Word: kosovo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...economic embargo is concerned, Kosovo looks like an easy target. With a territory some seven times larger than Kosovo's and with a population five times as big, Serbia looms heavily over the province. Furthermore, some 70% of Kosovo's consumer goods come from Serbia, and so does much of its electricity supply. In theory, the embargo would cripple Kosovo's already troubled economy, especially if it includes cuts in electricity...
...troika" - representatives of U.S., E.U., and Russia - officially declared on Monday that the four-month-long talks between Kosovo and Serbia have failed. From the beginning, it was clear that there was very little common ground between the parties: the Kosovo Albanians opted for nothing less than independence, while Serbs vowed that they would never accept it. Belgrade now says it is ready to retaliate against Kosovo if it tries to secede, as well as against any country that chooses to recognize...
...Last week, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov echoed those threats by saying that unilateral secession of Kosovo was "unacceptable." "The tensions are already rising in the whole region," Lavrov said in an interview to a Cypriot news agency. Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Romania and Slovakia are the only E.U. member countries that remain resistant to Kosovo's independence...
...what can Serbia really do if and when Kosovo declares independence and gets recognized by the bulk of the Western world? Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said on Dec. 4 that Belgrade's diplomatic response to the recognition of the breakaway province would be within a wide spectrum from "the very mild to the very tough, the toughest one being cutting off diplomatic relations with countries which violate the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Serbia." Other measures may include imposing an economic embargo on Kosovo, stirring trouble in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other neighboring states, and turning to Russia...
...effective would these measures be in real life? An embargo was already tried, in 1999, after NATO forced Slobodan Milosevic to pull his security forces from the province. It was never enforced: bypassing controls and ethnic barriers, truckloads of smuggled Serbian goods still flowed into Kosovo, their passage greased by bribery. If Serbia does attempt to close the border with Kosovo, the trade would not stop: it would simply go underground, through the old and well-developed smuggling networks. The prices would rise slightly, but that would...