Time To Decide; The United Nations will soon take up the thorny issue of Kosovo. Should it become independent? The answer is 'yes.'.

Byline: Morton Abramowitz (Abramowitz is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.)

Once again the Balkans are on the world docket. Few are paying attention, but the stakes are high: the stability of the region, the reliability of international promises, the credibility of the United Nations. We need to get the right answer.

The question, of course, is Kosovo. U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari has drafted his plan for "supervised" independence, severing the southernmost province of the former Yugoslavia from Serbia to join Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro among the tribe of new sovereign states. In Vienna this week he will make a final effort to convince Kosovars and Serbian leaders that it is in their best interests to sign on. The next stop will be the Security Council, which must decide what to do. One temptation will be to call for continued negotiations among the "parties." That would be a disaster for the region, the West and the United Nations. So would any Serbian effort to promote the partition of Kosovo.

The case for independence begins with Serbian misrule, culminating in massive ethnic cleansing. In 1998-99, Serbia's military drove nearly a million Kosovar citizens from their homes. Even most Serbs recognize they can never rule the land again, however reluctant they are to let go. Just as clearly, Kosovo's uncertain status generates instability throughout the region. Without resolution, neither Kosovo nor Serbia will be integrated into the EU--essential to their ultimate reconciliation as well as their economic growth. There's also a new phenomenon at work. The Albanian peoples of the Balkans are a rising power, not only in Kosovo and Albania, where they are in the overwhelming majority, but also in neighboring Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro. It is in Europe's interest to focus their energies on building their own countries, rather than on uniting their disparate communities into a single Pan-Albanian nation. And that's a strong possibility if the international community mishandles Kosovo.

The United States and its European allies share blame for creating the limbo that Kosovo finds itself in. To bring NATO's 1999 war to a quick end, the allies negotiated Security Council Resolution 1244, which eliminated Serbian control of Kosovo but retained its formal sovereignty--even as the United States, in particular, effectively promised Kosovo its independence at some unspecified future time. The Americans reasoned that dictator Slobodan Milosevic would soon lose power ...