Ill-advised land swaps and population transfers won’t bring peace. They’re more likely to revive the bloodshed that plagued the Balkans during the 1990s.

See at:https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/19/partition-in-kosovo-will-lead-to-disaster-serbia-vucic-thaci-mitrovica-ibar/

The Trump administration will regret looking for simple solutions to Eastern Europe's territorial disputes.

“We don’t have a dog in that fight.” James Baker, U.S. secretary of state, June 1991, speaking of the impending dissolution of Yugoslavia.

“We don’t exclude territorial adjustments. … We think they’ve got to solve it for themselves.” John Bolton, U.S. national security advisor, August 2018, speaking of talks on territorial swaps between Serbia and Kosovo.

A tragic death could spark a lasting peace in the Balkans’ most restive region.

In March 2003, a sniper enlisted by a powerful criminal gang shot dead Serbia’s young reformist prime minister, Zoran Djindjic. In an instant, the promise of a clean break — for Serbia and for the region — from the Slobodan Milosevic era was dashed. Djindjic’s successors returned Serbia to the self-pitying past, most notably on the emotive issue of Kosovo.

In early challenge to Antonio Guterres’ independence, the United States and other veto-wielding powers insist on filling U.N. jobs with their own picks.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres may be the world’s most visible diplomat. But he is quickly learning that he is far from the most powerful.

Gazeta Express re-runs an article that originally appeared on Foreign Policy.

Almost everyone agrees that Kosovo, home to 1.8 million people and one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe, desperately needs more energy. The question is how to generate it without doing more damage to a country already battling terrifying levels of pollution — and facing a tough choice between using the energy sources of the past or betting on those of the future.

Women sexually assaulted during Kosovo's war have been battling for recognition for nearly two decades. Now they’re on the brink of getting it – but to do so, they’ll have to overcome years of stigma.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/22/the-rape-victims-of-kosovo-bosnia-commission/

After 20 years of peace, Republika Srpska threatens to tear apart the agreement that has held Bosnia together. The West must stop it.

Lost in the cacophony of international news about Russian airstrikes against U.S.-backed anti-Assad rebels in Syria and refugees flooding through the Balkans on their way to Western Europe, a crisis is brewing in Bosnia-Herzegovina on the European Union’s southeast flank. And here, too, Moscow has a hand in the mischief-making.

This is the winter of discontent in Kosovo. The lingering euphoria over independence in 2008 has given way to frustration with economic stagnation and political squabbling. Unemployment sits at 45 percent, and an estimated 500,000 of Kosovo’s 1.8 million citizens — the vast majority of whom are ethnic Albanians — live on less than $2 a day. On Jan. 24 and Jan. 27, some 15,000 Kosovars took to the streets to protest corruption and poverty.