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BRUSSELS, Nov 10 (AFP) -- Nearly six months after NATO'S 78-day air campaign against Serbia, ethnic violence in Kosovo remains the alliance's biggest Balkan headache, a senior NATO military official said Wednesday.
The Serbian repression against Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority which spawned the NATO campaign now is turning into a case of "reverse ethnic cleansing," Admiral Guido Venturoni, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, said after a meeting of alliance chiefs of staff here.
"The fact that inter-ethnic violence has decreased doesn't mean it has disappeared, or will disappear, in the short term," said Venturoni. "There are too many historical and deep-rooted causes."
"We are all aware of the mass repression, the ethnic cleansing, the mass deportations that took place there," he said. "How how can we think that this will be forgotten?"
"What we must do is to prevent this ethnic cleansing from taking a reverse course vis-a-vis other minorities there," he said. "This is not an easy task. We are improving, but reconciliation still is an objective that will require time."
The situation in Kosovo, said Venturoni, is "delicate."
"We still have a lot of problems -- incidents, murder, looting, arson, clashes, inter-ethnic violence, criminality, intimidation."
The situation in Bosnia is improving, however, and Venturoni said a plan to reduce the NATO-led Stablization Force (SFOR) there from the current 30,000 troops to around 19,000 was on track and targeted for completion by early April.
Venturoni said much of the Wednesday meeting dealt with implementation of the European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI) agreed at a NATO ministerial meeting in Toronto in September, but he did not elaborate.
The ESDI, an idea with roots in the early 1960s under the administration of US president John Kennedy, would create a "European pillar" within NATO that would free European members of the alliance to take military action, using NATO resources, independent of their richest and most powerful partner, the United States.
Venturoni said the meeting also dealt with implementation of the defense capability initiative (DCI), also elaborated in Toronto, whereby the alliance members would identify strengths, weaknesses, and needs for shifting funds and weapons to, as more than one Toronto participant put it, "get more bang for our buck."
That idea also centers on moving away from the de facto obligation of one NATO member -- the United States in the case of Kosovo -- shouldering the lion's share of providing money and high-tech hardware in cases of future such conflicts.