Word: serbia
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More than eight years after U.S. planes bombed Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo, the small Balkan territory is still legally a part of Serbia. But the province--which has been under U.N. administration since clashes between Serbian forces and secessionist rebels sparked an international crisis in 1999--took another step toward independence this month when the U.N. failed to negotiate a settlement between the two sides before a Dec. 10 deadline. Differences between Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian majority and Belgrade, which opposes full independence for the province, proved too great to bridge. So too did the gulf between...
...enough," Kosovo's Prime Minister-in-waiting, Hashim Thaci, recently told TIME. With the province poised to unilaterally declare independence, it could be a complicated birth. The U.S., which still has some 1,500 troops in the territory, has indicated it is prepared to recognize the new country. But Serbia and Russia remain fiercely opposed. The European Union, which would be the chief backer of the new state, is divided: some countries worry that recognizing a declaration of independence without the U.N.'s imprimatur will encourage separatists elsewhere. And some Kosovo Serbs, who account for less than one-tenth...
...Serbia's ultimate threat is that the secession of Kosovo would topple moderate nationalists in the government and replace them with ultra-nationalists from the Serbian Radical Party, thus ending democracy in Serbia and turning it, again, into a rogue state. Western endorsement of Kosovo's independence, Serbian officials say, would turn a vast majority of Serbs against the U.S. and the E.U. and bring it closer to Russia, the only major power that backs Serbia over Kosovo...
...turns out that the majority of Serbs do not share the government's views. Although recent opinion polls do show a slight increase in anti-Western sentiments, more than half of the electorate strongly supports Serbia's prospective membership in the E.U., even if the price of that means losing Kosovo...
...Serbia's options for retaliation remain limited, as the government may soon discover that fulfilling their threats would damage their own country rather than the intended targets. Belgrade will almost certainly not recognize independent Kosovo any time soon, but it will have to find some way to live with...