Around this time last year, I was in Istanbul. I’d just left the Balkans, for good, or so I thought at the time. A few weeks in Croatia, a dash into newly independent Montenegro, a month in Bosnia, one week in Ljubljana and then a couple of weeks in Belgrade was all I’d seen of the former Yugoslavia at that point. I missed it greatly.

That was when I read an article by my former employer called “Kosovo: The Next Yugoslav War.” Protests were mounting in the ethnic Albanian enclave that technically remains to this day a part of Serbia. Upcoming elections in Belgrade looked as if they might go the way of the Radical Party, which had nothing but hostile things to say about the future of the region. Ethnic Serbs in the Republika Srpska (RS) region of the nation technically known as Bosnia-Hercegovina were threatening to secede from BiH in the event of Kosovar Independence. War clouds were gathering on the horizon of the Balkan Peninsula once again, and there didn’t appear to be that much time left.

So I left Turkey, and thought I didn’t know it until months later, abandoned a plan I’d harbored for years, which was to travel through the Middle East at the end of college. I had to get one last taste of life in the Balkans, the Land of Honey and Blood, before it blew itself to hell once again.

Well, it never happened. The elections in Serbia, though not turning out the way it would have in a non-parliamentary system, at least failed to put the Radicals in power. Republika Srpska never had to act on any secession plans, because the UN continued to avoid making definitive statement vis a vis Kosovo’s Independence. Russia has continuously made known its opposition to a non-Serbian Kosovo: the “bad guys” in our prism are seen as fellow Slavs in Moscow, and it would also set a terrible precedent for Chechen affairs. Not to mention Spanish fears of legitimizing a Basque separatist movement, with Romanian and Slovakian paranoia over ethnic Hungarian unrest within their borders not helping the Kosovar Albanian cause much either.

War never came in the Balkans because everyone was able to delay and stall and convince themselves that everything would end up all right. Now, it seems that we’re about to be reminded of that simple truth that exists in the Land of Honey and Blood: very seldom does everything end up all right.

They held elections in Kosovo on November 18. The new prime minister has stated a December 10 date for a unilateral declaration of independence. Russia will not be able to block it. The Western response will dictate the course of events that are to transpire. I'd prepare for the worst.