At the end of her visit with the Kosovar government’s leadership, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded that Serbia “normalize” relations with its neighbor, and insisted that the US would never allow any new negotiations on the border between the two.

“The boundaries of an independent, sovereign Kosovo are clear and set,” Clinton added. Kosovo was declared independent after a US invasion of the then-Serbian region in 1999. It has been occupied by NATO forces ever since.

The question of borders is not simply sour grapes from the Serbian government but a very serious concern over the fact that the lines drawn after the war leave a number of ethnic Serbian villages on the Kosovo side of the border, and the ethnic-Albanian dominated Kosovo government has sought to prevent them from trading with Serbia, using NATO troops to try to seal the border.

Which leaves open the question: if the US supports self-determination for Kosovar Albanians, why not also for Kosovar Serbs who never wanted to secede from Serbia in the first place and now don’t want to be stuck as part of the new Kosovo. The US has not addressed the “why” of this double standard, but has repeatedly reiterated that they will not allow northern Kosovo to secede from the rest of Kosovo, whether it is to re-join Serbia or to become its own independent state-let.