably be able to count on Russia to delay Kosovo’s membership of the United Nations. Serbia may also increase pressure on Bosnia by propping up the so-called Republika Srpska there.

Russian reservations on independence are not new but have deepened because of worsening of relations with the West on several other counts. Hostility to Kosovo will jeopardise Serbian prospects of EU membership but Moscow which has recently decided to construct an energy link with Europe through Serbia may in fact welcome that outcome.

EU will directly assist Kosovo for the next 120 days to create institutions of a viable sovereign state and if the Kosovars can begin the process of resolving their internal problems especially unemployment the impact of external threats will be greatly reduced.