Albania Included, Of Course

Serbia’s minister called borders sacrosanct, listed Ukraine, China and Cyprus, then added Albania “of course.” The reassurance is the warning.

The Editorial Board

On Monday a minister of the Serbian government published a list. Borders, wrote Nemanja Starović, are sacrosanct, “whether we are speaking of Serbia, Ukraine, China, or Cyprus”, and then, in parentheses, “Albania included, of course”.

Read the company Albania was assigned. Ukraine has provinces under military occupation. China maintains a standing claim on Taiwan, which the People’s Republic has never governed. Cyprus has been partitioned behind a ceasefire line for fifty years. Serbia, in this construction, is the state whose border runs through Kosovo. Every member of the list carries a border that somebody, somewhere, is prepared to move. Into this company a Serbian minister inserted Albania, a NATO member with no border dispute of any kind, and dressed the insertion as reassurance. That is the scandal of the week, and we intend to say so plainly, because the parenthesis was written to be deniable and we decline to cooperate.

We will grant the deniable reading its hearing. A list of states whose territorial integrity deserves respect is, on its face, an anodyne thing; perhaps Albania was included as a courtesy. But courtesies do not require “of course”, and lists are built, not found. A government wishing to reassure Tirana had cleaner instruments available all week and used none of them. What it used instead supplies the parenthesis its content. Six days before the list, Serbia’s president announced that engineers had been engaged to study diverting the Ibër (Ibar), the river central Kosovo depends on for drinking water, and attached his audience to the threat in plain words: “pa da vidimo šta će da rade Albanci”, so let us see what the Albanians will do. A parenthesis about Albania’s borders, published in that week, by that government, is not boilerplate. It is an address.

The week deserves reconstruction. By the account of Aleksandar Vulin, coalition insider and the president’s oldest political companion, the Zelensky visit happened under Brussels pressure, punishment for Serbia declining to sign the July declaration in Kyiv. On the stage Europe pressed for, a carefully drafted question from the state broadcaster extracted, on camera, a statement against Kosovo’s independence from the president of Ukraine, aimed past Belgrade at the European governments that recognize Kosovo and stand behind its statehood. The next day came the river, and the audience clause. When Tirana and Prishtina answered without alarm, from a region where Serbia’s monopoly on force expired years ago, Belgrade reached for the oldest page in its file and cried Greater Albania.

Albania’s Prime Minister answered on the record, confirming what our own sources had told us off the record: nothing walked back, and no appetite left for lectures. “Albania has no claim whatsoever on Serbian territory and no need to invent one,” Edi Rama wrote. The list arrived in the direct reply to that refusal. Unable to sustain the charge that Albania covets Serbian territory, a Serbian minister reversed the current and placed Albania’s own borders on the table, politely, parenthetically, in English, for the European audience. He also declared the river “not the real issue”. We agree it has stopped being the only one.

So a word to the capitals that pressed for the visit. For years the same governments that lecture Tirana on standards, as though Albania were a testing ground for European patience, have treated Belgrade’s episodes as weather, unpleasant but passing. This episode has a text. Within one week, the Serbian state threatened a river on which hundreds of thousands depend for drinking water, revived a territorial slander against a NATO member, and then filed that member’s borders alongside Ukraine, China, and Cyprus. Brussels may read each item as a separate incident. Tirana has stopped reading them separately, and Zagreb stopped years ago. Belgrade made a list. We are keeping a copy.