Tension mounts as Kosovo Constitution takes effect

Kosovo's new Constitution went into force Sunday, an important milestone on its path toward full-fledged statehood. But a simmering dispute over who has authority over this land threatens to destabilize the newborn country and plunge the Balkans into crisis.

The Constitution envisions handing over executive power to the majority ethnic Albanian government from the United Nations, which has administered the province for the past nine years after NATO intervened in 1999 to halt Slobodan Milosevic's repression of ethnic Albanians. It comes four months after Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, the culmination of a long and bloody struggle for national self-determination.

But even as Kosovo's president, Fatmir Sejdiu, on Sunday lauded the "historic" launching of the document ahead of what was expected to be a low-key ceremony in Pristina, the introduction of the Constitution threatened to unleash tensions in a territory where the international community is already struggling to maintain a fragile peace between the country's 2-million-strong ethnic Albanian majority and its more than 100,000 minority Serbs.