This reminds me of a comment one of my teachers made a few years ago about how the Vietnam War was really just another battle in a thousand-year-long war between China and Vietnam, and that we had basically barged in without fully understanding what was going on.

I can't state an opinion about Kosovo's independence either way. There's too much history and emotion behind it, and both sides are guilty of bloodshed and mayhem. No one can really claim "innocent" status. Vbo is right, maybe in the long run this will turn out to be for the best, but for now every country supporting Kosovo's claim is setting a precedent, which I think they don't quite understand, for anyone to secede. Whether a particular area's secession is good or bad depends on the area/country it wants to leave, but supporting countries have just given the go-ahead for everyone to try.

They have no claim for stopping Republika Srpska now, and that will be a real mess both politically and geographically (RS is divided in two, surrounds two little Federation enclaves, and then there's Brčko, a city that technically belongs to both RS and the Federation, map here, RS in red, Federation in blue, Brčko in minty green). RS's government has claimed they won't seek independence, but there are movements within RS that given time have the potential to gather energy.

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