Opinion by Maria Zakharova

This article is dedicated to NATO members who have been crying wolf about violations of international law like no one else.

Kosovo and Metohija is a territory in southern Serbia, where Albanians account for most of the population. In the second half of the 20th century, there was a surge in separatist sentiment there, which the Yugoslav/Serbian authorities had to counter.

It was against the backdrop of Yugoslavia’s disintegration in June 1990 that Albanians in the regional parliament proposed holding a vote on Kosovo’s independence from Serbia while remaining in Yugoslavia. After that, the Serbian president dissolved this assembly.

On September 7, 1990, the Albanian members from the dissolved parliament secretly proclaimed the Republic of Kosovo, where Yugoslavian law would apply to the extent that it was consistent with Kosovo’s own legal norms. On September 22, 1991, the parliament of the “independent ‘Republic of Kosovo’” proclaimed full independence and initiated a referendum in this territory, which took place on September 26-30, 1991. This is how they did it: the parliament voted on independence first, after which 99 percent of voters cast their ballots in favour of this during the referendum. The Republic of Albania recognised the results of the referendum.

Throughout the 1990s, Kosovo sought to have its independence recognised internationally, which resulted in an open standoff with the Serbs in 1998-1999, the Kosovo War, unleashed by the militants from the Kosovo Liberation Army, supported and encouraged by the West, including its intelligence services, resulting in multiple civilian casualties. In March 1999, NATO openly interfered in the conflict by bombing Yugoslavia. On June 9, 1999, under an international Military Technical Agreement signed by NATO representatives and the Yugoslav army in Kumanovo, the NATO-led international Kosovo Force (KFOR) was put in charge of the territory.

The next day, the UN Security Council convened for its 4,011th meeting and adopted a binding resolution, known as Resolution 1244, which reaffirmed then Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity, and accordingly Serbia’s, when it became Yugoslavia’s successor in 2006, while also providing for an international civilian and military presence in Kosovo. The resolution also stipulated that the Kosovo crisis must be resolved based on the coordinated principles contained in the annexes to the resolution.

On February 17, 2008, Kosovo’s “parliament” approved a bill unilaterally proclaiming the territory’s independence from Serbia effective as of February 18.

Serbia responded by asking the United Nations on August 15, 2008, to review this step from a legal perspective. On October 8, 2008, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 63/3 in which it called on the International Court of Justice in The Hague to render an advisory opinion on the following question: “Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?”

Eighteen months later, on July 22, 2010, the International Court of Justice released its advisory opinion concluding that “the declaration of independence of Kosovo adopted on February 17, 2008, did not violate international law” because international law contained no prohibition of declarations of independence, nor did it violate UN Security Council Resolution 1244, since the authors of the “declaration” were not bound by the framework established under Resolution 1244.

Led by the United States, the Western countries welcomed this International Court’s advisory opinion by giving it a broad interpretation as approving secession, despite the fact that UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which the Russian Federation adheres to, among others, remains at the core of the Kosovo settlement and calls for a compromise taking into consideration Belgrade’s interests.

During the proceedings, Washington officially advised the Court to accept the opinion it issued arguing that the territorial integrity principle did not rule out the emergence of new states within the territory of the ones that already existed.