Serb Leader Floats a Kosovo Partition, Triggering Alarm
- President Vucic says he favors split on ethnic lines
- NGOs warn the plan sends dangerous message in volatile region
Photographer: Armend Nimani/AFP via Getty Images
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Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said he prefers partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines, a proposal that risks reopening the wounds created across the Balkans in Europe’s bloodiest conflicts of World War II.
Vucic and his allies have floated the idea of Belgrade taking control of areas in Kosovo with majority ethnic-Serb populations as they try to normalize ties on the path toward European Union membership. Kosovo, an ethnic-Albanian majority state of about 1.7 million people, declared independence in 2008, a decade after a war with Serb forces that ended with a 1999 NATO bombing campaign. It has rejected the idea.