The Withdrawal Clause

Brussels condemned a Serbian minister’s sentence about 1998 and missed the clause about the future. Europe has missed this program before. Twice, at Berlin and at London, it certified the outcome instead.

By Ngadhnjim Brovina (Pristina)

Brussels condemned the wrong sentence. Within two days of Snežana Paunović’s interview on Kurir, the Commission had declared zero tolerance and personal shock at the Serbian minister’s wish to have ethnically cleansed Kosovo in 1998. The sentence that should concern Europe came later in the broadcast, and drew nothing. Serbs waited five hundred years for the Ottomans to leave, the minister said, and they will wait out KFOR as well, “and with it, probably, all those who came with it.” No occupation lasts. Neither, she promised, will this one. The line was presented as patience. It should be read as a citation, because the precedent it cites has a documented content, and most of the documentation is European.

Who came with KFOR? The minister answered that herself. Earlier in the hour she described the refugee columns of June 1999 as cover for a guerrilla force trained abroad and sent back to kill. On her own terms, then, “those who came with it” means the returned Albanian population and everything it has built: the institutions she calls temporary, the state she calls fake. The clause has the shape of nostalgia and the content of a schedule, and the departure of a NATO mission is its trigger.

Note what that single claim about the columns accomplishes. The camps of 1999, at Kukës and Blace, at Stenkovec and Cegrane, held the better part of a million people whom Serbian forces had deported in the most closely witnessed expulsion in postwar European history, the crime for which the Hague later convicted the state’s political, military and police leadership. Recode those camps as guerrilla staging grounds and two things follow at once. The victims disappear into the ranks of an army that never existed. And the deportation is retroactively justified, because expelling a guerrilla’s recruitment pool is counterinsurgency rather than a crime against civilians. One sentence performs a double denial: it erases the refugees, and it acquits the men who made them refugees.

It also completes a grammar that runs through the whole interview. In the past conditional, she would have cleansed Kosovo in 1998. In the present, she reports “less ambition” to do so. In the future, KFOR leaves and takes its arrivals with it. The verb changes. The policy does not. What shifts is only the agent: from the state she served, to no one, to history itself, relieved of any identifiable hand. Assigning the task to history is a familiar move in irredentist rhetoric, and it invites one question. How did history perform the task last time? The answer sits in Europe’s own files.

The last wait ended twice, both times the same way. In the winter of 1877 and 1878, as the Ottomans fell back, the Serbian army expelled nearly the entire Albanian population of the sanjak of Niš: Toplica, Kuršumlija, Prokuplje, Leskovac. The historian Justin McCarthy counted 131,000 Muslims there in 1876 and twelve thousand six years later; some six hundred villages were emptied and resettled from central Serbia. The expelled, the muhaxhirë, walked into Kosovo and settled, among other places, in Drenica, the district Paunović presents to her viewers as a suspiciously pure Albanian nest and the cradle of the KLA. Drenica is not a plot. It is the address of Serbia’s first expulsion. And Europe did not look away; it looked, and signed. The Congress of Berlin recognized Serbia’s annexation of the emptied districts while returnees were being expelled a second time. The removal was the act. Berlin was the receipt.

The second ending had witnesses of rank. Behind the Serbian army that entered Kosovo and Macedonia in October 1912, a correspondent for a Kiev daily described Albanian villages in rows of flame all the way to Skopje, headless bodies beneath the Vardar bridge, and an officer explaining without embarrassment that the atrocities were policy, not excess. The correspondent was Leon Trotsky. Contemporary reporting put the Albanian dead near twenty five thousand within months. The Carnegie Endowment’s commission, Europe’s own inquest, found a campaign aimed at transforming the ethnic character of the conquered regions; its report was published in 1914 and shelved. From inside Serbia, the socialist Dimitrije Tucović wrote that his country had “carried out the attempted premeditated murder of an entire nation,” and named the mechanism: a press that called for annihilation, and an army that acted on the call. While the reports accumulated, the ambassadors of the great powers sat in London and drew Albania’s borders so as to leave Kosovo inside Serbia. State the finding plainly. Europe did not fail to recognize the pattern. Twice, it recognized the outcome instead.

Tucović’s mechanism is why the rest of Paunović’s hour matters. Demonization does not accompany removal. It precedes it as a working phase, the conversion of a population into a security problem so that its disappearance can later be administered as a solution. Her hour performs the phase to the letter. The returnees are trained killers, the poisoned Albanian schoolchildren of 1990 were actors, the Jashari family were shields for a coward, Reçak was an improvisation, the state is fake and the land is holy. In 1913 this work belonged to the nationalist press, with the state keeping its deniability. In 2026 it is delivered by a cabinet minister on a pro-government channel. The preparatory discourse has not persisted. It has been promoted.

The government’s defense confirmed the diagnosis. Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dačić explained that his colleague had merely said that all who do not feel Serbia should return to their state of origin, Albania. He offered the axiom as the exculpation. It is the doctrine: assigning a population to a mother state elsewhere is the founding premise of every removal program in the region’s record, from the clearing of Toplica to Čubrilović’s memorandum of 1937. His arithmetic, that there can be no cleansing where Serbs now number fewer than Albanians, defines the crime by its end state; by that standard Toplica was not cleansing either, until the last Albanian left. And his history, that Kosovo’s Albanians arrived from Albania after the Second World War, collides with a border Enver Hoxha sealed on pain of treason and a majority documented centuries before it; the contested wartime arrivals under Italian occupation cannot carry a majority that predates them. The one mass settlement in Kosovo’s modern record ran the other way, sixty five thousand Serb and Montenegrin colonists installed by interwar Belgrade, and it had a ministry.

Even the Deputy Prime Minister’s standing repays a glance. I was born in Prizren, he says, where ten thousand Serbs lived in 1991. He was, for six months, because his father, a policeman, had been posted there; the family’s home district is Toplica, beneath Jastrebac, the very territory emptied of Albanians in 1878 and resettled from central Serbia. No one chooses a birthplace or a grandfather, and this is a map, not an accusation. But pressed to its documentation, the autochthony argument points in the direction its authors least intend.

Which returns the analysis to Brussels, and to the lineage its own archive establishes. Asked whether the Commission stands by its positive assessment of Serbia’s conduct in the dialogue, Commissioner Marta Kos answered that she could only assume the minister’s positions did not represent the government. Belgrade had at that hour clarified nothing, which means the Commissioner drafted the accused’s defense before the accused had requested one. The Speaker of Serbia’s parliament submitted the completed form the same day, while the Deputy Prime Minister contradicted it in public; a Speaker speaks for a chamber, a Deputy Prime Minister for the executive whose position was the thing in doubt. Brussels has been handed both answers and shows every sign of choosing the one it wrote itself.

The posture has a name in the scholarship: stabilitocracy, standards traded for the cooperation of useful regimes, scrutiny calibrated to the offender’s utility rather than the offense’s gravity. Kosovo, small and aligned, has lived under actual EU punitive measures since 2023 over a sequence of disputes that began with license plates. Serbia, holder of lithium, ammunition lines and the migration routes, endorses cleansing at cabinet level and receives adjectives. Meanwhile KFOR, the single variable the minister named, stands reinforced since Banjska and debated in every allied capital. Her interview assigns strategic value to each good-faith argument for its drawdown, and it explains what Banjska was for: such vacuums are manufactured first and awaited afterward, never merely found.

This is why the accession file now carries more than technical weight. Berlin certified the first removal after the fact. London certified the second while it was underway. If Brussels lets this week pass unmarked, the positive assessment in Serbia’s file will begin to function as a third certificate, and an unprecedented one, issued for the preparatory discourse in advance. That is a warning, not a verdict. The file is still open, and so is the choice.

Paunović was asked, at the end of the hour, what the Serbs of Kosovo expect. Much remains, she answered; the land is Serbian; the wait has history on its side. On the record, the last clause is true, and Europe is much of the reason. Waiting, as a strategy, has two requirements: an exit to wait for, and a notary to certify what follows it. The interview named the exit. Berlin and London show who has twice held the seal. Whether Brussels keeps the office is the only question this week has left open.

Ngadhnjim Brovina is a political scientist at the University for Business and Technology in Pristina, where his research addresses party systems, democratic consolidation, and transnational party organisation in postcommunist Europe.