Kosovo's Curse

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.

In recent weeks, they've been joined by campaign posters declaring GO SERBIA! and THE 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 are."

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.

Belgrade's decision to hold elections in Kosovo is part of a broader effort by Serbia and Kosovo's Serb minority, which makes up about 10% of the population, to maintain control over the breakaway state. The defiant phrase KOSOVO IS SERBIA! has cropped up all over the place, from a tennis tournament in California (where a banner bearing those words was confiscated from Serbian fans) to the European swimming championships in the Netherlands — where a Serbian medalist was suspended for wearing the slogan on his T shirt. Hard-line nationalists in Belgrade who continue to reject Kosovo's Feb. 17 declaration of independence are poised to do well in the upcoming vote. They include the ultranationalist Radical Party, led by indicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj, who is facing trial before a special tribunal in the Hague, and the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), led by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, who has called on the international community to "annul" the independence of what he terms a "fake state."

Meanwhile, the international effort to sponsor and maintain Kosovo's independence looks shakier than ever. The fledgling state's guarantor, the U.N., was scheduled to hand over authority next month to the new government of Kosovo, which was to be aided in security and judicial tasks by a 2,200-man mission under the auspices of the European Union. But Russia's refusal to recognize Kosovo's independence has thrown that plan into doubt. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has yet to make a decision about pulling out, and European diplomats now concede that the E.U.-led mission is in jeopardy. As a result, they say, Kosovo could face an interregnum with no properly functioning state institutions. "Serbia is going to use this period to provoke the West politically and in security terms," says a veteran Western diplomat. "It's going to be hairy."

Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence came off quietly at first. Beginning with the U.S. and major European powers, 39 countries have now formally recognized Kosovo. But problems started when the new government and its Western backers tried to extend authority into the Belgrade-backed, NATO-secured "enclaves" where most of Kosovo's Serbs have lived since the 1999 Kosovo war. The government in Belgrade urged Serbs working for the U.N., including police and customs officers, to quit their jobs, then rehired about 800 police at double their former salaries. On March 17, U.N. and NATO peacekeepers tried to arrest a group of Serb judges who had occupied a U.N. courthouse in Mitrovica. The confrontation escalated. Serbs tossed grenades; nato troops and U.N. police fired back with rubber bullets. Hundreds were injured, and a Ukrainian U.N. police officer was killed. U.N. officials say Belgrade orchestrated the clash as part of a wider effort to seize control of U.N. offices in northern Kosovo; local Serb leaders say they were only asserting their right to be judged by their own kind.

Ivanovic stands truculently at the center of the worsening crisis. As deputy director of Mitrovica's hospital, he controls hundreds of local Belgrade-paid government jobs. And as head of the Serbian National Council, he is key to local resistance against any power but Serbia in northern Kosovo. Interviewed in his hospital office, Ivanovic, dressed in a leather jacket and surrounded by Serbian flags, says the E.U. would be wise to stay out of Mitrovica altogether. Any attempt to establish a presence in the town will lead to "illegal chaos and instability," he says. Serbs like Ivanovic want to prevent the E.U.-led mission because the U.N.'s departure could be seen as a further signal that Kosovo is a sovereign state — an idea they can't accept.

Their resistance appears to be working. European diplomats concede that their governments won't be sending anyone to the area until moderates take over in Belgrade and Mitrovica. They may have a long wait. On May 1, Marijan Ilincic, a part-time judo instructor and chairman of the Association of the Descendants of the Serbian Fighters from the 1912-20 Thessaloniki Front, convened a small group of war veterans near a NATO post in Mitrovica and set fire to a U.S. flag. "Your country recognized Kosovo," Ilincic growled at a TIME reporter, whom he assumed to be an American. "You're not welcome here."

Until recently, Serbia's politics amounted to a pretty even match between pro-European moderates who wanted Serbia to join the E.U. and nationalists who wanted closer ties with Russia. Kosovo's declaration of independence tipped the balance in favor of the nationalists. Some 60% of Serbs say they want to join the E.U., but that number drops below 45% if they are told the price of E.U. entry is the loss of Kosovo. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party — which once advocated union with Russia and Belarus, and is now tied for first place with a coalition of more pro-Western parties — could enter government alongside nationalist Prime Minister Kostunica's DSS. Russia's ex-President Vladimir Putin, who provided critical backing for Serbia in its fight against Kosovo's independence, recently sent Kostunica a letter promising "deepening cooperation" between his United Russia party and the DSS. Both Serbian nationalist parties are dedicated to opposing Kosovo's independence.

Poisoned Atmosphere
The outcome of the elections could spell the end of Serbia's European dreams. Moderate voices are in retreat. The centrist president Boris Tadic, who publicly endorsed a "stabilization" agreement aimed at starting negotiations to join the E.U, has become the subject of a hate campaign. After the signing of the E.U. agreement, the nationalist tabloid Kurir carried a photo of Tadic and a colleague toasting the deal under the headline "Serbian Pigs Rejoice! They Gave Away Kosovo!" Tadic reportedly received a letter recently accusing him of "treason" and promising him "a bullet in the forehead." Authorities are taking the threat seriously: Zoran Djindjic, the reformist Serbian Prime Minister who helped topple Milosevic, was assassinated in March 2003. Even by Serbian standards, the political atmosphere "has become poisoned," says Dragoljub Zarkovic, editor-in-chief of the news weekly Vreme.

So far, the Kosovo Albanian–led government in Pristina has refrained from rising to Serbia's bait. Lutfi Haziri, a prominent member of the largest party, the Democratic League of Kosovo, says: "We will work very hard to integrate Serbs as much as we can." But how long their restraint will last depends in part on whether the E.U. mission can marginalize Serb hard-liners like Ivanovic. For that to happen, the U.N. Secretary-General will have to ignore Russia's griping about the illegality of Kosovo's declaration of independence and get on with handing over authority to the Kosovar government and the new E.U.-led mission — and soon. Then the real work begins: E.U. diplomats say the key to establishing a stable Kosovo will be to offer moderate Serbs there better economic prospects than the nationalism-tinged promises of Belgrade politicians and their Moscow backers. For that reason alone, the shrill tones from Belgrade are unlikely to fade anytime soon.