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Balkan tensions show in DavosDAVOS, Switzerland (CNN) -- Yugoslavia’s leader Vojislav Kostunica has pledged to use peaceful means for solving problems in the Balkans but warned that achieving stability was like building castles on the sand. Sunday's session at the World Economic Forum in Davos billed as a discussion on Balkans reconstruction became more of an occasion for the area’s leaders, mostly staring fixedly ahead of themselves, to set out their negotiating positions for talks to come. Kostunica, a figure of considerable interest in Davos, disappointed some with his insistence that Russia must remain a big player in the area to balance U.S. influence. But he declared that his ambition was “a Balkans looking more and more like Europe and less and less like the Balkans of the past.” Setting out the scale of his reconstruction problem, he told the delegates that Yugoslavia had to cope with 800,000 refugees and 40 percent unemployment. They had been burdened in the past with a centralised economy and an authoritarian regime. But they had suffered too, he reminded his audience, from EU sanctions. The 1999 NATO bombing campaign had caused damage estimated at $3 billion to the country’s power system and $30 billion dollars of damage overall. Tension showed when President Rexhep Meidani of Albania said that neither Yugoslavia nor Serbia could be truly democratic as long as their leaders held on to territories whose peoples wanted to exercise the right of self-determination. He insisted a date must be set for parliamentary elections in Kosovo and he urged European leaders not to try to organise the ultimate shape of the Balkans but to “step back and allow the elected leaders in the region to negotiate their own future.”
The Balkans, he said, “can’t be based on artificial federal concoctions.” President Stjepan Mesic of Croatia said that the goal of achieving security and co-operation in the Balkans was “within reach.” “However grateful we may be for humanitarian aid in the past what we need now is profit-based direct investment," he said. But he warned that any attempt to trade borders or people in settling the region would be “the source of a new war.” He rejected calls for a mini-EU in the area, saying that would be an illusion. The principle of individual accession to the EU was important. President Boris Trajkovski of Macedonia echoed those warnings, saying that any attempt to change borders could cause new instability. Early integration of Balkan countries into the EU and NATO, he urged, would discourage any calls for such changes. Regional co-operation could not be a substitute for that. President Petar Stoyanov of Bulgaria spoke of the “Balkan mentality” which used to lead to resolving every argument with violence and said that democratisation of Yugoslavia had been essential to the normalisation of south east Europe. George Papandreou, the Greek Foreign Minister, said: “I am proud to be a Balkan” but warned that if the Balkan countries could not co-operate they would become a sub-region. Carl Bildt, the United Nations special envoy to the Balkans, reminded the Davos delegates: “There is no region in the world in which the UN has been asked to undertake so many peacekeeping roles.” He called for the continued prosecution of war criminals, saying it was not for retribution but for reconciliation. People in the region had to come to accept what had been done in their names. In one of the more memorable quotations of the Davos conference he declared: “We are all nationalists. I’m a Swede. But I don’t beat up Danes, at least not daily. And that even goes for Norwegians.” RELATED STORIES: Belgrade urged to assist U.N. tribunal RELATED SITES: Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - Home Page |
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