The Guardian The UN secretary general's special representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, plans municipal elections this September or October.
Early elections are likely to be a dagger at the heart of democracy in Kosovo.
Before that, decades of autocratic rule from Belgrade under Milosevic and Tito. Hundreds of years of autocratic rule under the Ottoman empire. The elections went ahead with predictable results - the return to power of nationalists. There is even less excuse to commit the same error twice. Kosovan society is still too wounded, too riven with fresh hatreds, too economically insecure, fundamentally too unstable to sustain pluralist politics.