Breaking point in Kosovo

While this article mentions the ethnic cleansing by Serbia there is virtually nothing about the subsequent ethnic cleansing by the Albanian Kosovans. This is from the Guardian. This is just an excerpt from the article.

Breaking point


It's a crisis that's been simmering since 1999, when Nato troops enforced an uneasy peace on Kosovo. But from Monday, the Albanian majority in this former Yugoslav province will no longer be bound by the UN-brokered truce. And the fallout could be disastrous, as Julian Borger reports

Friday December 7, 2007
The Guardian


A Kosovo Albanian stands behind the Albanian national flag at a market in Pristina Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP-Getty



Some of the potholes have been mended on the rough tar road into Kosovo from the south, but otherwise it is unchanged, winding its way through a blighted land that has been stuck in limbo for eight years. British troops came this way as part of Nato's intervention force in June 1999, when their vehicles were festooned with flowers by enthusiastic villagers - creating the dangerous expectation of a similar floral welcome in Iraq.

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Unlike Iraq, the Kosovo invasion has gone down in history as a success. It staunched the bloodletting that had seen 10,000 people die in this, the last of the 1990s Balkan wars that broke Yugoslavia into its ethnic components. But eight years later, Nato's Kosovo force (K-For) is still there patrolling the same country roads, keeping a lid on the same fundamental problem - the unwillingness of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority and Serb minority to live together under the same flag. For most of the world, the troubled province has been out of sight and out of mind in recent years, but it is about to force its way back into the headlines. On Monday, the deadline expires for UN-brokered negotiations on power-sharing between the two peoples. The expectation is that Kosovo's Albanian-led government will go on to declare independence early in the New Year. The crisis that is now gathering momentum could not only ignite ethnic antipathies in Kosovo, but also set the west and Russia at each other's throats and send ripples of instability along other ethnic fault lines through the Balkans and the Caucasus.
The epic clash was inevitable from the moment Nato troops drove into the killing fields on that hot June day to put an end to Slobodan Milosevic's final stab at ethnic cleansing, before he was ousted as president of what remained of Yugoslavia and bundled off to the Hague war crimes tribunal.

By the late 90s, Milosevic's dreams of a Greater