Word: serbians
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...recent weeks, they've been joined by campaign posters declaring GO SERBIA! and THE 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...
...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...
...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's Feb. 17 declaration of independence are poised to do well in the upcoming vote. They include...
...Ivanovic stands truculently at the center of the worsening crisis. As deputy director of Mitrovica's hospital, he controls hundreds of local Belgrade-paid government jobs. And as head of the Serbian National Council, he is key to local resistance against any power but Serbia in northern Kosovo. Interviewed in his hospital office, Ivanovic, dressed in a leather jacket and surrounded by Serbian flags, says the E.U. would be wise to stay out of Mitrovica altogether. Any attempt to establish a presence in the town will lead to "illegal chaos and instability," he says. Serbs like Ivanovic want to prevent...
...working. European diplomats concede that their governments won't be sending anyone to the area until moderates take over in Belgrade and Mitrovica. They may have a long wait. On May 1, Marijan Ilincic, a part-time judo instructor and chairman of the Association of the Descendants of the Serbian Fighters from the 1912-20 Thessaloniki Front, convened a small group of war veterans near a NATO post in Mitrovica and set fire to a U.S. flag. "Your country recognized Kosovo," Ilincic growled at a TIME reporter, whom he assumed to be an American. "You're not welcome here...