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The former prime minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, was acquitted Friday on charges of murder, torture, rape, and the cruel treatment of prisoners during his years as a commander in the Kosovo Liberation Army. At the end of the war in Kosovo, Haradinaj turned his military following into a political party but was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia just a hundred days after becoming prime minister.

On Friday, a panel of judges found Haradinaj not guilty, but on the basis of insufficient evidence. Before announcing the final verdict, the panel noted:

The Chamber encountered significant difficulties in securing the testimony of a large number of witnesses. Many cited fear as a prominent reason for not wishing to appear before the Chamber to give evidence. In this regard, the Chamber gained a strong impression that the trial was being held in an atmosphere where witnesses felt unsafe, due to a number of factors.”

And by “a number of factors,” they mean death threats, the suspicious killing of the prosecution’s lead witness (and his son and nephew), and a general sense among Kosovars that the international community is more than happy to turn a blind eye to the grimmer actions of a man it sees as a key partner in regional peace.

The Haradinaj trial and verdict point to the precarious nature of any foray into international justice. Once again it seems politics has stood in the way of justice and has done so, per usual, at the expense of those whom the court should serve: the victims.

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President Bush's bid to win NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia turned out to be a non-starter. Member states opposed admitting the countries to a "Membership Action Plan," choosing instead to merely issue a non-binding pledge to admit them some day and review their application again in December. (Albania and Croatia did get the green light, continuing the alliance's expansion into the Balkans.) Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rozogin, was quick to declare that the review would alter nothing:

I doubt very much that in less than a year Georgia can solve its territorial problems and Ukraine can change the current proportion of NATO sympathizers," he said.

While it's easy to attack the Russians' motives, he's actually quite right. Half of Ukrainians oppose joining NATO and Georgia is still grappling with decades-old territorial conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Both countries believe that NATO membership can help them resolve their internal divisions. European governments were skeptical of this approach from the beginning. Estonian President Toomas Ilves had this advice, based on his own country's experience with NATO membership:

Don't be a Marxist" he said, "and by that I mean Groucho Marx-ist". He reminded the audience of the scene where Groucho Marx walks into a bank with a gun to his head claiming that he'll take his life unless they give him all their money.

But if Georgia and Ukraine's leaders' understandable desire to join NATO makes them Marx brothers, Bush comes out looking like a stooge. It's fairly clear that the primary U.S. goals in Bucharest were gaining support for a missile defense system in Eastern Europe and cajoling the Europeans into a greater commitment in Afghanistan. Why Bush would want to distract from these goals with an initiative that was bound to fail from the start is beyond me.

Hillary Clinton and her misstated trip to Tuzla have made headlines in the United States of late, but in the Balkans, it's all old news.

Back in early January, a former member of the Bosnian presidency, Kresimir Zubak, was reported to have called her story of her arrival in the Bosnian city, sniper fire and all, completely false (article here if you read Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian).

Clinton's Tuzla trip came under further attack by the Bosnian Serb political leader Mladen Ivanic -- although Ivanic had a different account of Hillary's motivations than did the Obama camp. He explains (text in Serbian):

Given that the world, and especially America, associate the activity of snipers shooting at innocent civilians exclusively with Serbs as 'the bad guys,' Hillary Clinton has sent a clear signal as to kind of foreign policy she would hold towards this part of the Balkans. The Serbs would still be 'the bad guys,' while the Bosniaks and the Croats would be 'the good guys.'"

It's no surprise a Bosnian Serb would beat Sinbad to the punch on this one. After all, it was Clinton's husband who led the push for NATO's 1995 airstrike on Bosnian Serb targets. But these Balkan denouncers were so quick to jump on Clinton's story that they seem to have gotten a few facts wrong themselves. Zubak argues that Clinton did not actually arrive in Tuzla until December 22, 1997. According to Clinton's official schedule for March 25, 1996, released by the National Archives, Clinton did in fact visit Tuzla in 1996 -- just in time to meet an eight-year-old Bosnian girl and a 7th-grade class adopted by Germany.

Tensions in Kosovo between minority Serbs and U.N. peacekeepers turned violent Monday when a peaceful protest in the Serbian controlled northern half of Kosovska Mitrovica got ugly (think Molotov cocktail ugly). The clash left one U.N. police officer dead and more than 130 people injured. And despite today's calls for an end to the violence from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, riots have only continued.

You may be wondering: Why is it so important for Kosovo to keep this little town within its newly declared borders? Ask an Albanian Kosovar, and he'll tell you it's not. Mitrovica is a sad little town, once ravaged by war and now home to a bunch of scared, isolated Serbs. And the same can be said for many small towns situated between Kosovo's northern border with Serbia and the Ibar River.

So why not just let them go? After all, if Albanian-majority Kosovo can just leave Serbia, why can't Serb-majority Mitrovica leave Kosovo in turn?

Because, for the last eight years, the West has toed the "partition is not an option" line, and with good reason. In a region already teeming with disputed boundaries drawn around ethnically cleansed communities (fruits of the wars of the 1990s), partition could only make things worse.

Looking at Kosovo alone, partition would be tough. More than half of Kosovo's Serbs live south of the Ibar. To only partition the northern enclaves would only half address the issue, and even moderate partitioning would indirectly legitimize the population swapping that turned so bloody back in 1999. Regionally speaking, partition would also only add fuel to separatist flames, sending the wrong message to Serbs in Bosnia's Repulika Srpska and Albanians in Macedonia.

So even as the U.N. withdraws its forces from the north, the West will keep up its "no partition" mantra. Good thing, too. The last thing Europe needs right now is a precedent for the creation of endless mini ethnic states.

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Protests against what looks like a stolen election in Armenia turned ugly over the weekend, with riot police cracking down harshly on demonstrators. Eight people died and more than 130 were wounded in the clashes, and the government has declared a state of emergency. But among the chaos, Sabrina Tavernese of the New York Times found some absurd moments:

The officers withdrew from the crowded areas toward midnight, leaving strange scenes in the moonlight. An elaborately decorated cake was atop an upside-down car; loaves of bread spilled out of an open trunk of a car on its side. Drunken men gobbled up expensive chocolates.

"The owner of this store is a very bad person," said Arsen Sarkisyan, 20, who was walking out with a bag of sour cream containers.

Before declaring independence, Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci announced that 100 countries would quickly recognize its sovereign status. It seems he may have been a bit too optimistic.

Currently, 25 countries have or are in the process of recognizing the Republic of Kosova (Kosova being the preferred Albanian spelling). According to the website kosovothanksyou.com, a site created by two Kosovar Albanians to thank recognizing countries, another 28 countries are expected to eventually recognize Kosovo's sovereignty. But that still leaves Thaci short of his hopeful 100. The site includes a handy map showing recognizing countries in blue and potential recognizing countries in yellow:

The list of recognizing countries includes big names like the United States, France, Britain, and 12 others from the EU. But the list falls short on regional players -- Romania and Bosnia have both said they will not recognize Kosovo -- and on emerging global powers like Russia, China, and India. Predominantly Muslim Senegal is the only recognizing country in Africa, and recognition for Europe's new majority-Muslim state has been slow in the rest of the Islamic world too. Turkey and Afghanistan are the only other Islamic countries to have recognized Kosovo so far.

Even if Kosovo does hit the 100 country mark, that's still barely half the countries in the world. Though, I suppose fewer recognizing countries does mean fewer thank you notes.

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For more than a decade, Bosnia has been struggling to pull itself back together under the Dayton Peace Accords, the 1995 agreement that brought an end to the country's bloody civil war but also left Bosnia divided into two mini-states.

Also for more than a decade, Radovan Karadzic (shown at right) -- one time president of the Bosnian Serbs, now indicted by the U.N.'s International Criminal tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity –- has remained at large, making a mockery of the court's attempt at international justice. (For anyone who’s seen The Hunting Party, you know the story).

Now, Bosnian officials have reported that the actual original copy of the signed peace accords is missing from the presidential archives. And who do they think has it? None other than Radovan himself. Vladimir Lukic, former prime minister of the Serbian half of Bosnia, said:

I suppose the document was given to the President of the Republika Srpska (Karadzic) for safe keeping."

No wonder Bosnia continues to be an unsustainable, divided country -- its founding document has been entrusted to the very face of ethnic cleansing.

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The scenes on CNN today of Serbian political and religious leaders holding candles at a vigil to protest Kosovo's independence, as well as the rogue protesters setting fire to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, bring to mind Graham Fuller's January/February FP cover story, "A World Without Islam." In the piece, Fuller cautions Islam's critics not to assume that a Middle East dominated by Orthodox Christianity would be any more accepting of Western influence than today's Middle East. With Serbian Christians now fighting to retain what they they view as their religious homeland, maybe he was on to something:

The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos, which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of Western missionary proselytism, a tendency to perceive religion as a key vehicle for the protection and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the “corrupted” and imperial character of the West. Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War. Samuel Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations embroiled in a cultural clash with the West.

Whatever you think of Fuller's characterization, it certainly seems noteworthy that the United States and the EU are about to go the mat with Russia for a Muslim country at the expense of a Christian one. If the rift between an increasingly religious Russia and the West continues to grow, can it be long until the op-eds start appearing on "The Orthodox Threat" or "The Failure of Political Orthodoxy"? "Orthofascism" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?

Via e-mail, John McCreary comments on the Kosovo precedent:

If self determination based on ethnic homogeneity becomes the basis of nationhood, every nation in Africa is at risk of civil war. Pakistan, India, Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, China and Russia all could splinter. Latin American countries will disintegrate. Self determination always is great in speeches, but lousy in practice. This is the issue that will stop the eastward march of NATO. Vlad Putin will try to use it to destroy NATO.

It's still an open question, though, as to what kind of control over Russia's foreign policy Putin will have once he steps down as president and becomes prime minister. His protégé and successor, Dmitry Medvedev, just might turn out to have some ideas of his own.

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Kosovar Prime Minister Hashim Thaci (shown at right) gave an interview for Friday's Haaretz in which he professes admiration for Israel and stresses that his majority-Muslim proto-country (which is expected to declare independence any minute now) will not be an Islamic state:

At a time when in Turkey, which also wants to join Europe, the battle over the religious character of the state is heating up, Thaci promises: "Kosovo is going to be a democratic and secular state of all its citizens, and the freedom to exercise religion without any hindrance is granted by the Kosovo Constitution."

This assertion is significant since many Israelis fear that an independent Kosovo, or a potentially unified "Greater Albania" could serve as an Islamist beachhead in southern Europe that relies on Iranian and Saudi support, an argument that Thaci said "does not even deserve comment." It was this concern that lead then Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon to break with most of the international community in 1999 and support Slobodan Milosevic during the NATO bombing of Serbia. Nevertheless, Thaci describes Sharon as a "great leader."

Many also see parallels between Kosovo's struggle for independence and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and worry that a precedent may be set. This is but one of the many domino-effect scenarios that have emerged in recent weeks. Thaci argues in response that Kosovo is "a unique case" and "should not represent any precedent." The rebel leader-turned-politician clearly hopes Israelis will think of Kosovars as kindred spirits. Haaretz, at least, is already calling him "the Ben Gurion of Kosovo."

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Once again, leaders in Kosovo are planning to declare independence -- and this time, the announcement could come as early as this Sunday.

Kosovo's impending independence has sparked great international debate, mostly around questions of legal and political precedent. But perhaps the real question is one of economics: Will an independent Kosovo be financially viable?

Judging by statistics from the World Bank, the answer would appear to be: not very.

Kosovo is one of the poorest economies in Europe, with per capita income of an estimated $1,600 per annum in 2005… Approximately 37 percent of the population live in poverty (below $2.07 per day); and 15 percent in extreme poverty ($1.35 per day).

Youth unemployment will present one of the biggest problems for Kosovo's future independent economy. Last year, during a trip to Pristina -- Kosovo’s dusty, provincial capital -- I met two young Kosovar Albanians, ages 24 and 25. Neither had a job, but neither seemed too concerned about it. Most people don't work, they told me (unemployment is actually 44 percent). One of the two wasn't even looking for employment. He lived off remittances from his brothers who were working in Sweden and Canada (nearly one quarter of Kosovars are now living abroad). "He's lucky," the other told me, "I wish I had brothers."

For a generation that has grown up with little opportunity and, in turn, little motivation, adjusting to a self-sustaining economy will likely prove a long and painful process. As of now, the U.N. is holding Kosovo's economy somewhat together, and the EU will increasing take over that role. But if Kosovars are serious about independence, they're going to need to back up their coming declaration with a real plan for keeping their tiny new country afloat.

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Pro-Europe candidate Boris Tadic narrowly beat out his opponent Tomislav Nikolic in the second round of Serbia's presidential election, held on Sunday.

EU High Representative Javier Solana declared the results a sign that Serbian citizens want to "resume the European path." But Serbian democracy is not out of the woods. Its democratic coalition, led by both Tadic and Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, is on shaky ground. Kostunica did not endorse Tadic prior to the elections and is now opposing efforts to sign a cooperation agreement with the European Union.

Despite the importance of Sunday's elections, it was not the only presidential race on the minds of Belgrade's Serbs. I visited the Serbian capital between its first and second rounds of voting and found students there more interested in U.S. politics than in their own. Demonstrating a global trend mentioned here earlier, the students I spoke with were closely following the U.S. primary season. A bit skeptical of the hubbub, they found the state by state run-offs both frivolous and fascinating. All were intrigued by the prospect of an African-American or female U.S. president, but several told me, with a classically Serbian cynicism, that they thought the Obama-Clinton battle was all for show—that, in the end, "the Man" (the white man) would prevail. I guess that's a vote for McCain?

Why won't leading Russian presidential candidate Dmitri Medvedev debate his opponents? It would take too much time away from pressing the flesh, say his handlers:

Senior United Russia member Vyacheslav Volodin said Medvedev was meeting ordinary citizens in an extensive campaign across Russia and that television debates would disrupt his schedule. "The most important thing for us is real deeds, meeting people and solving actual problems, not wrangling in a TV studio," Volodin was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

Why debate your political opponents when you can simply pretend they don't exist? Soon enough, after all, they may not.

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Sometimes, a tree is not just a tree.

In the Moldovan capital of Chisinau, the pro-Russia communist President Vladimir Voronin (shown at left with Russian President Vladimir Putin) removed a Christmas tree put up by pro-Europe Mayor Dorin Chirtoaca, an advocate for strong ties with neighbor and new EU member Romania. Voronin said the tree should not be displayed until after the New Year, the traditional time for Russian Orthodox. But Chirtoaca fought to display the tree at a traditionally European time.

In a victory for the pro-European mayor, a Christmas tree now stands in Chisinau, about 300 meters from government buildings. But it raises the larger question encountered by members of the Commonwealth of Independent States during this holiday season: Are they to be Russian and abandon the freedoms of the EU, or tilt toward Europe and risk falling victim to the wrath of Putin?