In the Balkans, it’s no good reacting too late. Whenever conflict erupts, it inevitably draws in Americans and Europeans alike. That is an old lesson; World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia, while the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s only ended after major NATO aerial campaigns and the deployment of tens of thousands of peacekeepers — 60,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone following the Dayton Accords. Likewise, failure to finally put an end to the Serbia-Kosovo conflict, which began in 1998, is causing serious problems.
Reactions to the latest events from the US, EU, and NATO have been rather lame. The transatlantic alliance should use this crisis to end the Serbia-Kosovo conflict rather than calling on “both sides” to de-escalate.
The dispute stems from a new Kosovan regulation requiring vehicles crossing from Serbia to purchase temporary registration plates. That matches a long-standing Serbian rule for Kosovan drivers designed to make the point that the country does not recognize Kosovo’s independence. That generated immediate resistance from Kosovo’s small but vocal Serbian community: Kosovan Serbs blockaded two crossing points and Kosovo ordered special police units to the border. Kosovo’s police observed implementation of the new policy and monitored the situation to identify potential violence, an unsurprising deployment given Serbia’s frequent use of proxies to stir up conflict in northern Kosovo.
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