for the albs, it has nothign to do with religion. it has to do with ethnicity...alb can be a muslim, cathlolic or orthodox, as long as they are albanian and loyal to the ruling clan, they are fine. Until, they go stray, then they are killed.
True, but recognition of that fact is very inconvenient for Serb nationalists. They want to continue to exploit how little most people know about the region in order to portray the Kosovo conflict as religious in nature and Kosovar Albs as Islamists in the hopes of gaining allies among those of us fighting the war on terror.
There are real arguments for maintaining Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo based on history and legally recognized borders versus the Kosovar Albanian arguments of self-determination and the illegitimacy of an oppressive government. The Islamist stuff is a canard.
The biggest problem the Serbs have right now is that the US & other big-power negotiators working on Kosovo have no confidence that the Serbs won't pick up the ethnic cleansing where they left off in 1999.
The Serb Radical Party is still the largest party in Serbia and its leader is still preaching Greater Serbia from where he is on trial for crimes against humanity; a great portion of the Serb population (as reflected by some of our FReepers as well) remains so indoctrinated by the Milosevic propaganda machine that even when videotape of Serb warcrimes is aired and hundreds of bodies of warcrime victims are discovered hidden deep inside Serbia itself, they still do not believe those things happened.
On the Kosovo final status negotiations, here is what is going to happen: as long as the Serb Radical Party still preaches nationalist extremism, as long as Mladic & Karadzic remain unarrested, and as long as the Serbs continue to slow-go on the return of Kosovar-Albanian bodies to their families, the more likely that Kosovo will be independent.