The talks about the final status of Kosovo, which have dragged on for months, are officially over. What happens next seems to be anybody's guess, says the Balkans commentator Micha Glenny, writing in Britain's New Statesman.
Kosovo Albanians are planning to declare independence soon and Serbia is refusing to listen to any argument containing the word 'independence', so can we expect another war in the province?
Officially at least, both the Kosovo Albanian and Serbian sides have offered guarantees that they're not planning return to war in the next few months. But the reality on the ground may be different.
"An incident, a provocation, and the security situation could unravel very quickly," LA Times says a senior official with the U.N. mission currently governing the province, according to the LA Times.
"We have been very patient until now. But we fought and died just to establish a country. We could lose control in a second," Kushtrim Mahmutaj, who fought Serbian forces as a teenager, tells the paper.
What with shadowy extremist groups emerging on both sides, the danger of renewed conflict is real, thinks the LA Times.
Britain's
2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F8d0fbd04-a6c2-11dc-b1f5-0000779fd2ac.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.ft.com%2Fsearch%3FqueryText%3Dkosovo%2Bdeadline%26aje%3Dtrue%26dse%3D%26dsz%3D" target="new"> Financial Times agrees. Kosovo officials should get the backing of the European Union before they declare independence. But even if they do, Serbs in northern Kosovo and Bosnian Serbs wonÂ?t want to sit still, while Russia might want to "(stir) up trouble", according to the FT.
Serbia, for its part, has mentioned an "action plan" in case Kosovo declares unilateral independence. But insiders insist that this is mere posturing, writes Ian Traynor in Britain's Guardian.
"Nobody wants Kosovo independent, of course. But it's clear (Serbia) can't do much about it," Dragan Bujosevic, Belgrade commentator and TV chat show host, tells Traynor.
When it comes to non-violent steps Serbia could adopt in order to undermine Kosovo's new state, there's been a talk of imposing a trade embargo against the province and cutting off electricity, writes Joshua Keating, researcher at the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine.
The trade embargo would hardly do much harm to the province as it would simply move underground, says Dejan Anastasijevic of Serbia's weekly Vreme, writing in Balkan Insight. As for electricity, this could prove trickier for Kosovo Albanians to deal with, but it would hit thousands of Serbs living in the region - something that Serbia would not like.
One solution which has been championed by some commentators is the partition of the province. Glenny claims that all sides consider the split to be the inevitable consequence of any decision on Kosovo, but the "diplomatic cowardice has ensured that nobody has been prepared to articulate this clearly in public".
"If this is what is going to happen in practice, why risk a war over what we call it in theory? Why not simply regularise the reality, and negotiate a peaceable partition?" agrees Britain's Daily Telegraph.
A de facto partition of the province is the main reason the European Union is reluctantly going along with the U.S. recognition of Kosovo's independence, says Glenny. The recent internal disagreements over the issue have exposed it as an incompetent manager of affairs on its own continent. This, according to Glenny, is just what both U.S. and Russia had wanted.
In addition, Russia is only using Kosovo as a "handy stick" to beat the West with and show it still counts, says the International Herald Tribune. Possibly more than that, Russia is trying to stop further NATO expansion in the Balkans, according to Radio Free Europe's Melazim Koci.
"What began as a humanitarian mission to stop ethnic cleansing has become part of a new balance of power in Europe", Toronto Star quotes a veteran BBC Balkan correspondent Humphrey Hawksley, writing in Yale University publication YaleGlobal Online. Even the war NATO waged against Serbia in 1999 was never just about Kosovo, says Eric Jansson in the Balkan Insight.
It may still be early to predict what will happen with Kosovo and, indeed, with the whole region. But whatever the outcome, it is likely to depend heavily on the interests of the main international players.
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