2006 a decisive year for the Balkans

SARAJEVO, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA — Experts are forecasting a whirl of diplomatic activity in the Balkans in the coming months, making 2006 a decisive year for the war-torn region.

Splintered by ethnic conflicts in the 1990s, segments of the former Yugoslavia are pushing for solutions to the legacies of those years. Several states in the region are moving toward EU membership.

Developments may include the creation of two new countries, as Kosovo and Montenegro look to break away from Serbia. It could also mean a makeover for Bosnia-Herzegovina.

And many hope Serbia, like Croatia, will round up the last of its war-crimes suspects: the U.N. war-crimes tribunal's two most-wanted suspects are thought to be hiding in Serbia more than a decade after being indicted for genocide during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Macedonia's relative success with a 2001 power-sharing agreement that narrowly averted civil war resulted in the EU awarding the country formal candidate status in December.

Croatia will this year continue its accession talks with the EU. Croatia cleared its last stumbling block in early December with the arrest of its last war-crimes suspect, Ante Gotovina, a former general indicted in 2001 for involvement in the wartime killings of Serb civilians.

Meanwhile, the EU has signaled that Serbia's failure to turn over former Bosnian Serb political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic is jeopardizing its chances for membership.

What's going to happen with Kosovo?

Though the province is still technically part of Serbia, the U.N. has been running it since the fighting ended in 1999. The majority Kosovar Albanians want independence, while the minority Serbs want to remain part of Serbia. The Serbs envision carving the province into Serb and Albanian areas — a model tried in Bosnia, which is still not fully sovereign more than a decade after the guns fell silent.

In November, U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, came to the region to lay the groundwork for talks that were supposed to start on Jan. 25. But Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova's death in January delayed the talks. The talks finally started in Vienna in February, and the next session is scheduled for May 4 but without a strong leader like Rugova to unite Kosovar Albanian politicians on the negotiating team.

It's likely that the majority Albanians will have to give some power to the Serb minority, and agree to some oversight from the U.N. or the European Union, giving the province conditional independence. While Kosovo's constant power and water outages may not make it Europe's most viable new state, independence would remove the threat of a new war posed by any handover of Kosovo to Serbia.

Why does Montenegro want independence?

As the other Yugoslav republics broke ranks in the early 1990s, Montenegro's 650,000 people stuck with Serbia. But while Serbia's former president Slobodan Milosevic — who died last month while on trial at the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague — fought and lost three wars, ruining Serbia's economy and international standing, Montenegro adopted the euro and ran its own internal and foreign affairs.

The republic got its own dubious reputation as a kleptocracy, however, as media reported on Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic's alleged involvement in the lucrative Balkan cigarette-smuggling trade. But the EU now says that Montenegro has made some small improvements in the rule of law and the fragile economy, and has more of the characteristics of a country than it did three years ago.

When the EU brokered Serbia-Montenegro's constitution in 2003, it was reluctant to encourage the redrawing of more borders in the Balkans. But now officials admit that Serbia-Montenegro isn't working. The EU's concern now is that a May 21 Montenegro referendum on independence — allowed to both Serbia and Montenegro this year, after three years under the EU constitution — be held legally and fairly.

Montenegro can break its union with Serbia if at least 55 percent of voters who cast ballots opt to make their tiny republic a sovereign state, according to EU guidelines.

The two regions already have separate currencies, tax regimes and trade rules. Serbia uses the dinar, while Montenegro, eager to attract Europeans to its Adriatic coastline, adopted use of the German mark in 1996 and now uses the euro.

Who's running Bosnia?

Since the end of the 1992-1995 war, Bosnia has been made up of two ethnic halves — the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic — held together by a loose central government and three presidents.

Working under a deadline for reforms to allow October's general election, Bosnia's main political parties agreed last month on constitutional reforms that would make the country's complex central institutions more efficient, a condition for closer ties with the European Union. The changes would boost the powers of the central institutions, hampered by terms of the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the country's 1992-95 war but created two political entities — the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

The leaders of the seven strongest ruling and opposition parties agreed to replace the three-member presidency with a single president and two deputies, all of whom would be elected by the parliament and not directly, as is the case now. They are to be representatives of the three peoples — Croats, Muslims and Serbs — and would rotate as presidents every 16 months during their four-year mandate.

The reforms have to be adopted by the central parliament. Changes to the constitution have to be made at least six months before any election.

Additional information from Seattle Times staff research.