Kosovo Unburies Its Dead

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The dead of Kosovo can get no peace, and the outlook for the living isn't much better. Yesterday, ethnic Albanians exhumed the corpses of massacre victims hurriedly buried in mass graves by the Serb authorities. Not surprisingly, today they were in no mood to meet with senior leaders of the Belgrade government who arrived offering dialogue.

Under pressure from the West, the Serb government had offered to hold talks with leaders of Kosovo's Albanian majority. But with Belgrade ruling out demands for independence for the region, no Albanian leaders were prepared to take a meeting. "The difference between what the two side are prepared to consider is so vast that right now there isn't much for them to talk about," says TIME's Central Europe bureau chief, Massimo Calabresi.

Anger over last week's massacres by Serb paramilitaries, meanwhile, is boosting Albanian support for the violent actions of the Kosovo Liberation Front. That, together with Serbian intransigence, is likely to dash the best efforts of the international community to keep the peace in the Balkans.