Kosovo’s New Enlarged Defense Budget and Tariffs Rankle Serbia

Serbian President Alexander Vucic at a meeting in the Pentagon in 2012. (Wikimedia Commons)

The reveal of Kosovo’s 2019 budget in January proved to be a tipping point in relations between Serbia and Kosovo. Balkan Insight reports that Pristina allocated an extra €6 million ($6.8 million) to “begin the slow process of transforming the country’s security force into a regular army.” This budget hike brings total defense spending in the disputed territory to almost €60 million ($68 million) in total, with plans to increase that further by €5 million ($5.6 million) each year.

Two decades ago, a bloody war between Serbs and ethnic Albanians necessitated Western intervention and resulted in the eventual secession of the southern province of Kosovo from Serbia.

Serb Kosovars and the government of Serbia in Belgrade both oppose the establishment of a regular army and continue to push against its continuous training, which the government says is aimed at optimizing “operational readiness,” reports Balkan Insight. In addition to the development of the new army, Kosovo placed a 100 percent tariff on Serbian goods in November 2018 in retaliation for “Belgrade’s attempts to undermine its statehood,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty writes. Both the European Union and the United States have pressed Kosovo to repeal the measure.

Belgrade has expressed concern over the safety and autonomy of ethnic Serbs living in the north of Kosovo. The imposition of this tariff, as well as the budgetary expansion of the military, come on the one-year anniversary of the murder of Serb Kosovar politician Oliver Ivanović, who was shot in the back six times from a moving vehicle in the town of Mitrovica, BIRN writes. The murder of Ivanović punctuated a series of more than 74 attacks on ethnic Serbs in the region. Kosovar police refused to treat any of these cases as ethnic violence, Balkan Insight reports.

Before his death in January 2018, Ivanović, in an interview with BIRN, claimed that “the center of power is not within the municipality building” but within an “other, informal center of power,” specifically referencing mafia rings run by Albanian separatists and debt collectors. These crime rings have strong ties to Serbian nationalist parties, with citizens caught in the middle.

NewsAsia notes that a possible land swap between Serbia and Kosovo could be a solution. However, the plan has raised concerns across the European Union that dividing borders along ethnic lines will strand Serbian enclaves such as Gracanica, with a population of over 80,000, under Kosovar rule. Serbs in these regions have debated whether, NewsAsia writes, “[Serbian President Alexander] Vucic has abandoned them to ‘an Albanian prison.’”

Leaders from Russia, China, the U.S., and the European Union have all criticized the growing divide, Bloomberg reports, demanding that “Kosovo abolish the taxes” and Serbia “respond in a constructive way to stop provocations from both sides.” Diplomats hope for a historic 2019 agreement for normalization of relations and an end to the conflict, citing the “courage and creativity” of the governments in the Republic of Macedonia and Greece as an inspiration for a potential peace in the Balkans.