Word: serb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Serbs in the northern Kosovar town of Mitrovica are not sticklers for appearances. The stained cement façades are peeling away from drab 1960s-era high-rises. Dented satellite dishes teeter on balconies. Kiosks peddling photos of local heroes like Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb general indicted for war crimes, crowd out pedestrians along potholed sidewalks. But all over town there are flashes of brilliant color: red, blue and white Serbian flags fly from nearly every window, door and rusted railing...
...FATHERLAND BEFORE ALL! Mitrovica may be in Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia three months ago, but Belgrade politicians insist that it's still Serbian. Indeed, over the objections of the United Nations, Serbian parliamentary elections will be held on May 11 in Mitrovica and several other Serb-populated areas of Kosovo. "We want to stay within Serbia, with our own institutions," says Milan Ivanovic, a physician who heads a hard-line local movement that calls itself the Serbian National Council. "The territory of Serbia is everywhere where Serbs...
...That is a political line with a very bloody history. Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and his supporters used it to foment Yugoslavia's wars of dissolution in the early 1990s, when they stirred up the defiance of Serb enclaves against independence for Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. These sentiments were invoked again in 1999, when Milosevic's security forces tried to push ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo. All these efforts ended in war and tragedy, not least for Serbs. Yet the failure of extreme nationalism to improve the lot of Serbs doesn't appear to have blunted its appeal...
...Belgrade's decision to hold elections in Kosovo is part of a broader effort by Serbia and Kosovo's Serb minority, which makes up about 10% of the population, to maintain control over the breakaway state. The defiant phrase KOSOVO IS SERBIA! has cropped up all over the place, from a tennis tournament in California (where a banner bearing those words was confiscated from Serbian fans) to the European swimming championships in the Netherlands - where a Serbian medalist was suspended for wearing the slogan on his T shirt. Hard-line nationalists in Belgrade who continue to reject Kosovo...
...independence came off quietly at first. Beginning with the U.S. and major European powers, 39 countries have now formally recognized Kosovo. But problems started when the new government and its Western backers tried to extend authority into the Belgrade-backed, NATO-secured "enclaves" where most of Kosovo's Serbs have lived since the 1999 Kosovo war. The government in Belgrade urged Serbs working for the U.N., including police and customs officers, to quit their jobs, then rehired about 800 police at double their former salaries. On March 17, U.N. and NATO peacekeepers tried to arrest a group of Serb judges...