Appeasement and Aftermath: What Banjska Revealed About the West
In a charged London chamber, voices clashed over Kosovo, Serbia, and Western appeasement, exposing Europe’s uneasy conscience and the perilous politics of power, principle, and paralysis.
On the first night of The Gunpowder Chronicles’ new debate series, The Situation Room, the chair announced a hitch. “We had a last minute cancellation from the good ambassador,” said moderator
, adding that it was due to “unforeseen circumstances.” And with that, the evening pressed on, no ceremony, little cushioning into a subject already freighted with grievance and distrust: whether Europe’s support for Serbia undermines democracy and security in the Western Balkans.The motion was put plainly. As Sheppard read it, the proposition held that the Banjska attack of 24 September 2023 in Kosovo was “direct proof that Europe’s support for Serbia undermines democracy and security in the region.” The format promised “evidence, clarity, and persuasion.” What it delivered was something starker: a clash of worldviews about law and legitimacy, about appeasement and accommodation, and about where responsibility truly lies when a frozen conflict thaws in bursts of violence.
The briefing: a chronology of erosion
Opening what the moderator called a “crisis briefing,”
offered a compressed narrative arc from the end of the 1999 war to the present unravel. He traced the post-independence years, the recognitions that followed, and the stubborn constitutional claim from Belgrade that “Kosovo is Serbia.” In Xhymshiti’s telling, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine accelerated a pattern already set in motion by Western “appeasement” after the annexation of Crimea. That permissiveness, he argued, emboldened Serbia to push a “destabilising operation in the Balkans.”The recital turned granular: a 2022 foreign-policy alignment between Belgrade and Moscow; the call for Serbs to boycott Kosovo’s institutions; attacks on Kosovo’s election authorities; the establishment of road barricades; and a cycle of escalation in which Kosovo authorities cleared obstacles while KFOR soldiers were injured in clashes “about 90 members,” he said, some by “firearms.” Throughout, he charged, the international community led by the EU and the United States kept pressing Kosovo “to de-escalate,” even as Pristina faced “aggression.”
The Banjska raid itself, Xhymshiti argued, was “a nearly exact Russian-styled attempt” and not an isolated spasm by “local extremists.” He pointed to “weapons caches” and asserted that arms “were verifiably found to be owned by the Serbian” side. In a broader sweep, he framed Serbia’s strategy as a bid to make Kosovo “unworkable,” and he linked Western indulgence of Belgrade to a longer pattern1: a tendency to congratulate illiberal manoeuvres as democratic normality. The picture he offered was uncompromising: a region “dragged deeper into instability,” a West that kept asking Kosovo to yield, and a neighbour testing the line.
The diplomat’s caution
Ian Cameron Cliff, a former British ambassador in the region, answered first with the caution of someone who has inhabited the long corridor between principle and practice. The situation is “immensely complicated,” he said. The EU acts under constraint; some of its member states still refuse to recognise Kosovo. “Everything the EU does towards Kosovo, it does… with countries… which don’t recognise Kosovo,” and that splits the room before it begins to negotiate.
Cliff dated the present diplomatic track back to 2011, noting that “on neither side has there been” sufficient political will. He sketched the more immediate backdrop to Banjska, local resignations, a boycott, municipal elections that “they knew were going to be boycotted,” protests at town halls, and KFOR “hold[ing] the ring.” He warned against a procedural fetishism »following the letter of Kosovo law, in an environment where a very large percentage of the population… do not accept the authority of the Pristina government« that produces “very, very adverse political results.”
The argument was not sympathy for Belgrade; it was an insistence on political sequencing. Treat the north as a problem of governance and consent as much as of statutes and sovereignty. “Where does Kosovo have to go?” Cliff asked. “There’s only one way: the EU,” but that path requires a different sensibility than “bang[ing] the table” over legal texts alone.
The academic’s charge: sovereignty, appeasement, inevitability
When Dr Aidan Hehir began, he waved away a parallel that had surfaced in the room. “If we start talking about Northern Ireland, we’re going to be here all night,” he said. The analogy, he argued, is “false.” The Irish were “oppressed by the British for 800 years.” In Kosovo today, he insisted, “the Kosovo Serbs are not being oppressed by the government of Kosovo.”
Hehir’s case was brisk and prosecutorial. Those barricades in Mitrovica? “Theatre,” he said, staged as if Albanians were poised to flood the bridge and “kill all the Serbs.” The Kurti government, in his view, “exercise[d] internal sovereignty,” as any “self-respecting government” would: there is no European state that would accept “a part of our country that’s being ruled by another country… [so] we have to abide by their norms.”
On Banjska, he was scathing about international omissions. British reports of arms “going into Orthodox churches” were not acted upon by KFOR, he said “we can’t do anything about that” was, as he recounted it, the response. With intelligence unheeded, “Banjska was inevitable.” Whether the aim was as grand as taking Pristina was almost beside the point: allow weapons to move “with the intention of one day using them,” and “at some point they’re going to be used.”
Hehir pressed the “appeasement” line further. He mapped it onto a wider failure to draw lines from 2008 to Crimea, to a European habit of congratulating President Aleksandar Vucic on “winning another democratic election,” thereby “emboldening” him. He called the Kosovo Specialist Chambers a “massive PR disaster,” saying he had “didn’t meet a single person” in Kosovo who wanted such a court, and he warned that implementing the Association of Serb-majority Municipalities as envisaged in 2013 would “destroy” the country.
Kurti, courts, and contested architectures
In the middle rounds, the evening turned to personalities and institutions. On Albin Kurti, Cliff first called him “one of the few… conviction politician[s],” then immediately qualified himself: “I’m not so sure. I think he’s a pragmatist. A conviction pragmatist maybe.” He argued Kurti had “didn’t believe in the Ahtisaari plan,” “didn’t like the constitution of Kosovo,” and “didn’t support the dialogue with Serbia.” The implication was not ad hominem so much as a warning: conviction can calcify; pragmatism can harden into something more brittle if it refuses to build coalitions.
The Specialist Chambers drew a sharp exchange. Hehir’s view was that the court layered yet another external instrument onto Kosovo’s already dense legal canopy, UN structures, EU missions, Kosovo’s own judiciary “and somebody says we need a fifth, we need a sixth one.” Cliff countered that Serbia had pushed for a UN tribunal and that “the recognising states of the EU and NATO did not want the UN to assume more authority.” As he described it, the Chambers are “a special chamber of the Kosovo court staffed by EULEX judges… an amalgam of the Kosovo institutions and EULEX.” The disagreement was precise, not rhetorical; it cut to whether the international presence in Kosovo is a scaffold or a superstructure that distorts the building it is meant to support.
The Association, in Three Keys
When the debate turned to the Association of Serb-majority Municipalities, the outlines of three different diagnostics snapped into focus.
Dr Aidan Hehir was the first to strip the euphemisms away. He framed the Brussels-era commitment not as technocratic decentralisation but as a structural hazard: an instrument that could “install… a Serbska Republika” inside Kosovo. The analogy was deliberate and heavy with precedent. In his reading, an arrangement marketed as local self-governance risked replicating Bosnia’s most disabling contrivance a veto-laden, ethnically demarcated power centre that looks like a subnational unit and behaves like a brake on the state. It is not, he suggested, the soft architecture of minority protection; it is the hard-wiring of parallel authority. Signed in a season of Western optimism, the ASM now appears, in his telling, as a lever Belgrade could pull from across the border while disclaiming responsibility at home. What begins as “association” ends as dual sovereignty.
Vudi Xhymshiti approached the same problem from the angle of cause and consequence. He recounted, in the matter-of-fact cadence of a field note, a warning issued in northern Kosovo shortly before the September 2023 Banjska assault: if Pristina refused to “commit to allowing the implementation of [the] Serb-majority municipalities’ agreement,” there would be “security problems” in Kosovo. The sequence that followed—“boom, we’ve got Banjska attacks,” as the moderator would summarise was not, for Xhymshiti, a narrative convenience but a logic chain. Arms cache intelligence had been aired; enforcement had been delayed or deflected; a conditional threat was spoken aloud; violence arrived on schedule. In that light, the ASM is less a policy option than a coercive demand, a security hostage, where “implementation” is extracted not through constitutional argument but through the shadow of force. The lesson, as Xhymshiti drew it out elsewhere that evening, is bleakly simple: appeasement doesn’t moderate grey-zone actors; it teaches them.
Ambassador Ian Cliff did not defend the Association so much as expose the political terrain around it. Long before the debate reached the late-night coda, he had set out the frame: municipal resignations in the north; mass withdrawals from parliament and the police; and a rushed cycle of elections that, “following the letter of the law,” produced mayors who were “totally unrepresentative.” The European Union, he noted, “lost confidence” and imposed measures on Kosovo. Cliff’s caution was precise: what reads as black-letter law in Pristina can play as counter-majoritarian rule in the north; the ASM sits inside that contradiction. For him, the question is less whether decentralisation is good or bad in the abstract, and more whether it is introduced in a context where consent and legitimacy have been prepared, or whether it is tacked onto a crisis as a fig leaf, hardening grievance into structure. Even in his closing reflections about the need for a political horizon in which Serbia at least de facto reconciles itself to Kosovo’s sovereignty, his subtext holds: whatever the model, process matters. A design, however elegant on paper, fails if it ignores the people expected to live inside it.
Taken together, the three lines form a stark triptych. Xhymshiti warns about the destination, a Bosnia-style veto enclave that would fracture Kosovo’s sovereignty by design. Hehir insists on the method—threats and the implicit promise of violence as the price of “implementation,” with Banjska as the case study in what follows when such leverage is indulged. Cliff maps the ground on which any of this could plausibly work—one where legality without legitimacy produces perverse outcomes, and where European disunity both shapes and constrains the toolset.
In the room, those strands did not converge into a compromise. They did, however, fix the stakes with unusual clarity. Call it association; call it autonomy; call it municipal competencies. Without hard constitutional guard-rails, Xhymshiti’s spectre of a Republika Srpska-style parallelism looms. Without a line against bargaining under duress, Hehir’s coercion spiral persists, teaching precisely the wrong lesson. And without the patient political groundwork Cliff described one that privileges consent over box-ticked procedure the entire apparatus risks collapsing into the very dysfunction it claims to prevent.
What appeasement means, and what it does
The audience pressed the panel on the central word of the night. Is “appeasement” a rational hedge or a norm-eroding signal that rewards “grey-zone coercion”? Hehir answered that appeasement begins when the other side “escalate[s] their behaviour” and yet “you continue to try to present their misbehaviour as progress.” In his view, Europe had crossed that line with Serbia, praising procedure while overlooking substance and thereby taught Belgrade the power of brinkmanship.
Another question cut to the ritual that follows every shock: “to negotiate what exactly?” After each episode like Banjska, the “immediate reaction” is always to “return to the negotiating table,” the questioner said, but if the core concessions were already banked—the Ahtisaari framework invoked here as a major one—what remained to be traded away? It was less a question than a challenge to a decade-long vocabulary that often reads process as outcome.
By the end, even the moderator turned to the periphery that shapes the centre. The composition of KFOR itself is “very worrying,” Hehir said, given “the number of troops… from countries that either don’t recognise Kosovo or are actively hostile to Kosovo,” naming Hungary as an example. In that simple observation lay a truth that animated the whole night: institutions are never neutral in a contested space; they are collections of states, with interests that persist.
The line that held and the one that didn’t
No votes were tallied in public. No definitive “for” or “against” was declared into the record. But the fault-lines were clear.
Xhymshiti’s case, reinforced by Hehir, was that Banjska/Banjë exposed the cost of indulgence: arms in churches, barricades as political theatre, a pattern of escalations met with calls for “de-escalation” by the wrong party. “Appeasement,” in this story, isn’t a smear; it’s a description of a habit of praising façade while institutions and norms are steadily hollowed out.
Cliff did not deny Serbian culpability; he questioned whether reading the conflict through law alone untethered from the consent of governed populations and the brute fact of EU disunity can produce anything but backlash. The state has rights; it also has constituencies. Sovereignty asserted without a political bridge may satisfy in principle, and fail in practice.
Some nights end in synthesis; this one did not. It ended, instead, with a kind of uneasy clarity. The ambassador who might have argued the government line was absent. The room had heard, in sharp relief, the case for firmness and the case for finesse. The West, so often cast as arbiter, was itself on the stand, its soldiers, its courts, its choreography of talks. And somewhere beneath the assertions and rebuttals, the unresolved question that brought everyone into the room remained stubbornly intact: when institutions hesitate and language softens, who, exactly, learns the lesson and what do they learn to do next?
One Year After Banjska: The West’s Role in Serbia’s Balkan Escalation
One year after the Banjska attacks, Serbia’s aggression and Western appeasement continue to destabilise Kosovo, raising questions about regional security and international accountability. — The GPC Balkan Watch.
