Embassy in Belgrade, how to make sense of the Kosovo independence issue?
Kosovo is diplomacy’s elephant’s graveyard, a bleak place where our best hopes and strategies and principles forlornly creep away to die. There has been nothing uniquely special or principled or even self-evidently fair about the Kosovar Albanian majority’s demand that a new independent state dominated by them be set up in Europe within Kosovo’s current borders. What is undoubtedly remarkable is the single-minded way that community has focused on this ambition in recent decades, and how stunningly and consistently inept the Serbs have been in dealing with the problem. The ethnic mix of the Kosovo population has ebbed and flowed down the centuries with different empires and wars and consequent rounds of ethnic cleansing. Nor has there been a consistent delineation of the territory defining Kosovo. But at least for most of the past 100 years most of Kosovo has been recognized by the rest of the planet as part of Serbia, albeit with an ethnic-Albanian majority. Numerous historic Serbian m
