MITROVICA, Kosovo — At first glance, Mitrovica looks like an unremarkable post-industrial mining town. A cloud of smoke hovers over a sprawl of dusty roads dotted with Yugoslav-era apartment blocks and an unattractive monument to local zinc miners, both Serb and Albanian, who battled against the Nazis during World War II. Today, the city is divided by a river and a bridge, symbols of the ethnic strife that exploded in violence in 1999 and again in 2004, driving Mitrovica’s Albanians to the south, and Serbs to the north, of the Ibar River. The final scheduled talks between Kosovo and Serbia [...]
ANNAPOLIS I: THE NOT-SO-SECRET SERVICE — The Annapolis Conference on the Middle East started with something as mundane as an early morning bus ride. At 8 a.m., foreign ministers and senior diplomats from 46 countries were bussed from the State Department to the U.S. Naval Academy for better security, and to avoid clogging rush hour traffic on the beltway with individual motorcades, it was said. In reality, however, the buses were meant to make sure that everyone showed up at the conference. Security was mainly shared between the local police and the oddly named Uniformed Secret Service, a Treasury Department [...]
WASHINGTON — Some 40 foreign ministers and other senior officials are being bussed to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., Tuesday for a day’s discussion on the conflict that has dominated events in the Middle East since 1948. Each speaker will initially have five minutes (President Bush will have a few more) to spell out his or her proposals for establishing peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Rome isn’t the only place that wasn’t built in a day. Neither will a peaceful Middle East, with Israel and Palestine existing side by side. But the United States, organizer of [...]
