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Kosovo on the edge 2007

After eight years of intense and intrusive international presence in Kosovo, a peace keeping effort to follow a brutal ethnic conflict between Serbians and Kosovar Albanians, the question of a "Final Status" is on the tongues of all in the region. At the crossroads between east and west, Serbia and Kosovo have been divided, conquered and ruled for hundreds of years; and today is no exception. Though the Albanians are waiting patiently for some semblance of independence and autonomy, all but promised by the Americans following the war, their future is ironically solely in the hands of the international elite, and more specifically, the remaining Cold War superpowers Russia and the United States. No matter their feelings, Serbs and Albanians on the ground are at the whim of the winds of highest-level international diplomacy. Where Kosovo might be looked at as a model of success for International Peacekeeping by some, many others on the ground see it for what it is: a stifling bureaucracy forced upon a region rife with problems of its own. Electricity production and water don't meet demand, infrastructure still is undergoing reconstruction and poverty abounds. Kosovo and Serbia are moving rapidly toward a European future, but on cars and rails of another's construction. © MATT LUTTON / INVISION IMAGES

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