When ethnic violence erupted last summer in northern Kosovo, builders of the country’s first modern motorway found the project’s sole supply quarry inaccessible behind roadblocks. The U.S.-Turkish construction team scoured the Balkans for aggregate and secured an alternate source just in time to continue work. The team recently completed the highway’s first section.
After a bloody war leading to independence from Serbia three years ago, tension remains high between Kosovo’s Serb minority and the majority of Albanian origin. Thousands of NATO-led troops are charged with peacekeeping. Known as KFOR, or the Kosovo Force, the peacekeepers have been struggling to quell violent demonstrations in the ethnically Serb north.