Kosovo Roundtables. 2001 - 2005 - Plaks, Livia 1947-2013 (PER Project on Ethnic Relations, 2006)
The future of Kosovo has been a matter of grave international concern for more than a decade. The unresolved interethnic dispute between Serbs and Albanians and the struggle between Belgrade and Pristina over whether Kosovo would become independent or remain part of Serbia has been the most intractable problem remaining from the historic breakup of former Yugoslavia, threatening the stability of the entire region. For more than a decade, the Project on Ethnic Relations (PER) has played a key background role in efforts to ease ethnic tensions in the Western Balkans between the Albanian populations of that region and their neighbors. As early as 1992, PER arranged a roundtable in New York City where Serb and Kosovo Albanian intellectuals and social scientists discussed their troubled relations.
In 1995, PER was one of three cooperating organizations that convened a roundtable in Belgrade bringing together representatives of the Serbian Socialist party and other ruling and opposition parties with Kosovo Albanian political leaders. (The Albanians broke their long-standing boycott of contacts with official Belgrade in order to participate.) PER then continued to work in the background, conducting numerous off-the-record dialogues and informal negotiations. In 1997 it finally succeeded in arranging a landmark meeting in New York City that brought together senior political leaders from Belgrade and Pristina-their last contacts, as it would turn out, before the war and the NATO intervention of 1999.
Following the war in Kosovo, between 2000 and 2005, PER convened five international roundtables on "Albanians and Their Neighbors." There, decision makers from all the countries of the region as well as from the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, NATO, the Council of Europe, and other key international entities took up critical questions of the day and debated alternatives for the future. PER followed up these large regional gatherings with country roundtables in Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo to address their specific problems. This report concerns the meetings about Kosovo that took place in Pristina from 2001-2005