When war broke out in Kosovo in 1998, it was not out of the blue. For years prior to the outbreak of open fighting, Albanian Kosovars had been subjected to brutal repression- schools were closed, freedom curtailed, young men conscripted. War claimed the lives of around 10,000 Albanians and 3,000 Serbs, and led to a hundreds of thousands Kosavar Albanians fleeing the country. The decade ended virtually as it had begun (indeed, the century ended almost as it began) with war in the Balkans. The international community had failed to intervene early enough and effectively enough during the early 1990s to halt the massacre of Muslims in the Bosnian war. That dreadful error was not repeated in Kosovo, and whilst Western intervention to protect the Kosovans was not without controversy, it was generally accepted as necessary. 13,000 deaths were 13,000 too many, but the alternative was unthinkably worse.

The trouble was that, in Kosovo as in so many other places, fighting and even peacekeeping operations are only part of the story. A decade on and normality remains suspended. The economy is shattered. Unemployment is the norm at 70%. Investment cannot take place whilst the status of Kosovo is unfinished business. And now talks over the basis of settled status had broken down. Serbia will not move from its insistence that Kosovo is a province of Serbia. Albanians in Kosovo are equally immovable in their insistence upon full independence.

Stalemate is bad enough for those people trapped in an uneasy peace with no real hopes of work. However, stalemate is not the worst thing that can happen. Serbia could tighten the screws on the Kosovan economy and on the movement of people, whilst the possibility of renewed fighting cannot be rules out in such a tense atmosphere. A new outbreak of violence has implications far beyond the Serbian borders. The British government is correctly seeking to prevent the kind of unilateral declaration of independence which could precipitate a new round of fighting, yet the Kosovans cannot wait indefinitely. Independence must come to Kosovo sooner rather than later, and the international community must stretch every sinew to secure it- not as punishment for Serbia but as a recognition of a undeniable reality.