yugoslavias implosion

Un secretary-general Kofi Anan stated that “the ethnically motivated
unrest dealt a serious blow to [the] building of democratic,
multiethnic and stable Kosovo.” 461 The Assembly of the Council of
Europe adopted a resolution on the situation in Kosovo, assessing the
March events as “a tragic regression of the process of reconciliation
… for which the international community is partly responsible.”
As a result of the March violence, the Contact Group was reactivated
and soon came up with a statement that indicated a new line of
thinking. This new approach coincided with the belief that the Dayton
Accords had fulfilled their role of bringing peace to the region
but had failed in being an instrument of reintegration in Bosnia.
The new insight was that the ethnic principle, which Milošević had
imposed as the basis for resolving the Balkan borders, was too costly
and destabilizing for the region.
Belgrade used the March riots to strengthen its argument that
cohabitation was impossible and that a multiethnic Kosovo was
unviable. Spc-led delegations toured Europe’s capitals in attempts to
convince the West that Albanians were incapable of governing a state
of their own and that the partition of Kosovo was unavoidable. To
secure the domestic public’s support for partition, Dobrica Ćosić had
compiled a book entitled Kosovo in 2004 in which he had proposed
that Albanians and Serbs be separated on the grounds of a compromise
between historical and ethnic rights; the separation would be
guided by demographic statistics that preceded the Albanians’ secessionist
rebellion and nato’s intervention and by full respect for
human and minority rights; and the Peć Patriarchal See and Dečani
and Dević monasteries would be autonomous in keeping with the
model of the Mount Athos independent monastic community. The
media promoted these concepts.
The international community attempted to buy time to resolve
the issue by imposing a “standards before status” policy by which
461 Belgrade-based agency BETA, May 5, 2004 .
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