US Kosovo Policy

Ten Years After Dayton: Winning the Peace in The Balkans (May 19, 2005)

R. Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs

Introduction

Mr. Hamilton, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me here and giving me the honor to speak with you today at the Wilson Center. All of us in the American Foreign Service, Mr. Hamilton, remember well your many years of service in the House and on the International Relations Committee, particularly during the 1990's when your support and actions were so crucial and your steady leadership was greatly appreciated. We are pleased that the Wilson Center can now profit from your expertise and experiences with you as its Director and President. I am also pleased to be with you today at the invitation of my friend John Sitilides of the Wilson Center.

President Woodrow Wilson went to war reluctantly in 1917 and only as a last recourse. He is best remembered now as a President determined to defend the principles he believed were essential to a moral world order. Wilson was also a man who had a clear vision of a European future and foresaw a role for a democratic international community to preserve the peace. The war that embroiled the U.S. and the Wilson Administration in Europe began in the Balkans in the wars of 1912 and 1913 and in the shot fired by Gavrilio Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

The twentieth century began and ended with conflict in the Balkans. A decade ago, international peacekeepers were held hostage in Bosnia, and the International Community was held hostage by a lack of consensus for action. The Balkans were our top foreign policy priority – just as Iraq and the Global War on Terrorism are today. And for fundamentally similar reasons: to stop catastrophic human rights abuses, to stand against tyranny, and to stand up for the values that make us more secure. Today, the Balkans remain a vital part of that global mission. It is time to solve this missing piece in the President's vision of a single Europe whole, free, and at peace.

Nearly one hundred years after the First World War and a decade after Srebrenica, the U.S is resolved to move the Balkan region beyond the savage conflicts of the 19 th and 20 th centuries and to integrate it into the democratic peace established in the rest of Europe after the end of the Cold War – because it is in our national interest to do so. This Center, named in President Wilson's honor, is perhaps the most fitting place to discuss United States policy in the Balkans and what we and our European partners must now do to help the people of the region find stability, democracy and peace. Ten years after the horrible massacres at Srebrenica, NATO's battle to stop the Bosnian war and the U.S.-inspired peace at Dayton, 2005 must begin a year of decision on the future of the Balkans.

To be effective today, we need to learn from the tragic events of a decade ago. Ten years ago the Balkans were in flames in a catastrophic conflict. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed and millions more were displaced from their homes. The Balkans also was a gaping diplomatic wound, which, if left untreated, was capable of infecting trans-Atlantic relations, not just between the U.S. and Western Europe, but also with a newly independent Russia, which had just emerged from the disintegrated Soviet Union. It was in the Balkans that the U.S. and its allies - and Russia - reached a consensus for action and put an end to the worst bloodshed Europe had seen since World War II.

It was in the Balkans that we learned anew that for diplomacy to be effective, it must sometimes be backed with the threat and use of force. We learned in the Balkans the danger of delay when crimes against humanity are committed by a wicked tyrant, and it was in the Balkans where the U.S. and NATO intervened to stop the Bosnian war and win the peace in 1995 and then acted again in 1999 to stop Slobodan Milosevic barbarous assault on Kosovo's Albanian communities.

As State Department Spokesman in 1995, I remember all too vividly the feeling of horror upon receiving the first reports of the massacre at Srebrenica ten years ago in July. I recall the terrible sadness we all felt at learning that our friends Ambassador Bob Frasure, Nelson Drew and Joe Kruzel were later killed in an accident on the Mt. Igman road because the Bosnian Serbs refused to guarantee them safe passage in their mission of peace. I was privileged to be at Dayton when Ambassador Richard Holbrooke achieved a remarkable peace agreement very few thought was possible. As Ambassador to Greece during the Kosovo crisis, working closely with my good friend Ambassador Chris Hill, I saw first hand the suffering of Albanians forced to flee Milosevic's cruelty. And most recently, as U.S. Ambassador to NATO, I saw how far these countries have come. I've met with the region's leaders who have a genuine desire to move forward beyond the past in a responsible way and into our great trans-Atlantic alliance.

A Year of Decision

Ten years after Srebrenica the United States and our partners cannot define averting disaster in the Balkans as success: we must demand solutions to problems, not defer them. The days for diplomatic triage in the Balkans must give way to a final and decisive international effort to help the peoples of the region to put war behind them forever, find peace and find a future home in NATO and the European Union.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been and will continue to be fully supportive of a strong U.S. role in this last campaign to achieve a permanent peace in the Balkans region. Secretary Rice has asked me to travel to Sarajevo, Belgrade and Kosovo in early June to help take the final steps necessary to bring security and peace to the Balkans. The Balkans—so often a source of instability in European history—are now poised to be the last piece in forming, as President Bush describes, "a Europe that is truly whole, free and at peace." That objective is our largest strategic goal in Europe, and one that will be one of the most important accomplishments of the European-American alliance. With the Cold War over, the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union disappeared, most of Central Europe now part of NATO and the European Union, it is only in the Balkans that our work for a final, democratic peace in Europe is incomplete.

And yet the opportunity to move forward is not indefinite. We must act now to address the future status of Kosovo, the region's last and largest unresolved issue. The status quo is neither stable nor sustainable. On this, all parties agree.

Hope and Challenges in Kosovo

2005 is a year of decision for Kosovo. Six years ago the United States led the NATO Allies in a campaign to end Slobodan Milosevic's abhorrent abuse in Kosovo and halt his attempts at ethnic cleansing. After an intensive military air campaign, the international community demanded that Serb security and paramilitary forces leave, allowing Kosovar Albanians back to their homes under NATO protection. Belgrade reluctantly complied, but Kosovo was effectively made a ward of the international community—administered by the UN and secured by NATO—with its future status left to later determination. That time is upon us to resolve that issue, and to finally win the peace.

Winning the Peace in Kosovo

Together with the United Nations and our European partners, we hope to launch a process this year to determine Kosovo's future status. Getting there will not be easy. It will require continued U.S. engagement and trans-Atlantic cooperation. It will require Kosovo's leadership to continue progress on the UN-endorsed standards that are designed to ensure basic values of multi-ethnicity, democracy, and market-orientation while placing Kosovo decisively on the path to integration with Europe. For Kosovo to move forward, the timeline for accountability must accelerate, as responsibility moves over from the UN Mission in Kosovo to the Provisional Institutions of Self Government (PISG). No matter what Kosovo's final status might be, these values are at the heart of our effort to resolve the major remaining issue in the Balkans.

In 2003, my predecessor Marc Grossman proposed, and the UN Security Council endorsed, a process of regular reviews of progress on the standards, leading to a comprehensive progress review in mid-2005. We hope that review will begin shortly and have strongly endorsed Norway's able Ambassador to NATO, Kai Eide, to conduct the review. Further implementation of the standards, especially those related to the rights and security of Kosovo's minority communities, is essential for all the people of Kosovo to live in the kind of society they deserve, and for Kosovo to meet the rigorous criteria for Euro-Atlantic integration. Having put meaning in the UN slogan "standards before status" we are effectively moving to an approach of "standards with status" – recognizing that, only with a resolution of the status question will we bring the kind of stability to Kosovo necessary for the building of the kind of advanced democratic and market-oriented institutions that the standards process has sought to achieve.

We are working actively with our fellow members of the Contact Group -- the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United Kingdom – to implement our vision for Kosovo and hope to move forward with the comprehensive review this summer. The review will look not only at the technical fulfillment of the standards, but also at the larger political issues. While the result of the review is not a foregone conclusion, we are hopeful that Kosovo is on course to a positive review. We expect the Contact Group and the UN to meet this fall to consider the results of the comprehensive review and to decide whether to launch a status process. If the result of the review is sufficiently positive, the United States will advocate a swift launch of status talks. We believe a senior European political figure should lead the talks and Secretary Rice has offered to identify a senior American to serve as deputy.

The exact shape of a status process remains undefined, and in order to preserve our role as facilitators of a negotiated solution, the United States and our partners in the Contact Group have not advocated any specific outcome for status talks. However, the Contact Group has already identified three essential elements: status talks will involve dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina; Kosovo's Serbs and other minority communities will have a role in the process; and all parties are expected to engage constructively and not obstruct the process. The goal will be to agree on Kosovo's future status in the international community.

Belgrade has set forth a position of "more than autonomy, but less than independence" for Kosovo. Kosovo's Albanian population insists on immediate and unconditional independence. Finding common ground between these positions will be a major challenge but we believe that with U.S. leadership and trans-Atlantic cooperation, we can a solution that produces long term stability for the Balkans by moving the whole region into the Euro-Atlantic family of nations.

The Contact Group has also identified some basic principles that it believes should guide a settlement of Kosovo's final status. We ruled out a return to the situation before March 1999 and made clear that Kosovo's final status must enhance regional stability and contribute to the Euro-Atlantic integration of the Balkans. Accordingly, Kosovo's final status must:

• Be based on multi-ethnicity with full respect for human rights including the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes in safety;
• Offer effective constitutional guarantees to ensure the protection of minorities;
• Promote effective mechanisms for fighting organized crime and terrorism; and;
• Include specific safeguards for the protection of cultural and religious heritage. Just last week, the U.S. pledged one million dollars to a UNESCO effort to raise funds to protect all of Kosovo's religious and historical sites, including especially Serb sites, to ensure the preservation of Kosovo's rich cultural and ethnic heritage.

Additionally, the Contact Group told the parties that we believe that Kosovo's final status must:

• Not be decided by any party unilaterally or result from the use of force;
• Not change the boundaries of the current territory of Kosovo, either through partition or through a new union of Kosovo with any country or part of any country after the resolution of Kosovo's status;
• Fully respect the territorial integrity of all other states in the region;
• Ensure that Kosovo continues to develop in a sustainable way both politically and economically; and
• Ensure that Kosovo does not pose a military or security threat to its neighbors.

We expect that the UN's international civilian and NATO's military presence would continue past a status settlement to ensure its full implementation and to monitor the political and security situations for Kosovo's minorities. We are discussing with our friends in the European Union placing an EU focus on the international efforts following a status settlement. We ask them to think creatively and to act decisively and assure them that the United States will remain an active partner in Kosovo and throughout the region.

That means we will continue to honor our Alliance commitments and to lead efforts to ensure that KFOR is the most capable and effective force it can be.