The violence and rioting that ensued effectively emptied most of the Serb enclaves in central Kosovo. Such violence in the troubled province, however, has existed for decades, even centuries – and many fear it will remain unstable for years to come. Only the victims and tormentors have changed places in an arena that has been steadily growing, largely due to background interests.

As Serbia’s southern province, Kosovo was swamped by a heavy-handed security and judicial system under Belgrade’s control, and remained mostly quiet until 1998.

Ethnic and religious wars
Ethnic Albanians constituted the vast majority of Kosovo’s population, between 80-90 percent in the early 1990s. At that time, the former Yugoslavia disintegrated into a series of ethnic and religious wars. Ethnic divisions and tensions in Kosovo were more acute than anywhere else in the country, due to linguistic and ethnic differences.

Violence in Kosovo ignited hatred on both sides, including the burning of this mosque in Nis

Then an underground – be it a liberation or a terrorist organization, depending whether it was named by Albanians or Serbs – began attacking Serbian police and civilians. The Kosovo Liberation army (KLA) proclaimed it was fighting against repression, and for the independence of Kosovo and the eventual unification of the entire area with its majority Albanian population. This area included Albania proper, Kosovo, southern Serbia, parts of Montenegro and northwestern Macedonia. The Serbian security apparatus responded to the growing KLA, but often with disproportional force, which left many civilians dead and entire villages flattened.

The spiral of violence gained momentum, finally prompting NATO to step in and intervene against Yugoslavia, bombing it for 78 days between March and June 1999, until former strongman, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, ordered security forces out of Kosovo and allowed the United Nations and NATO in.

In the first days of the NATO campaign, hundreds of thousands of Albanians fled Kosovo, outraging the world with tales of brutal terror inflicted by police, soldiers and paramilitaries.

An unnoticed exodus
Another exodus, however, which occurred at the end of the campaign, went largely unnoticed due to Belgrade’s squandered credibility. More than 200,000 Kosovo Serbs had been displaced after the pullout of their police and army. Those who remained faced violence – more than 1,000 were killed and as many went missing while thousands were beaten or otherwise violently intimidated.

The recent March 17 attack was not only against Serbs in Kosovo, but included foreigners who once celebrated as liberators when they first marched into Kosovo. This shocked the world into recognizing that diplomatic euphemisms of the success of UNMIK and the international community were not in line with bleak realities on the ground.

The campaign was intense and coordinated enough to return the word "genocide" to Kosovo-related statements uttered by international officials, such as NATO South Wing Commander Admiral Gregory Johnson. Such a statement came after a five-year effort by the world’s leading countries to find a solution in Kosovo.

What started as a protest of Kosovo Albanians was "taken over by organized elements with an interest in driving Kosovo Serbs from Kosovo and threatening the international presence there," Jean-Marie Guehenno, UN under-secretary for peacekeeping operations, told the Security Council in the days following the escalation.

Security sources in Serbia claim "the aim is to drive as many Serbs out of as many of their places in Kosovo and have a fait accompli situation for the proclamation of independence."

The attack on Serbs in Kosovo was followed by the torching of mosques in Belgrade and Nis and the harassment of Albanians in Vranje, the dominantly Serb economic and political hub of southern Serbia. It could have been worse, however, just as the torching of a Serb church in the Muslim part of Bosnia, in response to the blazing mosques in Belgrade, could have led to a new round of bloodletting. The situation this time remained under control, but in the long term it will continue to nurture extremists in the entire region. In Serbia, extremists are already the largest single group in the parliament, and it remains to be seen how they will fair in Kosovo in elections later this year.

A smoldering crisis
There is no apparent way out of the fiery crisis. Kosovo Albanians are impatient to win independence, while Belgrade insists on sovereignty over Kosovo. And by now, the international community is also insisting the province achieve democratic standards and guarantee security to minorities before talks on its final status begin – not before mid-2005. Even a resolution of status would leave open the question of other "Albanian territories" for the coming years.

Inhabitants of the village of Straz in Kosovo fleeing towards Albania in March, 1999

The West may have recognized that its passive peacekeeping maintained since June 1999 contributed little to the future status of Kosovo. "There has been no progress in Kosovo in recent years," Slovakia’s Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda said in a recent interview with UPI. Slovakia is a new NATO member and Dzurinda is widely regarded as a firm United States ally. "We need to debate where we go from here, whether to change the policy, to try to organize Kosovo more like Bosnia-Herzegovina. We need to be more active."

But Kosovo Albanian leaders, who were slammed by the EU and the UN over a weak and belated condemnation of the March violence, want to be more active.
" If we wait until September 2005 and we see they (in Belgrade) are buying time, probably we will unilaterally move for a referendum on independence or a declaration of independence," Kosovo’s Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi said in a recent interview with the Financial Times.

The bottom line is that independence – or no independence – alone for Kosovo would do nothing for regional stability and could in fact provoke further dangerous fragmentation in the Balkans – requiring continued heavy policing in the region.

" There will be no movement beyond the ephemeral unless people in the region actually decide that they are going to take responsibility for their own future," security analyst David Canin told a conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center in April.

The current Kosovo situation underpins uncertainty in the Balkans. It delays investment, development and growth, and is an endless source of cheap political points for extremists in Serbia and the province. The poverty, unemployment and the lack of perspective provide recruiting grounds for organized crime and keeps Kosovo as a crucial and highly lucrative point on the international pathways for the smuggling of drugs, weapons and human beings. It is difficult to even imagine a political force on both sides of the Serbia-Kosovo boundary determined enough to face not only deeply rooted hatred, but also extremists and criminals who based their livelihood on the murky situation.