The New York Times

Wednesday, February 16, 2000

Kosovo Flashpoint

NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo are facing their biggest challenge since the air war ended last June. Serbs and Albanians in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica have been attacking each other for the past two weeks, and NATO has increasingly been drawn into the conflict.

The alliance has responded appropriately, sending in British, German and Italian reinforcements to supplement the French forces already there. United Nations administrators have brought foreign judges into Mitrovica to try violent ethnic Albanian and Serb extremists. A clear message must be sent that NATO will not tolerate renewed ethnic warfare in Kosovo or leave its soldiers vulnerable to attack.

Mitrovica has become a focal point for the combustible problems left unresolved by last year's conflict. As hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians forcibly expelled by Serbian forces returned home last summer, the province's Serbian minority fell victim to numerous revenge attacks. Most Kosovo Serbs fled to Serbia. Many of those who did not moved into the northern part of Mitrovica, a city near the Serbian border. Mitrovica is now ethnically partitioned, with the area north of the Ibar River 90 percent Serb and the southern part mainly ethnic Albanian.

Elsewhere in Kosovo, serious problems remain. The United Nations administration under Bernard Kouchner, hampered by limited financial resources and the slow recruitment of an international police force, has made only limited progress toward constructing a civil society under the rule of law. Ethnic hatreds persist. But it is only in Mitrovica that armed Serbs and Albanians confront each other and endanger NATO troops.

For months, French forces maintained an uneasy peace across barricades partitioning the city at the main bridge across the Ibar.

But that awkward arrangement, which left more than 1,000 ethnic Albanians fearfully stranded in northern Mitrovica, broke down earlier this month. Since then many of these Albanians have been chased from their homes by Serbian mobs, while innocent Serbs have been killed in Albanian terrorist attacks.

It is not yet clear which side is more to blame. Serbian nationalists apparently sponsored by Belgrade have displaced more moderate leaders who showed some inclination toward living peacefully with their ethnic Albanian neighbors. Meanwhile, militant Albanians have been seeking to drive the Serbs out of northern Mitrovica, fearing that their continued presence there would solidify a partition of Kosovo that left the mineral-rich north under Serbian control.

It will take a long time and a lot of international assistance to build the kind of society in Kosovo where Serbs and ethnic Albanians can live together without fear, in Mitrovica and elsewhere. But the chances of achieving that will evaporate unless the violence in Mitrovica is suppressed.