Word: albanians
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...fortunes of "Greater Serbia" went the way of Slobodan Milosevic; now the imperial vision menacing the fragile Balkans is "Greater Albania." Clashes between Albanian nationalist guerrillas and U.S.-trained Macedonian army units intensified Friday, despite the direct intervention by U.S. troops Thursday to drive the guerrillas out of their stronghold in the Macedonian village of Tanusevci. The guerrillas are remnants of the Kosovo Liberation Army who have taken their fight across the borders both into southern Serbia, where their objective is to annex the Presevo Valley, and into Macedonia, where they're attempting to seize control over predominantly ethnic-Albanian...
...against the Yugoslav army in Kosovo, the alliance is now confronting those former KLA elements who are bent on destabilizing Serbia and Macedonia. Not only that, NATO has actually enlisted the help of the same Yugoslav army against which it fought in Kosovo. To the consternation of Kosovo's Albanian leaders, NATO this week asked Belgrade to send troops into the buffer zone inside Serbia established as part of the cease-fire agreement that ended the war in Kosovo. The symbolic significance of that decision cannot be understated: It's a clear a message to the region's Albanian nationalists...
...NATO's new assertiveness, of course, considerably raises the danger facing Western soldiers serving in the KFOR peacekeeping mission. Armed Albanian nationalists have shown increasing assertiveness both inside Kosovo as well as in Macedonia and the Presevo Valley since the beginning of this year, sensing that the demise of Milosevic and their continued ethnic cleansing of the territory's remaining Serbs has cooled Western sympathy with their demand for formal independence for Kosovo - which the KLA saw as the first step to its incorporation into a "Greater Albania...
...proposal to invite Yugoslav troops to help rein in Albanian nationalists appears to be a 180-degree turnabout for the Western alliance, that may be because NATO's original Kosovo intervention has failed to resolve the region's fundamental political problem. Nobody in the Balkans took particularly seriously the idea of a democratic multiethnic Kosovo championed by President Clinton and others, and no sooner had those Albanians driven out by Serb ethnic cleansing returned to the territory than KLA elements were launching their own ethnic cleansing campaign against Kosovo's remaining Serbs and other minorities as NATO for the most...
...most dramatic setback suffered by Kosovo's Albanian nationalists was probably the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. Once Yugoslavia had elected a president with whom the West could do business, prospects for winning NATO support for formal independence for Kosovo dimmed even further. That, and President George W. Bush's campaign promise to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from the Balkans, may have prompted Albanian nationalists across the region to step up their campaign for a Greater Albania, by launching new insurgencies in Serbia's Presevo Valley (which falls in a demilitarized buffer zone adjacent to Kosovo) and in northern...