Late one evening in March , as year-old Jovica Ivic walked through the village of Caglavica near Pristina, he was shot from a passing car.
After surviving the attack, Ivic, a Serb, claimed his assailants spoke with Albanian accents. According to a Human Rights Watch report, his account of the shooting exacerbated the already seething tensions in the region and prompted Serb villagers to block the busy Pristina-Skopje road and attack passing Albanians.
NATO troops who had been sent to restore peace in the area were also targeted. The next day, three organizations associated with the ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army KLA protested the arrest of former leaders on war crimes charges. On the same afternoon, dubious reports surfaced claiming that Serbs had chased and drowned Albanian children. As Kosovars from both ethnic groups took to the streets, the situation spiralled into chaos. By the time it had calmed down, 19 people were dead, nearly 1, were injured and more than homes had been torched, according to the International Crisis Group.
This time, Serbs were the principal targets of the violence, and once again, Kosovo appeared on the verge of collapse. Since the NATO intervention in ended the Albanian-targeted ethnic cleansing and forced the Serb president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, out of power and into custody, economic and social interaction has been slow to return, and stability remains elusive. Kosovo has been governed for the past six years as a United Nations protectorate, somewhere between a state and a province, with local ethnic Albanians and Serbs vying for control of its destiny.
The ethnic Albanians want independence, while the Serb minority advocates main- taining ties with greater Serbia. The riots were merely one manifestation of the resulting power struggle. The NATO intervention was one of the most signifi- cant events of the first post-Cold War decade, heralding a series of revolutionary changes in foreign policy.
