Word: balkanized
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...urgency of the situation was underscored by the mounting impact of an icy Balkan winter. No single incident so cruelly epitomized the plight of noncombatants as the discovery by U.N. refugee workers of the bodies of 12 residents of an unheated nursing home for the elderly in Sarajevo, all of whom had succumbed to the cold within two days. U.N. refugee official Jose-Maria Mendeluce warned that barring "drastic" progress in Geneva, "many people here will not survive this winter...
...these victories are not the end of the Balkan horror story--just the close of another bloody chapter, with the worst still to come. If settlements are soft on Serbia, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic could cause a European crisis that will dwarf the current one, and put millions more lives at risk...
More important, and more problematic, Bush issued the first explicit threat to use military power in the Balkans. In a letter to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic that was purposely leaked, Bush bluntly stated that "in the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force" -- and not just "against the Serbians in Kosovo" but also "in Serbia proper." Kosovo is a province where, it is widely feared, Milosevic might start Bosnia-style "cleansing" of the ethnic Albanians, who constitute 90% of the population, an action that could well ignite...
...changed the way that rituals, gods and heroes were represented is hokum: exactly the same changes of style occurred in cities, like Olympia, that were run by tyrants. The fact that modern Greeks apparently want to believe it -- this being a time of superchauvinism in Greece, as in other Balkan countries -- means nothing, except in the scheme of simplistic politico-cultural fantasy. You might as well claim that Abstract Expressionism was "caused" by the election of Harry Truman. Nevertheless, such is the show's political motive, and it seems a poor pretext for taking great art and jetting...
...place makes me think of W.B. Yeats' haunting line, "And wondered what was left for massacre to save." The place to intervene, they say, now must be in Kosovo and Macedonia. Everyone talks about the coming winter, about people freezing to death and starving. Everyone talks about a Balkan...