As Kosovans push for independence and Serbs try to hold their power base, today's elections could signal the start of a painful separation, writes Daniel McLaughlin.
Kosovo goes to the polls today to elect a prime minister who will spearhead its bid for independence from Serbia, as a deadline for a negotiated solution with Belgrade looms. Hashim Thaci, a former guerrilla who is expected to win the vote, has promised Kosovo's two million ethnic Albanians that it will become a sovereign country after talks end on December 10th, despite implacable opposition from Serbia and Russia.
Most of the 120,000 Serbs who remain in Kosovo, eight years after Nato bombs drove out Belgrade's forces and the United Nations started running it, will boycott the election, and two-thirds of them are threatening to leave if the region declares independence.
Amid mounting Albanian impatience and Serb fear, and the re-emergence of shadowy armed groups on both sides which vow to defend the interests of their ethnic kin, the 16,000 Nato-led peacekeepers in the rugged province are on alert for any unrest.
"Immediately after December 10th, we will take decisions to make Kosovo an independent and sovereign country," said Thaci, whose Democratic Party of Kosovo is expected to win today's ballot with more than 30 per cent of votes, ahead of the ruling Democratic League of Kosovo and a new party formed by Kosovo's richest businessman.
"From the meetings I have had with world leaders, I can confirm that it is just a matter of setting the date for the recognition of independence," Thaci insisted this week. "We have assurances that the independence of Kosovo will be recognised internationally."
Washington and major EU capitals support Kosovo's bid for independence, and call December 10th the deadline for talks between Kosovar and Serb leaders, after which a report must be delivered to the UN by EU, US and Russian envoys.
Serbia refuses to offer anything more than broad autonomy for Kosovo, however, and rejects the December deadline, saying talks should continue indefinitely. Russia says it will use its UN Security Council veto to block any resolution that is not accepted by Belgrade.
"Kosovo and Serbia could talk for another 100 years and never reach agreement," said Thaci, who led a guerrilla army that battled Slobodan Milosevic's forces from 1998-99 after years of mostly passive resistance to Serb repression erupted into violence.
Privately, Serb leaders would admit that there exists no common ground between them and their Kosovar counterparts, but none of them want to be be forever associated with loss of sovereignty over a region with huge significance for their nation.
KOSOVO IS STUDDEDwith medieval Serb Orthodox churches, which are now guarded by Nato troops after several were attacked by Albanian gangs. The 1389 Battle of Kosovo Field, when Serb nobles led by Tsar Lazar fought in vain to stop the westward march of a much larger Ottoman army, is seen as a defining moment for Serbia, encapsulating a feeling among many Serbs that they are history's valiant victims.
And it was in the town of Kosovo Field in 1987 that Slobodan Milosevic told Serbs who were complaining of Albanian police violence, "Nobody has the right to beat you," in a much-replayed speech that propelled him to Serbia's presidency two years later, at the start of a fatal decade for Yugoslavia.
Two decades after Milosevic made his address, which became a rallying cry for Serb nationalism, the people he claimed to be defending eke out a precarious existence. Up to 200,000 Serbs fled Kosovo after 1999, when Albanian gangs attacked them and their perceived accomplices, the Gypsies, in reprisal for Milosevic's crackdown on the province, which killed at least 10,000 Albanians and displaced about one million others.
The Serbs who remained in Kosovo live in Nato-guarded enclaves where poverty and unemployment are rife, and the prospect of independence for the region inspires only fear.
A survey released this week suggested that two-thirds of Kosovo Serbs planned to leave the province if it declared independence, and fears of armed conflict have been fanned by the creation of the Guard of Tsar Lazar, a paramilitary group that vows to defend Kosovo Serbs, and renewed patrols by the banned Albanian National Army, which claims to be protecting Kosovo from Serb incursions.
Many Balkan analysts say a declaration of independence by Kosovo would drive Serbs from their enclaves into the north of the province, where local Serb leaders may make their own claim of sovereignty or announce that they are joining Serbia proper. That could provoke an attempt by some Albanian armed groups to secure northern Kosovo, and in turn spark unrest in the mostly Albanian Presevo Valley in southern Serbia and in neighbouring Macedonia, where a quarter of the population is Albanian and a 2001 deal that averted a looming civil war has failed to dispel ethnic tension.
Despite fears from some EU countries that recognising Kosovo's sovereignty could embolden their own dissatisfied national minorities, major member states are ready to back independence for Kosovo under the supervision of an EU envoy and an 1,800-strong police mission supported by Nato troops - a plan that Washington is determined to see enacted.
"We have not given up on that," US under-secretary of state Nicholas Burns said of the plan this week. "We had hoped there could be an agreement between the parties, but if that does not happen we will have to take our responsibilities," he told a congressional hearing. "We are heading towards a very consequential period in the month of December and January, where we are all going to have to step up and make the right kind of decisions."
Belgrade insists the right decision for the West would be to persuade Kosovo to accept broad autonomy, and to give up what prime minister Vojislav Kostunica calls an attempt to "steal" a chunk of Serbia and create a "Nato state" in the heart of the Balkans.
Anything else, he says, would further strengthen Serbia's ultra-nationalist Radical Party and undermine more pro-Western groups whose shaky coalition is currently keeping the Radicals out of power, despite their clear victory in January's general election.
Kostunica also angered the EU recently by declaring his government's main goals to be the retention of Kosovo and the defence of Serb interests in Bosnia, after claiming that Western policies represented an "open threat to the essential interests of the Serb people".
HIS WORDS EVOKEDthe bad old days of Milosevic, and were followed by the resignation of Bosnia's premier and renewed talk among Bosnian Serb hard-liners about pushing for their region's independence or a union with Serbia if Kosovo won sovereignty.
Belgrade - and Moscow - also warn Washington and Brussels that recognising a unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo, without any supporting UN resolution, would create a precedent that would be followed by separatist regions around the world.
"Kosovo should be looked at from various angles," Russia's ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov said last month. "One is the immediate one - what happens to Kosovo and Serbia. Secondly, the regional dimension - what would the effect be on Bosnia, Macedonia and Albania. The third dimension is Kosovo as a precedent-setting case for many entities around the world. Not only those located exclusively in the post-Soviet space but also for northern Cyprus, Quebec, Scotland and maybe even Belgium. Why not?"
While Scottish nationalists may not be watching Kosovo particularly closely, separatist regimes in the former Soviet Union certainly are. This month, leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway provinces of Georgia, joined the president of Transdniestr, a separatist region of Moldova, in demanding that they be granted independence on the same basis as Kosovo. All three regimes are not recognised by the international community, but are backed by Russia.
Georgia's president Mikhail Saakashvili, who imposed a state of emergency last week after street protests against his rule, has accused Russian leader Vladimir Putin of telling him openly last year that he wanted to see Georgia divided "like Cyprus". Saakashvili says Kosovo's declaration of independence would trigger Russian "provocations" in his restive country, which sits on a key supply route for oil and gas.
Amid the geopolitical rumblings, whichever party wins today's election will promise to bring peace, prosperity, and above all independence to Kosovo. Most Kosovo Serbs, meanwhile, will heed Belgrade's call to boycott the vote, and stay at home in their isolated enclaves.
Some, it seems, may also decide that it is finally time to pack their bags, and get clear of whatever the near future holds for this troubled land.