Prishtina, Kosovo
IT'S A BUSY TIME in southeast Europe, where self-congratulation is mixed with anxiety at the 50th anniversary of the European Union. Romania and Bulgaria, neither of which has much to offer in the way of stable institutions or economic development, are now E.U. member states. One of the first effects of Romanian membership was the sudden appearance of an anti-Jewish, Holocaust-denying bloc of deputies in the European Parliament, including five representing the crude neo-fascism of the Greater Romania Party (GRP). The GRP is headed by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a former court poet for Bucharest's Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. The arrival of the GRP quintet gave primitives in the Euro-legislature standing to create a caucus with the title "Europe of the Fatherlands," also including such attractive political elements as the French Front National, the Belgian Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), and Alessandra Mussolini, grand-daughter of the Italian dictator.

Romania gained entry into Europe while Croatia, with no significant Jew-baiting party, remains excluded thanks to political blackmail by Serbia, which demands that before the Croats enter the European Union, they embrace the Serbs who launched a vicious war against them in 1991. Serb blackmail and Romanian mischief are visible elsewhere. The Belgrade regime agitates against any form of independence for Kosovo, while Romanian police serving with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) distinguished themselves by killing two participants in a demonstration in February held by a popular Kosovo Albanian national movement, known in Albanian as Vetëvendosje, or Self-Determination.

Eleven Romanian police officers have been repatriated to Bucharest, notwithstanding a request by UNMIK that they remain in Kosovo while an investigation of the two deaths is completed. The murder victims, Arben Xheladini, aged 35, and Mon Balaj, 30, were shot with rubber-coated bullets. In the same incident, 82 people were injured by Romanian gunfire, under color of U.N. authority. And Albin Kurti, the articulate leader of the Self-Determination movement, is now in prison, locked up in a windowless cell with no room to walk around and a half hour per day in the sunlight.

Bizarrely enough, March 24 marked the eighth anniversary of the NATO bombing of Serbia, which was intended to liberate the Kosovar Albanians from the cruelties of the Milosevic dictatorship. Yet almost a decade later, the territory still suffers constant power outages, unemployment over the 50 percent mark, and renewed efforts to return it to Serbian domination. The latest gambit in pursuit of the latter aim is something called "supervised independence," as recommended by Martti Ahtisaari, U.N. special envoy to Kosovo. Under the Ahtisaari plan, details of which are now public, Kosovo would be divided, with a major share of its territory set apart as Serbian enclaves under U.N. protection.

The Ahtisaari document is notable for the devious manner with which it presents the points at stake in Kosovo. It refers to the following as "practical issues" as if they were minor details that should be easily solved:

"Decentralization"--meaning handing back a third of the territory to Serbian control;

"Community rights"--that is, sheltering Serbs in their enclaves, ringed with NATO troops;