The Policy Implications of Kosovo’s Growing Tendency Towards Extremism / Institute on Religion and Public Policy, 6 July 2007
http://religion-and-policy.blogspot.com/2007/07/policy-implications-of-kosovos-growing.html
Erik Resly
"While fires blaze in Baghdad and Washington-housed politicians devise security strategies for the Middle East, the impending status of Kosovo’s independence looms among the rafters of the international community’s multi-pronged War on Terror. Geographically and ethnically kin to a nation recently heralded by US President Bush as “a model of religious tolerance,” the UN-monitored province of Kosovo, demographically composed of a sobering 92% ethnic Albanian majority, remains far from utopian. Rather, the territory presents a fertile ground for the long-since documented rise of extremism. With an explosion of Saudi-funded petro-dollar-mosques and Madrasas now dotting the agrarian landscape, while the newly formed hard-line Serbian nationalist “Guard of Tsar Lazar” anxiously waits on the northeastern sideline “with bullets,” the fate of Kosovo’s future could very well determine long-term stability (or lack thereof) in Europe’s forgotten and neglected backyard."