Serbs have emotional attachment of province of Kosovo, but the people not so much

NY Times:

...

The meaning of the Kosovo Province to Serbs is neatly encapsulated in phrases like “ancestral heartland” that do little to capture its depth and centrality as a symbol of national pride. The declaration was akin to foreign powers forcing the United States to give up the Alamo, only worse.

Supporters of Kosovo’s independence argue that Mr. Milosevic’s brutal subjugation of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo forsook Serbia’s moral and legal claim to rule the territory.

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The independence of Kosovo is by far the hardest blow in the series of secessions from the former Yugoslavia that began in 1991. After years of watching the country being whittled down — in 2006 Montenegro peacefully ended its union with Serbia — there was an expectation among reform -minded Serbs that, having rid themselves of Mr. Milosevic and embraced democracy, their case would be heard differently.

“Now we’ve been doing things the right way, and it’s still not good enough, and Serb national interests are crushed,” said Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor in chief of the prominent Serbian newspaper Politika. Ms. Smajlovic said she expected the nationalists to become more powerful as a result, leading to years of recrimination “deeply harmful for the democratic process.”

Belgrade has been quiet since the attacks on several embassies and the looting of shops. Residents marveled at how quickly things seemed to have gone back to normal.

...

The Alamo analogy fails for an obvious reason. The people of San Antonio do not want to declare independence from the US or Texas. They have reasons to be not only proud of their association with the US, but feel like an important part of the US and its culture.

In a comment to another post on Kosovo a Serbian makes the point that the Albanian Kosovars have only been there 200 years. I would note that San Antonio has been a part of the US for less than 200 years, but the major difference is that Texas and Texans have been embraced by the US and except for that little disagreement in the 1860's it has been a happy relationship. Even during that unpleasantness, neither side engaged in genocide or ethnic cleansing. People tend to remember that sort of thing and not feel comfortable being ruled by groups who have engaged in the practice.

If the Serbs had validated their emotional attachment to Kosovo by also embracing the people who inhabit it they would probably not be going through the current trauma. Even now when you hear their complaint it appears to limited to the loss of the real estate and not the people.