Free Republic

The EU Must Take Over Kosovo By Doug Bereuter and Thomas D. Grant* Wall Street Journal August 25, 2004 A spasm of violence orchestrated by ethnic Albanian extremists in Kosovo this spring put paid the notion that the troubled Balkan province is ready for full self-government. Yet a stumbling U.N. administration has failed to foster the institutions and economic stabilization that are essential if self-government ever is to be achieved. Caught between its own unreadiness and the disappointments of the present form of international tutelage, Kosovo needs a fresh approach. As the international community faces a decision on Kosovo's status...

The United Nations is facing some of its most intense scrutiny over the administration of Kosovo. Serbs and ethnic Albanian leaders -- barely in dialogue with each other -- see the UN as unfit to run the province. UN Security Council members are pressing for policy changes to maintain their goal of a multiethnic entity. A number of outside experts, meanwhile, regard the council's mandate for Kosovo as an inherent contradiction that must be revised soon. United Nations, 13 August 2004 (RFE/RL) -- When Soren Jessen-Petersen takes over on 16 August as the UN's sixth administrator of Kosovo, he will...

In 2001 two events at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague put the subject of genocide in the former Yugoslavia back on the front pages of newspapers. Firstly, Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic was convicted of genocide against the Muslim population of the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the first conviction at the ICTY for this gravest of crimes. Secondly and more spectacularly, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was indicted and put on trial for genocide against the Muslim and Croat population of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole. These events at the ICTY inflamed the bitter...

Explosives found near UN building From correspondents in Pristina, Serbia-Montenegro 07mar04 POLICE and NATO-led peacekeepers found explosives placed close to the UN mission headquarters in Kosovo early today after receiving a bomb threat. The homemade bomb was found in a black sports bag by a fence adjacent to the UN mission headquarters' parking lot in the centre of the province's capital, Pristina, said UN police spokesman Derek Chappell. The find was made after police received a phone call tipping them off that a bomb had been planted near the UN building, he added. "The sports bag was found to be...

10:20 LONDON, March 9 (Tanjug) - South East Europe Stability Pact co-ordinator Erhard Busek said on Monday it is necessary for the members of the European Union (EU) to coordinate their policies on Kosovo, since the United States (US) has already decided that the province should become independent. The US determination is clear. It advocates an independent Kosovo, while EU members are divided on this issue and have not yet declared themselves, Busek told London-based BBC.

BELGRADE -- Monday – Five years after the alleged massacre in the Kosovo village of Racak which eventually led to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Finnish pathologist Helena Ranta, who led forensic investigations into the case, has said for the first time that Serb security troops were also killed. Ranta told B92 today that she had received information about the death of Serb troops in Racak in 1999. “I was told there victims of both Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army murdered in Racak on Friday, January 15, 1999. I didn’t see the list of Serb victims. I was...

    PRISTINA, Kosovo -- U.N. police vehicles still clog the streets of Kosovo's capital. U.S. troops patrol other cities to deter violence and help people feel secure. In smaller towns, NATO vehicles guard the Orthodox churches of Serbs to prevent desecration by Albanian Muslims. Armored personnel carriers still rumble down the highways.     People who ponder how much time the United States and the international community will have to commit to rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq might want to consider this. More than four years after U.S.-led NATO forces intervened successfully in this riven Serbian province, Kosovo remains today like a...

In long conversations over neat whiskey, marked by scores of cigarettes, sometimes in a cold, blacked-out Kosovo, even in the United Nations headquarters that was once the seat of Belgrade's administration in Pristina, Nadia was, above all, honest about what was possible and what was not. Blunt, refreshingly cynical, she spoke openly about the realities of Kosovo: the criminality of the Kosovo Liberation Army; the fraud of its "transformation" into a supposedly disarmed civilian conservation corps; the hapless optimism of the Clinton administration; the endless reluctance of the Security Council to finance its responsibilities in Kosovo; the wounded, malign nationalism...