By Harry de Quetteville in Pristina
(Filed: 23/10/2004)
The Balkan province of Kosovo goes to the polls today in the hope of ending an identity crisis that has stunted economic growth and entrenched ethnic hatreds.
The general election follows five years of international intervention and limited self-rule that began with the 1999 Nato bombing.
US troops as part of a Nato peace-keeping force are encouraged to vote in their elections
The new government could lead Kosovo to peaceful independence or tip it back into violence.
The United Nations has run the province since 78 days and nights of bombing drove out Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslav army, which was viciously putting down the uprising of Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians.
As thousands of Yugoslav troops pulled out, tens of thousands of Nato soldiers moved in.
Without statehood, the province's two million people have been in limbo since then.
The peace has proved uneasy and in March the frustrations of unemployment and resentment between Albanians and minority Serbs boiled over into street battles and killings.
Nineteen people died and thousands of Serbs fled from mobs that burned and looted their homes and churches. The violence revealed that the status quo was untenable. Lt Gen Yves de Kermabon, the commander of the Nato peacekeeping troops, known as Kfor, said the street fighting "refocused international attention on Kosovo". But the outcome of the election is far from clear.
Kosovo's political landscape is dominated on one side by Ibrahim Rugova, once an icon of passive resistance to Serbia, and on the other by rivals who have swapped armed rebellion for the debating chamber.
Neither camp is unlikely to win an outright majority. Whichever takes most of the parliament's 120 seats will lead a coalition aimed at taking over more power from the UN and striving for independence. It will be a delicate process that many fear could collapse, leading to more violence.
"Only a small incident is needed," Fatmir Humolli, an Albanian radical, said this week.
Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, has urged Kosovan Serbs to boycott the election.
At a rally this week Marko Jaksic, a local Serb politician, said the election "will give legitimacy to the institutions which kill, expel and burn Kosovo Serbs".
Officially, the UN still abides by a decree under which Kosovo must improve its human rights record and the rule of law before talks on its status can begin. Unofficially, those negotiations are due next summer, with several possible outcomes.
While it remains politically impossible for Serbia simply to hand over Kosovo to its 1.8 million ethnic Albanians, a partition in which ethnic Serbs, concentrated in the north, would join Serbia also appears impracticable. Most of Kosovo's 130,000 Serbs are spread throughout the province, barring territorial division on ethnic lines.
Other options include increased decentralisation to devolve more power to individual Serb or Albanian towns. But in neighbouring Macedonia such a process has proved fraught and could lead to renewed fighting there.
Mr Kostunica has come up with another plan - snubbed abroad and likened to Israel's settlement programme in the West Bank - to repatriate Kosovan Serb refugees from the 1999 war in autonomous Serb enclaves.
While new proposals for Kosovo's future sprout from all corners, another international deployment in the province may prove to be the real answer.
In the past few months officials from the European Union have been setting up offices in the centre of Pristina, adding to speculation that the EU is preparing to take over the UN, which is often criticised as bloated and rudderless.
While analysts suggest that the EU is hardly more streamlined, it does hold the lure for Serbia of future EU membership.
"The only peaceful solution for Kosovo is Serbian consent for it to break away," said Gerald Knaus, the director of the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think-tank. At Kfor headquarters, Gen de Kermabon put it more bluntly: "We have invested time, money and lots of soldiers here. Things must change or we shall be here for centuries."
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