Word: serbs
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...Serbs in the northern Kosovar town of Mitrovica are not sticklers for appearances. The stained cement façades are peeling away from drab 1960s-era high-rises. Dented satellite dishes teeter on balconies. Kiosks peddling photos of local heroes like Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb general indicted for war crimes, crowd out pedestrians along potholed sidewalks. But all over town there are flashes of brilliant color: red, blue and white Serbian flags fly from nearly every window, door and rusted railing...
...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 is everywhere where Serbs...
...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...
...long ago, the scenes of unrest would have inspired fears of the kind of ethnic violence that devastated the Balkans in the '90s. But these are different times. Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian leaders have belatedly tried to extend an olive branch to the province's aggrieved 120,000 Serbs. In addition to allowing Serbs in northern Kosovo to have their own police, schools and hospitals, Kosovo's new Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, did the unthinkable: he delivered part of his inauguration speech in the hated Serbian language. Even in Serbia, whose citizens feel genuine humiliation over losing Kosovo (which Serb...
...many did. But it's not wholly by chance that Serb fury over Kosovo's secession has outstripped expectations. Serbia's nationalist leaders have been stoking confrontation. For example, surveillance cameras recorded police being ordered to leave their posts minutes before the crowd gathered for the attacks on foreign embassies; some did not return until 45 minutes after the first rocks began to fly. Yet Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica later declared himself satisfied with the performance of his police force, and Transport Minister Velimir Ilic even remarked that the damage done to the embassies pales next to Serbia...