Word: balkanize
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...President believes, has opened the door for NATO to fire shots outside its alliance when three "ifs" are satisfied: if there's a clear moral justification for using force (such as ethnic cleansing on the scale perpetrated by Milosevic), if the trouble spot is strategically important (a pan-Balkan war would have tested Eastern Europe's stability), and if the military operation can be undertaken without exacting a heavy price. It is easy to see these ideas as a possible future for American policy. They suggest a nice admixture of realism with ideology: Milosevic's army committed horrors in Kosovo...
Disgruntled Serbs may have other ideas. By bringing the Balkan wars to Belgrade, Milosevic and his wife Mira Markovic may have pushed their people too far. In their hearts, many Serbs secretly hope Milosevic will go the way of his brutal Romanian neighbor, Nicolae Ceausescu, who was overthrown and executed in 1989. For many in the Balkans, that ending is the only happy one for this miserable fairy tale gone...
...drawing analogies." But there can be little doubt that the Clinton Administration, which has repeatedly invoked parallels between Kosovo and the Shoah, had exactly that in mind. As a U.S. embassy spokesman in Macedonia told the New York Times, Americans were losing focus on the reasons for our Balkan mission, and so "you need a person like Wiesel to keep your moral philosophy on track...
...Prime Minister Chernomyrdin had sat across many tables over six years, negotiating issues from safeguards on plutonium to trade disputes over frozen chicken legs. But never had their knowledge and trust of each other been so tested as on May 3. On that day, Chernomyrdin came as Russia's Balkan envoy to Gore's Victorian mansion in Washington to discuss the situation in Yugoslavia. Sitting down at the Vice President's dining-room table, they could not have known they were putting into motion the strategy that would ultimately produce a peace plan for Kosovo...
...ouster a short-term priority. After all, in the long run he?s probably damned himself to a nasty end, whether as a besieged despot, a fugitive, in a war crimes court or worse. The truth, of course, is that there are no real winners in this messy Balkan conflict, only plenty of losers: The Kosovar Albanian civilians who have been terrorized, tortured, r aped, murdered and driven from their homes, and for whom the trauma of exile isn?t yet over; and the Serb civilians who have seen their country -? and many of their loved ones ?- bombed into oblivion...