USIP report

United State's Institute of Peace has issued a new report on Kosovo: Ethnic Nationalism at Its Territorial Worst. The conclusion boils down to this: Serbia is asking to delay sovereignty for 20 years (Belgrade argues that Kosovo should be given everything but a seat at the UN) during which Serbia will establish itself within the up-for-grabs Serb enclaves in Kosovo, with the Serb state sovereignty eventually spreading over those territories.

Conclusion
The question of Kosovo's status is gradually boiling down to the question of the status of the Kosovo Serbs, and the degree of their integration into the rest of Kosovo. Or, to put it another way, the question of Kosovo's status is not whether it will be independent or not, but whether it will be sovereign and, if so, over what territory.
Kosovo is already independent in the sense that the Albanian-populated areas govern themselves, within limits imposed by the UN Security Council, independently of Belgrade. No one in Belgrade has put forward a plan to govern the Albanians, and no one any longer imagines as Milosevic did that they can chase the Albanians from Kosovo. But if decentralization allows separate governance of the Serbs within Kosovo, without reference to Pristina, Kosovo will not be sovereign over the territory occupied by Serbs. It should be no surprise then that some in Belgrade and in West European capitals imagine that Kosovo can be given independence but not a seat at the UN, where all sovereign states rightfully sit.
This kind of ambiguous solution is a formula for failure and violence. Seven years after NATO's intervention, the future of Kosovo and most of the rest of the former Yugoslavia is once again at stake. With talks on the future status of Kosovo already initiated, the implications of ethnoterritorial separation inside Kosovo need to be understood: calling it decentralization does not change reality, and the reality of ethnoterritorial separation leads to instability and violence. The international community and the people of the Balkans have come too far over the past decade to end up in a scenario that would only satisfy extreme nationalists. The Balkans endgame can be a peaceful one, but only if ethnoterritorial separation is ruled out.