Word: balkanize
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...take a position on deploying groundtroops in the ongoing Balkan conflict, butquestioned whether President Clinton had outlinedhis goals in the Kosovo crisis clearly enough...
...August 1995, Croatia launched a savage attack on Krajina, a region of Croatia that Serbs had inhabited for 500 years. Within four days, the Croatians drove out 150,000 Serbs, the largest ethnic cleansing of the entire Balkan wars. Investigators with the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague have concluded that this campaign was carried out with brutality, wanton murder and indiscriminate shelling of civilians. The tribunal is bringing war-crime indictments against high Croatian officials...
...that's exactly what Clinton was saying last week. He knows from his experience in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995 that Milosevic understands only force. The dirty little secret is that it's taken Clinton several years to realize that. It's impossible to know if last year's Balkan bloodshed might have been diminished had Clinton acted faster. But when Milosevic massed troops on the Kosovo border two weeks ago, Clinton faced a choice between his instincts and his experience, between doing nothing and doing something he had only recently learned how to do. "The dangers of acting," Clinton...
...Serbs to cut off. It has produced a wide range of K.L.A. leaders, from bloodthirsty terrorists who target civilians to patriots ready to die for their putative country. Some commanders are outright criminals. Interpol cops say parts of the K.L.A. are funded by profits from smuggling along the infamous "Balkan route," the main line for 90% of Western Europe's heroin...
...should be surprised that Rambouillet came a cropper. NATO's fragile construct was designed to avoid answering the question at the heart of this Balkan war: Should Kosovo be an independent state? "The beauty of the interim accord is that no one has to give up their dreams," explains U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill. "We've created this gray thing that one side will call an elephant and the other will call a mouse." Trouble is, some members of the Albanian delegation saw through that and demanded a written guarantee of eventual independence. No way, said NATO. "Sure, they...