Word: balkanizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Young men and women from all over Europe headed south last week for a peculiarly Balkan harvest in the dangerous land of Macedonia. It has been a hot summer and the corn is high, but these gleaners are out for a more elusive crop: the guns of the rebel ethnic Albanians who make up the so-called National Liberation Army. No one is making plans for a bountiful autumn festival...
...begin the approval process for the "framework agreement" signed by political leaders on August 13. Constitutional amendments establishing rights of language, education and public symbols for the Albanians are supposed to be completed by September 27, about the same time that the NATO task force pulls out. Many Balkan experts, including former Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark, have expressed severe doubts that NATO's limited engagement will be enough to quell the distrust and stanch the violence. Says Mark Thompson, Balkan analyst for the International Crisis Group in Brussels: "You can be pretty sure that any voluntary disarmament...
...There may yet be some method, though, in NATO's fudging of the unresolved issues. For one thing, squeamishness in Western capitals about another Balkan peacekeeping mission may require such palpably deceptive promises as a 30-day limit on the deployment - after all, it's easier to cajole alliance members into expanding the terms of the mission once the troops are already on the ground. The early deployment may well be a primarily symbolic gesture, designed to generate psychological momentum behind the peace process...
...arrival certainly paints the guerrillas into a political corner, by making clear that the West now believes that whatever justification the rebels have claimed for their insurgency has been removed by the political changes. Since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, the West has soured on any further redrawing of Balkan borders, and NATO's initial response to the Macedonian insurgency was to denounce the NLA as "murderers" and "terrorists." The guerrillas insisted, however, that they were fighting not to carve out a separate Albanian enclave in Macedonia, but to achieve greater civil rights alongside Macedonians. NATO's deployment, in support...
...Western alliance is currently patting itself on the back for acting early, so as to prevent Macedonia becoming another Balkan bloodbath. It has sent in an advance team of 400 soldiers, soon to be accompanied by a further 3,100, on a 30-day mission to collect whatever weapons the ethnic-Albanian guerrillas of the National Liberation Army deign to hand over. Of course many of those guerrillas, particularly the more militant factions based around Tetovo, are still actively using those weapons and it's hard to imagine they'll be ready to hand them over in the next couple...