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Argument: Delaying Kosovo independence will escalate violence and instability

Issue Report: Kosovo independence

Support

  • “Kosovo Status: Delay Is Risky”. International Crisis Group. November 10th, 2006 – “Further delay would be taken in Belgrade not as a cue to cooperate with an orderly Kosovo process but as a further opportunity to wreck it. Kosovo Albanian social and political fragility offer Belgrade a last opportunity to change the outcome. And delay much into 2007 would severely test Kosovo Albanian cohesion. Politicians have promised their constituents independence this year and have articulated no vision for the period after. They have marginal capacity to implement precisely the complex choreography the international community envisages as producing independence. The longer the Kosovo Albanians are forced to wait, the greater the chance they will discredit themselves with unilateral independence moves or riots. The pendulum of international support and sympathy would then swing away from them, as after the March 2004 riots. That would virtually finish prospects for retaining the Serbs of the north in a multi-ethnic Kosovo and see many leave the south. Instead of finally closing the question of western Balkan borders with an orderly Kosovo settlement, a new destabilising chapter would be opened.”

Counter-arguments

See also