Word: balkanizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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NATO on Friday begins its most dangerous Balkan mission yet. But the danger facing the Western alliance in Macedonia is less physical than political. Some 400 British troops are due to be deployed in the former Yugoslav nation in advance of an eventual 3,500-troop contingent whose mission, innocuously dubbed "Operation Essential Harvest," involves collecting and destroying weapons voluntarily tendered by ethnic-Albanian guerrillas. They're not there to disarm anyone, NATO spokesmen insist, and they'll stay only 30 days. If the guerrillas choose to hang onto their weapons and the fighting starts up again, the Western troops...
...giving the Macedonian government a lot more robust support than they have been up to now. What remains to be seen, then, is whether the NLA, or any faction among them, will choose to test NATO's will - and how the alliance will respond if its adopted role of Balkan enforcer is challenged...
...Balkans: B Early slips have been quickly corrected, and the world informed that the U.S. has no plans to leave any time soon. Still, don't expect any muscle-flexing. Reluctant engagement in Balkan peacekeeping could become a policy crisis point, however, if Macedonia blows up. To be fair, once again, this is a quagmire bequeathed by Clinton and Albright...
...best, the "peace deal" being brokered in Macedonia is a misnomer. At worst it may be a recipe for marching NATO troops with a milquetoast mandate into the middle of another Balkan bloodbath...
...Reflecting on Western culpability in the events at Srebrenica is not merely an historical exercise. Peacekeeping troops are still deployed throughout the Balkans, for the most part under the sturdier command of NATO rather than the paralytic U.N. bureaucracy. Even then, their record of standing up to racist thuggery is somewhat mixed. NATO showed great resolve in forcing the Serbs to accept the Dayton accord on Bosnia and later in getting them out of Kosovo, but the alliance has proved rather wimpish when its peacekeeping troops are confronted by continued ethnic cleansing (as in Kosovo) or new separatist insurgencies...