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When I travelled to Kosovo in October last year I believed as did the entire international community that the situation in Kosovo was stable. Everybody deemed that Kosovo was ripe within a near future to live in a multiethnic society where the different population groups could live together. It was therefore planned to reduce KFOR drastically, to reduce the international police force correspondingly and to hand over power and competences to local institutions.

On 17 March that illusion was broken very clearly and brutally.

WRONG! Well over a hundred Serbian Orthodox churches (plus at least one Albanian Protestant church) were destroyed by the KLA/UCK--THE VAST MAJORITY OF THEM before March 17, 2004. And well over 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians (plus who knows how many pro-Yugoslav and/or anit-KLA Albanians) were cleansed from Kosovo BEFORE March 17, 2004--most of them in 1999!!

Like most Americans, I remember where I was and what I was doing when the planes hit on 9/11. I also remember where I was on March 17, 2004. I was exactly where I belonged--at a Lutheran Lenten communion service. Among other things, we sang St. Patrick's Breastplate, because it was St. Patrick's day. (St. Patrick is a saint for both Lutherans and Orthodox, as well as Roman Catolic Irish.) What a letdown and a grief it was when--soon thereafter-- I found out what the UCK was doing!!

On another, related subject: Welcome, Srebrenica Squak! All I can say is AMAZING!!!!