Times Online Logo 222 x 25
>From Times Online February 21, 2007 Comment: decision on Kosovo will be made in New York, not Vienna Catherine Philp In all of Europe’s history of shifting borders and empires, there has never been a country called Kosovo. That could all soon change but not without pain, rancour and, very likely, more bloodshed. Serbia has long regarded Kosovo as its spiritual heartland, the seat of its Orthodox Church dating back to medieval times. But the accelerating migration of ethnic Albanians to the area left Serbs there in a minority even before the area was incorporated into modern Yugoslavia. The republics of Bosnia and Croatia were the first parts to erupt into open conflict, but it was the tensions between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo in the eighties that sowed the seeds for the break-up of Yugoslavia. Their loss only made Serbia cling hard to Kosovo, a province of Serbia itself, and Albanian agitation for self-rule was met with harsh repression. Albanians formed the Kosovo Liberation Army in the mid-nineties to fight for full independence, prompting Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, to unleash his army and militias in Kosovo. The ethnic cleansing that followed saw hundreds of thousands of Albanians pouring over the borders in Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, sparking fears of regional destabilisation among European powers and guilty consciences about the failure to halt recent crises like Bosnia and Rwanda. In 1999, Nato unleashed its first ever humanitarian war, bombing Serbia into submission and invading Kosovo to ensure the refugees return. But even as the troops were present, more than 200,000 Serbs and other ethnic minorities were chased from their homes or fled a retaliatory campaign against them. Since 1999, Kosovo has existed in a bizarre limbo, still legally under Serbian sovereignty but ruled in reality by a United Nations administration. Kosovars have no passports, just UN travel papers. There is no official flag, although the Albanian eagle is flown everywhere – except the few enclaves where the Serbs lives, where the tricolour of Serbia flies. It is a country that is not a country. Kosovo Albanians who meet with the UN and Serbs in Vienna want this to change, want a rapid implementation of the Ahtisaari plan that promises them everything short of full independence and puts them firmly on the path towards it. It is hard to imagine what they will have to talk about with Serbia, which only last year voted that Kosovo was an inalienable part of its territory and refuses to countenance any plan that takes away its sovereignty. Martti Ahtisaari may have hit the nail on the head last week when he said that he would not be able to get both sides to agree even if he negotiated for the rest of his life. Ultimately, the decision will be made not in Vienna, but at the Security Council. Serbia still hopes for a Russian veto but that looks increasingly unlikely. So the world will face another first; the first country ever to be created in such a way - by international committee and against the will of the legally sovereign power. History has no precedent for what happens next. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1419168.ece [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
