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

Serbs resist independence for Kosovo

This article does not mention the reverse ethnic cleansing practiced by the Albanians after the "succesful" intervention of NATO into Serbia's attempt to drive out many Albanians. Now the UN mission still has not convinced Serbia to allow independence. Probably in the long run Serbia will have no choice. After the UN intervention most Serbs and also gypsies were driven out or in the case of Serbs into small enclaves. Interesting the Serb guards are called "thuggish"!



Serb-Albanian gap wide as others decide Kosovo's fate
February 5, 2007

Thuggish Serbians maintain a vigil on the north of the Ibar River, ready to punish ethnic Albanians who cross the unofficial boundary in Europe's unfinished war.

Kosovo, a province of Serbia, is bitterly divided between Serbian enclaves, including a big part of the north, and the rest of the territory, which is ethnic Albanian. Now, as the UN nudges Kosovo towards what it calls final status and what Belgrade calls independence, Serbs in northern Kosovo are threatening to break away.

"Northern Kosovo will secede," said moderate Serbian politician Oliver Ivanovic. Mr Ivanovic said he had warned the UN, NATO, the European Union and the US that, nearly eight years after NATO bombing drove the Serbian army and other security forces out, it was too early to settle Kosovo's status.

"Kosovo's independence will leave no space for the moderates to act," he said.

Kosovo — more than 90 per cent ethnic Albanian — has struggled since early last century to free itself from Belgrade. With the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s the fight began anew, but Serbia resisted.

UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari presented his plans for Kosovo's final status to officials in Belgrade and Pristina on Friday.

Serbian President Boris Tadic rejected the plans as a prelude to independence, while Kosovo Albanians welcomed them. With the blessing of the US, they have said they will accept nothing less than independence.

Most Kosovo Serbs will never accept an independent Kosovo.

"It would create a situation like Iraq or Lebanon here in Serbia," said Milan Ivanovic, head of Kosovo's hardline Serbian National Council. "We would fight to get Kosovo back with all legitimate means."

Kosovo Albanians and their international supporters hope that a high degree of autonomy in Serbian areas with guarantees for the protection of Serbian rights and strict international oversight will persuade Serbs in the territory to accept an Albanian-led government.

"Hopefully, with independence, a local Serb leadership will emerge to address the needs of the Serbs within the Kosovo system," said Muhamet Hamiti, an adviser to Kosovo's President Fatmir Sejdiu.

Kosovo is home to the Serbian Orthodox Church's most sacred sites. "This is the spiritual centre of the Serbian church," said Sister Dobrila, a nun at the monastery of the Patriarchate of Pec, built around a Byzantine church from the 13th century that holds the tombs of Serbia's medieval archbishops.

Birds are woven into Serbian folklore. The birds are the souls of the dead from the 14th century battle of Kosovo, in which a Serbian-led Christian army sought to stop the Ottoman advance — an advance whose legacy is the nominally Muslim Albanian majority in the province today.

NEW YORK TIMES