Gwynne Dyer, Contributor

THE WAR in Kosovo ended with a Serbian withdrawal eight years ago, but it didn't really settle anything. Determined to stop another genocide of Balkan Muslims like the one that Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic had masterminded in Bosnia in 1992-95, NATO bombed Serbia for eleven weeks in 1999, and in the end Milosevic pulled Serbian troops out of Kosovo. The problem was that Kosovo was legally part of Serbia, and that NATO's action was therefore illegal.

The only way it could have been legal was if the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council had agreed that there were legal grounds for a military intervention, but any such motion would have been vetoed by Russia and China. So the major Western powers, with the United States in the lead, attacked Serbia to prevent the genocide they believed was impending in Kosovo. That, under international law, was an unjustifiable act of aggression.

Many people (including myself) supported this act of aggression at the time, believing that Milosevic had to be stopped and that the breach of international law couldbe papered over later. It was papered over, in a sense, for the U.N. agreed after the war to take responsibility for the administration of Kosovo. But it was not given independence, because that would be just too flagrant a violation of the international rules.

No guarantee

The fundamental bargain that underpins the U.N. is this: every member gives up the right to attack other states, and in return every state gets a guarantee that it will not be attacked. The guarantee does not say that you will not be attacked except if you are a tyrant, or are oppressing your minorities, or look dangerous to your neighbours. It says you will not be attacked. No excuses, no exceptions, no loopholes that a clever enemy could use to justify an attack.

The priority of the American diplomats who drafted the U.N. Charter in 1945 was to prevent another major war. The worst war in history had just ended: 60 million were dead, and nuclear weapons had been used. A law that bans aggression must be universal, protecting both 'good' countries and 'bad' ones from attack. So what goes on inside a country is the business of that country's government alone, as long as it does not harm the neighbours.

Stay on solid ground

It was a brutal rule, made for brutally dangerous times. For a moment there, in the mid- to late 1990s, some of us believed that the times had got softer and that the rules could be modified to give vulnerable people and groups more international protection. But we were wrong, for the rhetoric that justified an attack on Serbia in 1999 was then hijacked to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The slope is too slippery, and we have to get back to solid ground.

That is why Kosovo has remained a U.N. protectorate for eight years, rather than gaining the independence that the vast majority of its people crave: to give it independence would be to dismantle the sovereign state of Serbia by force. For Russians, who fear that Kosovo's independence could be used as a legal precedent for breaking up their own multi-ethnic state, it is a red line.

Yet, Kosovo cannot be forced back into Serbia, and it cannot be left in limbo forever. If the U.N. will not grant it something very close to full independence, many Kosovars are ready to seize it anyway, even if that triggers a new war. There are no good options left. Indeed, there was none from the beginning of this miserable tale.