yugoslavias implosion

into the hands of ethnic radicals. Meanwhile, the partition of Kosovo
was incorporated into the state policy of the fry. Goran Svilanović,
the Yugoslav foreign minister, initiated a conference in 2001 on the
immutability of Balkan borders in hopes—paradoxically—of being
able to engineer a territorial swap that would see the part of Kosovo
given to Albanians exchanged for the part of Bosnia (Republika Srpska)
being given to Serbia. Russia supported this idea and continued
to play the role of a broker looking after Serbian interests in the hope
of establishing itself as an unavoidable factor in the Balkans.
Svilanović recognized that he was unlikely to win support for
the idea of an international conference except from Russia, but he
was not greatly perturbed. Serbia’s real but unstated strategy was to
maintain the territorial status quo for the moment only so that, with
the passage of time, the international community would have no
option but to acknowledge that Belgrade controlled only the north of
Kosovo and the Bosnian government controlled only part of Bosnia,
and that therefore the south of the province should be joined with
Albania and Republika Srpska should be joined with Serbia. At the
same time, the Belgrade regime insisted that Montenegrin independence
would cause a domino effect resulting in a union of Serbia and
Republika Srpska.
A variety of proposals for partition played into the hands of
all nationalists. Proceeding from the fundamentally irreconcilable
positions of the two sides and the brutal Serbian repression of the
Albanians, the Independent International Commission on Kosovo—
initiated by the Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, endorsed by
the United Nations, and tasked with providing independent analysis
of a range of issues related to Kosovo before, during, and after the
nato intervention—concluded in a 2001 report that the best available
option for the future of Kosovo would be “conditional independence”—expanding
the autonomy and self-government promised by
Resolution 1244 in order to make Kosovo self-governing outside the
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