Today we see the terrible consequence of ethnic hatred again in Kosovo and apparently in many parts of Serbia-Montenegro. TV channels in Europe are currently showing the images of Belgrade's only musk burning; it was there for 500 years.
According to
a Reuters Report NATO is immediately moving forces to Kosovo in an attempt to stabilize the situation:
"MITROVICA, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - Albanians set fire to Serb Orthodox churches in Kosovo on Thursday as NATO scrambled to deploy up to 1,000 more troops to stifle an explosion of ethnic violence.
A church was torched in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica despite the efforts of French NATO peacekeepers, who fired teargas and rubber bullets to drive off the mob.
Gunshots were heard, but it was not clear where from [...]
In a severe blow to international hopes of calm before talks this year or next on Kosovo's future status, the outburst of pent-up ethnic hatred in over a dozen locations suggested that reconciliation between the two communities was years away.
Clashes were reported from Mitrovica in the north to Urosevac in the south and Pec in the west, and U.N. police and troops were injured in several places, at least three gravely.
The violence triggered angry protests in Serbia's three main cities, where demonstrators stoned and burned mosques and other Islamic buildings. Serbs, whose forces were driven out of Kosovo by NATO in 1999, were furious at their own impotence and what they say is NATO's failure to check Albanian "terrorism."
U.N. police and vehicles and NATO troops were attacked and one policeman guarding a building in Pristina was shot in the leg. "People were trapped inside the burning building," U.N. spokesman Derek Chappell told Reuters. "Police came under repeated gunfire when they tried to rescue them."
Currently the eyes of the world are focused on Iraq and Spain. But all of us should keep an eye on the Balkans as well. There we can see how difficult it is to stabilize even a tiny part of a country. Kosovo is much smaller than Iraq and has been under international rule for 5 years now and still there is now way out. Peace-keeping and democratization takes time. It should be a lesson for those who believe it would be easy to hand over power to the Iraqis on July 1st.
Kosovo and Iraq: the two screwed up international Interventions of the last decade. In Kosovo, too the intervention was based in false assumptions and outright lies and happened to be without any U.N. mandate. It might have liberated a significant part of the Yugoslavian people from Milosevic (even though it stabilized his rule over the rest or some more years), but unfortunately no one has had a clear concept about the post-Milosevic era.
Why are the same mistakes always repeated? I just hope the people of the Balkans won't have to go through all that horror again.