The fight against toxic nationalism in Kosovo

This essay is part of an occasional feature on this blog that presents compelling stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, IsraelStine, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. A list of all pieces in this series can be found here.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good piece on reconciliation in Kosovo, location of a genocide in the late 90s.

Soft power works. So do democratic elections. And it is possible to de-escalate longstanding violence and hate... [Serbia's] new government, while still insisting that Kosovo's independence is illegal, has detoxified this issue and is now acting pragmatically rather than ideologically. It has renounced the use of force. It has moved the dispute from the hot political to the cool legal arena by appealing it to the International Court of Justice.

Serbs gone wild!

Serbian mobs in the capital Belgrade attacked embassies of the United States, Croatia and other countries that recognized the independence of the new Republic of Kosovo.

Now, Serbs are implementing a plan to sabotage Kosovo into submission.

This is the same Serbia that executed a mini-genocide in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

It's a mystery why Kosovars wouldn't want to remain part of such a beacon of civilization.

Kosovo

Congratulations to citizens of the world's newest nation: the Republic of Kosovo.