i realize that this post is too late,1 i don't know that much about the ins and outs of the kosovo problem, and mucking with borders always seems to raise a host of other problems. but why didn't the international community tell kosovo they could be independent if they let the northern bits with a serb majority split off and become part of serbia?
that way, the serbs get to keep a token part of kosovo, but the 90% of kosovars who are albanian get their independence. maybe you'd have to gerrymander the border a little to make sure that the field of blackbirds gets to stay with the serbs (and i don't know enough about the geography to tell if the field is near or far from serbian areas).
maybe a compromise like that would end up pissing off everyone anyway. it just seems like the serbs and albanians want different things. serbs seem to want "kosovo" as the place where their founding myth as a nation took place. kosovar albanians just want to live without serbian domination. so maybe the symbolic "kosovo" the serbs want doesn't have to be contiguous with the "kosovo" where all the albanians live.
it probably wouldn't have worked. but if it did, maybe we could avoid this kind of stuff.
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1-as if being "on time" would actually make a difference, given the huge influence this blog has on the wider world.
