Unfinished Business; The status quo in Kosovo won't work. Nor will the plan being pushed by the U.N. and Washington.(United Nations; Washington D.C.)

Byline: Michael Levitin (Levitin is a freelance journalist based in Berlin.)

Just when politicians in Europe and America thought they'd finally cleaned up the mess in the Balkans, the whole package is on the verge of unraveling. Serbia's leaders, backed by Moscow, have categorically rejected a U.N. plan to grant independence to Kosovo, insisting that to forcibly redraw Serbia's borders would violate its sovereignty. The West claims Serbia forfeited that sovereignty when it crushed the Kosovar insurgency in 1998-99. This argument may appeal to human-rights advocates, but it overlooks a dangerous truth. Pushing too hard on Kosovo would nourish Serbia's legitimate sense of grievance, undermine moderates there and possibly spark a return to political extremism, even war.

Outsiders should remember just how important Kosovo--first settled by Slavs some 1,400 years ago and the home to the Serbian Orthodox Church--remains to Serbs today. As Ivan Stanojevic, a 22-year-old student at Belgrade University, puts it, to lose Kosovo now would be "like losing Serbia itself." Stripping away the province would also strike many as collective punishment. Most Serbs feel they've paid a high price for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic, including a NATO bombardment and debilitating sanctions. The country has recently made progress arresting and extraditing major war criminals. To chastise Serbia again would strike most Serbs as profoundly unjust. "We're aware of what happened," says Stanojevic. "[But] we changed that regime. We had a revolution [in 2000] and gave a new direction to our government."

If the EU and the United States nonetheless press for "supervised" independence for Kosovo, as U.N. special envoy Martti Ahtisaari recommended in April, it could lead to three unintended consequences. First would be political instability. Serbian politics have been fragile ever since the pro-Western Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated in 2003. The current coalition government, which includes conservatives and moderates, has pledged never to part with Kosovo and could crumble if it loses the province, says Radmila Nakarada, a researcher at the Institute for European Studies in Belgrade. Factor in the sorry state of Serbia's economy (it has 20 percent unemployment) and you get an explosive situation. The most ...