Austin Bay Blog

It’s not a hot war — but it remains an unfinished war and certainly an unfinished peace.

This week’s Creators Syndicate column is entitled “The Quest for Kosovo’s Final Status.” I wrote it Tuesday, January 23.

Today (January 26), news about Kosovo began to blossom on the wire services. The Serbian election gave a collection of “pro-Western reform” parties the chance to form a coalition government. (The biggest parties in this group are the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Serbia. The G17 Plus Party is another minor reform party.) 

The reform parties want to modernize Serbia and join the EU. Their leaders seem to accept the loss of Kosovo.

However, the nationalist Serbian Radical Party took the most votes of any single party. The SRS staunchly opposes an independent Kosovo.

The UN and EU want to resolve Kosovo’s “final status” but a rapid move toward independence could fracture the reform coalition.

Here’s a Reuters report on UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari’s “independence lite” proposal. That proposal leaked today– but as I noted in my column, the diplomatic “body language” has signaled Kosovar independence.