Prorokovic: Some Want Kosovo's Path to the UN to Be Like Palestine's, but These Cases Are Incomparable

The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution last week calling on the Security Council to positively consider Palestine's request to become the 194th member of the UN, without setting a precedent for future cases such as Kosovo and Taiwan. Dusan Prorokovic, a senior research associate at the Institute of International Politics and Economics, states that the cases of Palestine and Kosovo are not comparable, and it is unrealistic for Kosovo to follow Palestine's path to UN membership.

In 2012, Palestine transitioned from an "observer entity" to a "non-member observer state," and now the United Nations General Assembly has supported Palestine's candidacy for full UN membership. When asked how likely it is for Kosovo, which aspires to become a UN member, to follow step-by-step like Palestine, Prorokovic says that this trajectory is likely being considered by some in Pristina, and especially in Washington, and they would like it to appear similar for Kosovo.

“It is not a realistic option to proceed step-by-step because such a process does not exist in the UN system; it was invented for Palestine because the Palestinian issue is very complex and continuous. The UN committed seven and a half decades ago to resolve it, and there is enormous pressure from all the countries that have recognized Palestine and established bilateral relations with it, which is a convincing majority of UN members. We do not have any of that in the case of Kosovo,” Prorokovic told Kosovo Online.

Palestinians were guaranteed a state as early as 1947, three major wars have been fought over this, and we are witnessing a fourth. Additionally, Palestine was a mandate territory of the British Empire and lost that status in 1947 due to the decolonization process. Prorokovic notes that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 1974 calling for the recognition of Palestine, leading to the "strange solution of granting observer status in the UN General Assembly in the 21st century." He emphasizes that the issue of Palestine was mainly handled by the UN General Assembly, while in the case of Kosovo, there is a Security Council Resolution, which is not the same.

“Kosovo is an integral part of the Republic of Serbia and was not anyone's mandate territory in 1999, nor was Resolution 1244 adopted due to a decolonization process. UN Security Council decisions are binding, they must be respected, they are part of international law, and they are not in the form of recommendations, calls, or similar categories. These are fundamental differences, and that is why I think that the idea being entertained in some minds in Pristina or Washington is not a realistic option,” Prorokovic said.

Moreover, if a territory that self-proclaimed independence is to join the UN system, there are about ten other candidates with unresolved status ahead of Kosovo.

“Why should Kosovo be an exception? Western Sahara, or the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, became a member of the African Union, and the vast majority of then-UN members recognized the Polisario Front, but no unique path, such as that devised for Palestine, was applied in the case of Western Sahara. Also, one must consider the current perspective. In the UN General Assembly, the collective West has not been able to muster a majority for a relatively significant non-binding resolution on Srebrenica for over a month. If they cannot secure a majority on an issue where they counted on the support of all Western states plus all Muslim countries, it is unrealistic to expect that they could secure any majority regarding the Kosovo issue. This brings us to the fields of international law and politics, American hegemony, and everything else that has been discussed in recent years in the UN General Assembly,” Prorokovic concluded.