Kosovo, one year on

It was one year ago that Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia. Thankfully a lot of the predictions of doom and gloom - namely a war between the Kosovars and the Serbs - never came to pass. But that’s not to say that everything is rosy for the world’s newest nation.

Only about a quarter of the UN’s member nations have recognized Kosovo as an independent country, and a lot of the places that have are members of the European Union (as well as the US and Canada). The Serbs who live in the far north of Kosovo in towns huddled along the Serbian border do not feel that they are a part of the new state and a mission of European Union troops (the largest-ever military mission by the EU) maintains an uneasy peace. Russia refuses to recognize Kosovo, blocking attempts at the UN to do so, while using the example of Kosovo as a justification for their own recognition of the Georgian lands of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.

Much of the early excitement about independence has ebbed, as the reality of crushing poverty takes hold in Kosovo. Unemployment is running at a rate of 70% (and is much higher among Serbs and women), and according to the Independent newspaper of the UK, the economic situation will likely get worse. So far the country’s economy has been dependent on remittances from the roughly one million Kosovars living abroad. But they too have been hit by the global economic crisis and many find that they don’t have spare cash to send home, so Kosovo’s main source of income seems to be drying up, at least for the short term.

The economy in Kosovo, the legal part at least, is based mainly on subsistence farming, not great base to grow an economy on. Kosovo does have potential resource wealth - coal and other minerals - but getting them out of the ground and to market will take billions of dollars of investment in the national infrastructure, something unlikely to happen anytime soon.

The question of whether Kosovo was really a viable country, or whether the Kosovars would have been better as an autonomous region in a larger Serbia that was fast-tracked into the European Union, was a good question to ask about a year ago. But for reasons that seemed to have more to do with settling old political scores with Serbia and Russia rather than Kosovo itself, the Western powers (US, UK, France, Germany) were all quick to recognize Kosovo’s claim of independence. So the EU is stuck with an ill-prepared new nation that now seems destined to be dependent on foreign aid - both from other nations and their own citizens living abroad - for years to come; a place of simmering ethnic tensions and bleak futures for its citizens.

But at least, so far, it hasn’t turned out as bad as it could have.