Kosovo

“WE HAVEN’T WON THIS YET.” That’s how a senior Western diplomat serving in Pristina characterized the situation in Kosovo six years after the end of NATO bombing. The intervention against the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was the right policy, he added, but what we’ve been trying to accomplish since is “more difficult here than in Bosnia.” A bit south of Pristina is the town of Lipljan. There, a Kosovar Albanian man, a geography teacher, sat at a table in the home of a Kosovar Serb and spoke of people “in dark corners who work to undermine efforts [of reconciliation between Albanians and Serbs] because it’s not in their interest to reconcile.” Similar sentiments were repeated by others in Kosovo. So while Milosevic is tried at The Hague for war crimes, much more work remains to defeat his legacy in Kosovo.

In the late 1980s, Milosevic consolidated power on a platform of extreme nationalism. His efforts to centralize power in Belgrade put the Balkans on a path to war in which over 200,000 people would eventually be killed. In 1989, he forced amendments to the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution which eliminated the autonomy of Kosovo “inaugurating an era of spiraling human rights abuses against the Kosovar Albanian population,” as detailed in war crimes documents at The Hague. All this led to the formation of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1997 and fierce fighting between the KLA and Serb forces operating in Kosovo before NATO intervened in March 1999.