'The Balkanization Of Europe'.(Point of View)

Byline: Denis MacShane; MacShane, a Labour M.P., was Britain's Europe minister in Tony Blair's government.

The European Union, NATO and the United Nations are all turning a blind eye to the troubles in the Balkans.

Europe's recurring nightmare in the Balkans has returned. On June 15, Kosovo will announce full statehood. But NATO is allowing Serbs to turn northern Kosovo into a new law-free zone for criminal activity. In March, in the northern city of Mitrovica, Serb thugs, unleashed and armed by Belgrade, launched a full-scale assault against NATO and United Nations forces, killing one soldier and wounding 83 others. During Macedonia's election earlier this month, the police opened fire and killed a political activist who was angry about the open stuffing of ballot boxes and other crude election manipulation. The strange thing was that the ruling party did not even need to fix the election--it had the votes it needed to win. But like the scorpion in the fable, Balkan politicians just keep stinging themselves to death.

The West's response: near silence. More than 100 years ago, Bismarck dismissed the region's travails with his remark that "the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." Today, Brussels, NATO and the United Nations are also turning a blind eye, lacking the will or the leadership to face down the Balkans' problems, which include a resurgent Serb nationalism that prefers its Balkan history to a European future. NATO intervened massively in Kosovo in 1999 and two years later in Macedonia to curb the anti-Albanian ethnic hostility of Macedonian nationalists. In 2001, NATO General Secretary George Robertson, with EU foreign-affairs duo Chris Patten and Javier Solana, shuttled to Macedonia and forced the Slav majority to treat the minority Albanian population with respect.

But now NATO and the others have let Kosovo slip down their priority list. Crack French troops failed to stop the Serb's March assault on the Mitrovica courthouse, and waited for days while political messages about whether to use military force to face down the Serbs went back and forth between the United Nations and Paris. Britain pulled its soldiers out of Kosovo in 2002 with the hopes that the turmoil in the region would die down. Now, for six short months an Iraq-hardened British Army battle group has been sent to Kosovo, but the Serbs wait patiently, knowing British Army chiefs need their soldiers in Afghanistan.

The EU leadership has also eased pressure on the Serbs. Brussels recently dropped its demand that the Serbs deliver the butcher of Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic, to the Hague tribunal as a pre-condition for talks on EU membership. Worse, while most EU nations recognized Kosovo's right to form its own government, Spain and Greece broke ranks ...