Not quite—NATO quickly retook the sites. But Serbia seems to feel that if it can’t have the entire former province, no one can. While the United States and major European countries now recognize Kosovo, Russia and others are balking, worried about their own restive regions. Russia’s Security Council veto can block any move to affirm Kosovo as an independent country, not a U.N. protectorate. Meanwhile, Serbia announced that its judges would start holding court in northern Kosovo, where ethnic Serbs are clustered. When NATO peacekeepers shut the border for a day, Serb officials and traders took mountain paths.
Officially, no one wants partition. But that seems to be what’s happening by default. “They can’t control it, so what are they going to do about it?” Aleksandar Vasovic, an analyst with Belgrade’s Balkan Insight journal, says about the European Union mission that hopes to take over from the United Nations in Kosovo. “It is a de facto partition already.” An EU official, unnamed because of the issue’s sensitivity, confirmed there’s no timetable for establishing Kosovo’s international borders. “We’d have to see what precise arrangements were made,” the official said. “It’s unwise in the present circumstances to make precise predictions.”
Serbia’s leaders won’t settle for part of Kosovo, says Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor in chief of the newspaper Politika, who is close to Serbia’s ardently nationalist president, Vojislav Kostunica. “They’ll do everything they can simply to treat Kosovo as part of Serbia, provide Serbs there with all the government services they can,” she says. “But Kostunica will never put his signature on anything recognizing the partition of Kosovo.” Instead, she says, Belgrade will keep trying to bar Kosovo from international organizations and sporting events while calling on other countries to reject Kosovo’s. The point? “To make [Kosovo’s independence] less real.”
