The day after independence
The next Balkan headache for the European Union
FOR months the future of Kosovo has been uncertain. In March Marti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president, presented a plan for conditional independence to the United Nations, which has run the province since the end of the war in 1999. Russia stepped in to stop this, and has since treated Kosovo as a bargaining card with the West. The crude message was that, even though Kosovo is surrounded by the European Union and NATO, a resurgent Russia can still get its way there. Now it looks as if this may have backfired.
Kosovo has a population of 2m, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanians who have long demanded independence. Serbia’s leaders say they cannot have it, since Kosovo was always a Serbian province and not a Yugoslav republic before the country fell apart. Serbia has proposed various models of autonomy, drawing on such examples as Hong Kong and the Swedish-populated Aland Islands, formally part of Finland. But Kosovo’s Albanians have rejected them all. A final bout of diplomacy intended to reach a compromise has, predictably, failed so far to find one. …
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