Crunch time for Kosovo

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Kosovo's location
within Serbia

Simmering tensions in the region are threatening to reach a boiling point as UN-appointed envoy Martti Ahtisaari hosts a seventh round of negotations in Vienna this week, aimed at settling the province's final status: Albanian Kosovars favor independence, while Serbia is pushing for the province to remain under its control.

Kosovo's minority Serbs, concentrated in the north, have ended cooperation with the Pristina government. Just over half of ethnic Albanians, meanwhile, support to some extent Kurti's Self-Determination movement. The latest UNMIK head resigned last month. And a rift between governments of the West, which advocate a solution by the end of the year, and the government of Russia, which fears that an independent Kosovo would set a precedent for its own breakaway provinces, could further stall the process.

between mid-2003 to as recently as this past may, i spent a fair amount of time in macedonia, the country bordering kosovo on the south, where i was a mere 40km from kosovo's capital, pristina... the city where i was located was the weekend watering hole for many of the kfor troops (the un peace-keeping force in kosovo)... i'm currently in serbia, several hundred kilometers distant, but ironically at the nexus of serbian resistance to kosovo independence... the serbian president was in washington not long ago making serbian opposition to kosovo independence clear to the bush administration... having just lost montenegro, serbia isn't keen to lose yet more of what it considers its own... tensions in the region have been held in check ever since the nato bombing seven years ago, but they have never gone away... now that crunch time is here, i hope cooler heads will prevail...

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