A Restive Kosovo, Officially Still Serbian, Squirms Under the Status Quo

By Daniel Simpson

The New York Times

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Dec. 22

There is a taboo in Kosovo that none of the foreign officials who administer the province want to mention: independence. Most residents want to discuss little else.

Ever since NATO bombed the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 to stop his attempts to crush an armed rebellion by Kosovo’s repressed Albanian majority, the international bureaucrats have tried to defer a decision on the ultimate status of what remains, officially, a Serbian province.

It is an act increasingly hard to pull off — largely because many of the Albanians of Kosovo are aware of the foreigners’ desire, particularly palpable in conversation with American officials, to end their involvement here.

Driving out of Pristina, a sprawling mass of Communist-era tower blocks and muddy streets, the road signs on the main highway are supposed to be bilingual — Serbian and Albanian.

Instead, stickers written in English cover the Serbian listings of all destinations. Using the Albanian spelling of the province’s name, they proclaim: ”Independence for Kosova! The only way to peace in the Balkans.”

The stickers reflect the growing impatience of many Kosovars with foreign diplomats who neither constrain Albanian ambitions nor try to entice Serbian politicians to abandon their claim to land that was the heart of Serbia’s medieval empire.

”The status quo is not tenable for much longer,” said Brenda Pearson, an expert on Balkan affairs with the Washington-based Public International Law and Policy Group. ”The Albanians and Serbians alike are waiting for the international community do something courageous. Yet, left on their own, both would quickly choose partition, ignoring the consequences for their neighbors.”

Splitting Kosovo in two, and trading the northern parts where most Serbs live for land inhabited by Albanians in other parts of southern Serbia, could open a Pandora’s box of border disputes, potentially threatening the territorial integrity of both Bosnia and Macedonia.

But in simulated talks on Kosovo’s future, former Serbian and Albanian officials in the province — brought together by another Washington research group, the United States Institute of Peace — repeatedly chose partition as the solution to Kosovo’s problem.