Balkan Rift Deepens With Some Unexpected Help From... Togo

(Bloomberg) -- The biggest territorial dispute in the Balkans, which has hampered Serbia’s and Kosovo’s integration with the European Union, has gone global instead of moving closer to resolution.

While publicly stating that it wants to resume EU-mediated talks, Serbia has been campaigning to persuade nations not to recognize Kosovo’s 2008 unilateral declaration of independence.

Vowing never to accept the Western-backed split of Kosovo, Serbia is working to reduce the number of countries that recognized Europe’s newest state after the total peaked at 116 of 193 United Nations members.

In the latest twist to the diplomatic saga, Serbia’s Deputy Premier Ivica Dacic said this week he persuaded Togo to revoke its recognition made in 2014, making the west Africa nation 15th in the world to switch sides in the dispute and back Serbia’s stance. Previous Serb wins include Grenada, Suriname, Liberia, Sao Tome and Principe, Guinea-Bissau, Burundi, Papua New Guinea and Lesotho, he said.

Serbia aims to reduce the number of states recognizing Kosovo to at least half of all UN members to make sure the latter never joins the organization, not even as an observer, according to Serbia’s foreign minister. The biggest former Yugoslav republic also relies on the backing from Russia, China, India and five EU states that have not recognized Kosovo.

The diplomatic dispute, which has intensified in the past three years, has stirred another wave of unease in Kosovo, with the Foreign Ministry saying on Facebook it has faced “an unprecedented diplomatic and propaganda campaign by Serbia with the support of Russia and other countries to hinder Kosovo’s integration into the international community.”

The government is working with the U.S. and other western allies to counter the campaign by Serbs who use “bribes, corrupt affairs, arms sales and visa waiver agreements” to win nations over, the ministry said.

Serbia and Kosovo fought a war that only stopped in 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia. The Balkan neighbors signed in 2013 an EU-brokered framework deal to mend ties but the efforts stalled last year when Serbia blocked Kosovo from joining Interpol, triggering a retaliatory 100% tax on Serb imports.

The trade barrier will remain until Serbia accepts Kosovo’s statehood, said Premier Ramush Haradinaj who has made the tariff a key theme of his campaign ahead of Oct. 6 snap vote in the landlocked nation of 1.9 million people.

The U.S., France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. have urged the Balkan neighbors to sit and talk rather than use resources to battle it out globally.

“For Kosovo, that means suspending the tariffs imposed on Serbia,” the western nations said in a joint statement in mid August. “For Serbia, that means suspending the de-recognition campaign against Kosovo.”

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic dismissed this, saying that under the 2013 deal signed in Brussels both sides were to halt the hunt for allies at the time when the total of countries accepting Kosovo as a country was just over 80.

Kosovo “never accepted this, and since they didn’t, we just did our job” to seek reversals, Vucic said after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week.

The next showdown may be in October when Interpol holds its conference in Chile and Serbia will again seek to block Kosovo from the organization, Foreign Minister Dacic said.

--With assistance from Gordana Filipovic and Jasmina Kuzmanovic.

To contact the reporter on this story: Misha Savic in Belgrade at msavic2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, ;Irina Vilcu at isavu@bloomberg.net, Alan Crawford

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