The AP reports that dozens of UN and NATO soldiers were wounded in Mitrovica as they attempted to dislodge several Serb protesters who had barricaded themselves in a courthouse.

At this point, the outlines of a Kosovo endgame become discernible:

The U.N. said later it was pulling out of the Serb-dominated northern half of Mitrovica because of the shooting. NATO helicopters hovered above the city and NATO troops remained, but the U.N. withdrawal could fuel a widespread Kosovo Serb desire to split from largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo and rejoin Serbia. The Serb minority dominates about 15 percent of the territory in northern Kosovo, including about a third of Mitrovica, Kosovo’s second-largest city.”

Indeed, partition has been on the table for quite some time. The most strident nationalists in Serbia don’t realistically hope to have all of Kosovo re-annexed. The genie is out of the bottle in almost every way imaginable, and if 2 million Albanians refused to be governed from 1989 through a few weeks ago, there’s precious little to suggest that they could ever be persuaded to join Serbia now.

The strategy is transparent. Just like in Bosnia, war has created relatively homogeneous communities, and Serbia, after bitterly complaining at having its heartland torn from its embrace,¹ will graciously concede to annexing only those territories which have Serbian majorities in them. This would be a monstrously cynical play because, again, just like in Bosnia, the majorities in questions only arose as a result of a war instigated by the Serbs themselves.

Why would Serbia agree to merely getting the north of Kosovo? Besides expediency, there is the small matter of natural resources—it just so happens that a healthy number of the country’s lead and zinc mines are located in the regions which now conveniently have Serbian majorities. And though the Albanians will protest bitterly that the viability of their state is being compromised, I can’t see the Europeans (or the Americans) having much appetite for compelling the Serbian parts of Kosovo to remain under Albanian control.

I hope I’m wrong.