The new European legal and policing mission would need better branding and way better determination by stakeholders. Just like UNMIK in the years after 2002, EULEX has lost the trust of the majority of the population on the ground - Kosovar Albanians and the Serb minority - and it will be a waste of EU taxpayers' money.

Because the EU acts on consensus, it is very hard to get all the EU countries to agree to anything daring and substantial. As a result, you get half-baked solutions. With EULEX watering down its status to satisfy the prickish attitude of the leaders in Belgrade so they give up supporting radical Kosovar Serbs (moderate Kosovar Serbs like Trajkovic have called for unconditional EULEX deployment) and thus pass Russia's test at the UN to the whims of which it will also have to report, the mission has become obsolete: a new UNMIK embellished with the EU flag. As such, it does not serve anybody, except the well-paid-no-results-expected weakling eurocrats and the national staff that will be serving them.

 

Instead, the current International Steering Group and its International Civilian Office (ICO) in the Republic of Kosovo, which represent most of the EU members, Switzerland, the United States, Turkey, Japan and other contributing nations, all of which recognize Kosovo independence and are the biggest financial contributors to the EULEX mission and Kosovo reconstruction, should constitute a new law and order mission. The new group will be a coalition of the willing with foolproof determination backed by their own money and "get the job" done attitude, which otherwise is as hard to find in Brussels as it is in New York.

It was naive to expect anything more from EULEX considering that some of the EU countries do not recognize the Kosovo status. When EU failed to get consensus, it turned to the next easiest option: violating the constitutional order of the Republic of Kosovo, the same constitution which was applauded with much fanfare from Kosovo's international friends and approved by fiat by the Parliament of the Republic of Kosovo only last June. But as goes the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo, so goes the Ahtisaari Plan, and the unraveling might create more problems than it solves.

Time and again the wrong message is being sent to the Kosovar citizens. If you hold strongly enough, it is possible to change the laws of the land to fit the corrupt reality. The same should hold true for upholding the laws, if there is any interest in that venture. It's imperative to note that that Kosovars after independence were diligent, avoiding any provocation fomented by the radical ethnic Serbs, and the century-sought independence was achieved while aspiring to integrate all ethnicities, including Serbs, into a multi ethnic state of Kosovo based on the Ahtisaari Plan.

But pushed around like this, the Kosovar people will certainly take a more radical stand than they did to Milosevic’s stripping of the Kosovo Constitution in 1989, which in the best-case scenario will lead to the downfall of the ineffectual Thaçi government leading to anarchy and inter-ethnic rioting like in 2004, and in the worst case the same people will acquiesce and go for a union with Albania instead, destabilizing the whole Balkans.

It is ironic that while the EU last week was hectically trying to repair the stitches that barely hold Bosnia together, another Republika Srpska teeming with armed gangs and criminality is being created in Kosovo, ready to be served on the plate of the EU for the foreseeable future.

EU and UN love the unsolvable situations. But as these "unsolvable" situations go, northern Kosovo is one of the easiest out there with less than 40,000 people. I admire the attitude by the Finnish teacher’s college trainee and Noble laureate Ahtisaari last week when he said that most conflicts presented as otherwise, are solvable. This one is as well; EU has something that Serbia wants badly: euros and integration. But instead Serbia is acting as if it is doing EU a favor and placing conditions on it while the EU is only flattering Serbia's pretensions by even talking to them about Kosovo All this is just a matter of rising to the challenge and making the right choices instead of taking the seemingly easy way out.