Dashboard: Aug. 27, 2007

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Will the Balkans be partitioned again? Eight years after the U.S. and its NATO allies went to war to stop former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing campaign in Kosovo, efforts to integrate the province's two ethnic communities have produced disappointing results. The province of 1.8 million has been under U.N. administration since 1999. Demands for independence by Kosovo's Albanians, who make up more than 90% of the population, have been thwarted by Serbian and Russian objections and by the Albanians' failure to provide a safe environment for Kosovo's Serbian minority. A key European envoy to talks on Kosovo's future has suggested that the impasse could be broken by dividing the province between the ethnic groups. The proposal flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that splitting Kosovo would destabilize the region, encouraging other minorities--like Serbs in neighboring Bosnia--to demand a similar deal.

Under a self-imposed deadline, envoys from the U.S., Russia and the European Union have until December to produce an agreement or face the likelihood that Kosovo Albanians will declare independence on their own, heightening tensions in the region and compelling NATO peacekeepers to remain indefinitely. Neither side has much enthusiasm for partition: Serbs say it would leave several of their historic churches and monasteries in Albanian hands; Albanians insist the entire province is rightfully theirs. But a strip of northern Kosovo is effectively part of Serbia; it has its own Serb-run administration, and Albanians travel there at their own risk. With the latest talks going nowhere fast, another Balkan partition may be an idea whose time has come.