Word: balkanized
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Simatovic is one of dozens of principal coordinators of the bloody wars of the 1990s who remain comfortably at large in Serbia. Their continued freedom underscores the challenges and risks facing those who would bring key Serbian perpetrators of the Balkan wars to justice. While the world awaits the arrest of Milosevic--expected almost any day now--his detention will not be the watershed that international prosecutors hoped for. Despite his indictment by the international war-crimes tribunal in the Hague, he will be tried in Belgrade, most probably for abuse of office and other misdeeds rather than for ethnic...
...Berets, or "Frenki's boys," as they came to be known, were remarkably successful: they helped invent the 1990s version of "ethnic cleansing" and went on to become the most feared paramilitary unit of the Balkan wars. Without such units, politicians like Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic would never have had the means to carry out their radical ethnic policies. When the war expanded to Bosnia in 1992, Frenki moved with it and later went on to Kosovo. Word that Frenki's boys were in the neighborhood was enough to drive tens of thousands of Kosovars from their homes and across...
Some 200,000 people were killed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, most of them in Bosnia. No one knows how many died as a result of atrocities. Nor is it known how many of the tens of thousands of Serbs who fought knowingly participated in war crimes, though hundreds certainly did. So far, the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague has indicted 49 Serbs from throughout the former Yugoslavia, 15 of whom are now thought to be at large in Serbia...
...crisis maintains its present momentum, pretty soon we'll be seeing those columns of refugees on the roads that have become so familiar as a symbol of Balkan wars. And the worst nightmare could be the spillover of what we're seeing in Tetovo into the capital, Skopje, which has large Albanian and Slav communities. In the cities, these conflicts are the bloodiest, pitching neighbor against neighbor. And throughout Macedonia, the demarcation lines between Macedonian Slavs and Albanians are even more fuzzy than they were in Bosnia...
...NATO is afraid that any intervention in Macedonia will destabilize the situation in Kosovo, and the last thing they want is to be confronting Albanian nationalists there. So NATO is likely to sit on its hands and watch another Balkan disaster unfold...