Kosovo Attains Status (on Facebook) It Has Sought for Years: Nation

Valdrin Xhemaj/European Pressphoto Agency

A square in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but the United Nations has not recognized it as a country

By DAN BILEFSKY

PARIS — Ever since little Kosovo proclaimed itself an independent state five years ago, it has failed to win all the recognition it so craves. Neither the United Nations, which confers legitimacy, nor all the European Union, whose members are divided on the question, much less Serbia, from which Kosovo broke away, recognize the birth of a new European nation.

But after a campaign waged by an army of devoted Kosovars and strategically placed allies, Kosovo is hailing a grant of legitimacy by a new arbiter of national identity: Facebook.

Last month, Kosovo declared victory, after its officials said Facebook approved a number of changes, including giving users registering from the diamond-shaped area on the Balkan Peninsula the option to identify themselves as citizens of Kosovo, rather than the decidedly less attractive option for many there, Serbia. They can also use the Facebook function that allows users to “check in” on the website from locations within Kosovo, like a cinema or a bar.

It is not as if Kosovo has joined NATO. But in an era when accumulating “likes” may top a seat in the General Assembly, at least for many young opinion leaders online, Kosovo’s leadership is hailing a change on a social media site as a diplomatic coup worthy of Talleyrand.

“Facebook has grown to 1.2 billion users in eight years, faster than the growth of Islam, Christianity and the Internet itself,” said Petrit Selimi, Kosovo’s 34-year-old deputy foreign minister and the leader of the government’s digital diplomacy.

He said that having Kosovo fully included on Facebook had been a priority, along with the still-elusive goals of having Kosovo compete in the Eurovision song contest and in the European Champions League in soccer.

“Being recognized on the soccer pitch and online has far greater resonance than some back room in Brussels,” Mr. Selimi said.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. But because Facebook, mirroring the United Nations, did not initially list Kosovo as a state, many among the country’s majority ethnic Albanian population opted to register as being from a country other than Kosovo.

In protest, Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, a former guerrilla leader, said he had identified himself as being from neighboring Albania. Others among Facebook’s more than 200,000 Kosovar users said they had chosen distant Antigua.

Kosovo is recognized by the United States and a majority of European Union members. But five, including Spain, which is battling separatist movements of its own, refuse to recognize it. Serbia is also vehemently against recognizing Kosovo’s independence, and Russia, a staunch Serbian ally and a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, has blocked Kosovo’s membership in the United Nations, stifling its economic and political development.

So every bit of legitimacy is important to Mr. Thaci’s government.

It rallied citizens to write messages on Twitter and bombard Facebook with thousands of emails. Kosovar ministers said they also lobbied Facebook officials in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, and enlisted Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, whose longstanding support of Kosovo led the country to name a street after him. Mr. Engel said he appealed to Facebook officials in Washington, contending that listing Kosovo as a country was analogous to updating a map.

“I told Facebook that Kosovo was a legitimate country recognized by more than 100 nations, and that they are no longer part of Serbia,” Mr. Engel said in a telephone interview. “It was not a hard sell.”

The Kosovo government said it had also received 500,000 euros, about $690,000, from Britain and Norway to help with its national digital diplomacy strategy, including training editors to update Wikipedia entries about Kosovo.

Online reaction to news of the Facebook changes was swift. “Facebook recognizes Kosovo as a state,” Kosovo’s minister for European Union integration, Vlora Citaku, wrote on Twitter. The American ambassador to Kosovo, Tracey Ann Jacobson, congratulated Kosovo on Twitter.

But some Serbs vowed to protest by deleting their Facebook profiles and posting fake ones; others mocked Kosovo for treating Facebook like a country. “Tomorrow they will say that the Smurfs and hobbits have recognized them,” commented one reader on the online version of Blic, a Serbian daily newspaper. Another reader said Serbia should withdraw its ambassador from Facebook to protest.

Kosovars call the changes a matter of identity and economics. Kosovar businesses have been included on Facebook’s powerful advertising engine, helping companies target Kosovo’s small but growing consumer market.

Although Kosovo has sought to cast the Facebook changes as a diplomatic coup, Facebook characterized them as part of a gradual process and not politically motivated. The company said it found inconsistencies in how it designated locations and indicated that in future cases it would seek to align Facebook with international organizations such as the United Nations.

“Companies have clearly no role to play in the formal recognition of countries, as this is a matter for the international community to decide,” Linda Griffin, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in an email statement. “To ensure that our services meet the needs of other users, locations that are suggested for check-ins or ad targeting are based on information we have received from third-party location databases and user-generated content.”

Gokhan Yucel, a lecturer in digital diplomacy at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, said recognition on social media helped a new country or aspiring nation to raise its profile, reinforce independence, reach its diaspora and generate investment.

In Spain, the regional governments in Catalonia and the Basque region, which have secessionist movements, have fought to use their own Internet domain names rather than the .es domain name associated with Spain.

In May, Israel’s Foreign Ministry warned Google that it was undermining the peace process with the Palestinians after Google changed the label on its home page in the occupied territories and on all its products, including its maps, from the “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine.” The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, lauded the move, through a spokesman, telling Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, that Google “put Palestine on the Internet map, making it a geographical reality.”

Mr. Selimi, the Kosovar deputy foreign minister, said he hoped Facebook’s global reach would bolster Kosovo’s image. The country has a teetering economy and widespread corruption and remains associated with the brutal ethnic wars of the 1990s. The government recently held Instagram boot camps in Pristina to train people how to use social media to upload images of Kosovo such as medieval churches, new highways or its wine country.

“As a prime minister of Kosovo, I found it difficult to accept that I have to declare myself as being from Serbia,” Mr. Thaci said in an interview by telephone and email. “Being listed by Facebook was like being recognized by a global economic superpower. It has enormous impact.”

Source: nytimes.com