Biden says ending Balkan divisions will take time

By Adam Tanner

CAMP BONDSTEEL, Kosovo (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday real integration between ethnic groups in the Balkans could prove even more difficult than it had been to end the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.

"What we are talking about now is real integration, not just the elimination of carnage and brutality, but there is where it really gets hard and it's going to take time," Biden said at the end of a three-day visit to Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo.

"Things are drastically better than when I was last here, with a long way to go and in a sense the hardest piece to go," said Biden, referring to travels at the beginning of the decade.

"This is a process ... it's going to take a while," he said in an interview with a handful of reporters including a Reuters correspondent.

Biden said he recalled the successes of the U.S. civil rights movement to end discrimination against blacks when he paid a visit Thursday to a Serbian Orthodox monastery which feels isolated among Kosovo's Albanian majority.

The second-in-command to Barack Obama, the first U.S. African-American president, contrasted their inauguration in January with the chaos and ethnic divide in the United States when he started his political career in 1968, the year that civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

"Man, if that can happen, even you guys (in the Balkans) can get it straight," said Biden.

"I was explaining why in the constellation of changes that are taking place in the region, there is reason to hope," he said.