Preserving Kosovo's Separate Peace

The military checkpoints had been dismantled and the bridge open to civilian traffic for a week. But in the middle of the afternoon on a busy weekday, the main bridge in the northern Kosovo town of Mitrovica stood empty. Beneath its gleaming French-designed arches, a bored police officer lounged in the guard shack left vacant by international peacekeepers. All was quiet at Dolce Vita, the cafe where the "bridge watchers," Serb vigilantes, keep an eye out for Albanians crossing into their part of town.

Things looked calm enough as Alastair Butchart-Livingston, of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), steered us past the Dolce Vita in an official four-wheel-drive.

"We had trouble there on Sunday night," he said. A drunken Serb had chucked a bottle at a policeman guarding the bridge and then resisted arrest, prompting a nervous call for reinforcements by the officers on duty. "It backed down, but it showed how quickly things can boil up."

Mitrovica is Kosovo's most bitterly divided city, the front line in a standoff between the Serb-dominated northern tip of the province and its Albanian-majority main portion. Mitrovica's 15,000 ethnic Serbs and 65,000 ethnic Albanians rarely cross paths, so rigidly do they stick to their respective sides of the Ibar River.

In June, when the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) opened the bridge and turned it over to Kosovo police, it was supposed to foster freedom of movement -- a key civil right for the ethnic Serb minority sequestered in North Mitrovica. Instead, hundreds of Serbs turned out to protest the measure.

"They do not want the Kosovar Albanians trying to come north of the river," Butchart-Livingston told me. In fact, he said, Mitrovica's Serbs would like to turn back the clock to when KFOR stood squarely between them and the rest of Kosovo. "They want to provoke the international community into perhaps closing the bridge again and bringing back an effective form of partition."

The memory of war and the specter of more violence make people intensely fearful in this beautiful and dangerous mountain-ringed place. It's hard to imagine anyone arguing that Kosovo -- segregated, tense, a sea of effusive Muslim Albanians surrounding islands of frightened, angry Orthodox Serbs -- is ready for anything even approaching independence. But on Oct. 24 the United Nations Security Council is set to discuss precisely this issue.

Breakaway Province

Six years after NATO stopped a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing in which 10,000 Albanians died at the hands of Serb paramilitaries, Kosovo is ready to graduate from its status as a U.N. protectorate. Negotiations on its "permanent status" will determine whether Kosovo remains a province of Serbia, as it legally is now, or gains its independence.

Kosovo's Serbs want to see the breakaway province reunited with Serbia proper. But a return to rule by Belgrade is widely acknowledged to be out of the question. So is the outright independent statehood demanded by the ethnic Albanian majority. What's left, then, is some form of provisional independence for Kosovo. The problem is determining what that means and getting the relevant parties -- in Kosovo's capital Pristina, in Belgrade and at the Security Council -- to agree on it.

Experts, among them former Clinton envoy James Dobbins, agree that Kosovo will probably be emancipated from Serbia but will still have to answer to international authority for years to come, much like Bosnia. KFOR soldiers, now numbering 17,000 (down from a postwar high of 46,000), will probably remain in place. So will groups like the U.N. and OSCE, to ensure that Kosovo's 1.7 million ethnic Albanians respect the rights of the 130,000 ethnic Serbs who live among them.

To the Albanians, the Kosovar Serbs represent their former oppressors. Since just after the first World War, Serbia had maintained a colonial-style presence in Kosovo that fluctuated with the political tides. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of the semi-autonomy it had enjoyed under Tito. Exploiting a psychic wound Serbs had nursed since losing Kosovo to the Ottomans in 1389, he also clamped down on Albanian culture. An ethnic Albanian separatist movement flourished accordingly.