Word: balkanizing
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...small rear door, where a white-and-blue police van was waiting. He was whisked to a helicopter pad outside Belgrade and met by agents from the United Nations war-crimes tribunal. Six and a half hours later, the man whose policies had ignited a decade of brutal, fratricidal Balkan wars was in the Netherlands, where he will stand trial...
Unlike the hundreds of thousands who died in the Balkan wars, Milosevic can expect a fair trial. This week he is expected to plead not guilty to charges ranging from crimes against humanity to violations of the laws or customs of war. Specifically, prosecutors intend to link him through the chain of command to atrocities committed in Kosovo in 1999, including the murder of more than 600 civilians by Serbian security forces. Prosecutors are also looking to expand the charges to cover other crimes, including ones committed from 1991 to 1995, during the Croatian and Bosnian wars. Though U.N. lawyers...
...fire with the ethnic-Albanian rebels of the National Liberation army, to begin at midnight local time tonight. Despite that welcome development, there's still a significant possibility of a broader conflict to come, because the guerrillas' insurgency appears to have triggered the beginnings of that by-now familiar Balkan ritual of "ethnic cleansing." The rebels reportedly expelled some 600 non-Albanians from the villages they captured on Sunday, while elsewhere in Macedonia ethnic-Albanian business owners have shut up shop and fled following threats by a shadowy Macedonian militia group. And if the chain of "ethnic cleansing" is allowed...
...aware of the palpable failure involved in legitimizing the rebels. Far from stabilizing the region's ethnic conflicts, it actually sends the message that nothing succeeds quite as well as resorting to arms - and that creates an incentive for nationalist extremists to keep on fighting to redraw Balkan borders. The Macedonian insurgency began with small groups of men infiltrated from NATO-controlled Kosovo, who then launched attacks on security force personnel. And despite some verbal wrist-slapping from NATO, the reward for that strategy may turn out to be a place at the negotiating table to determine Macedonia's future...
...leaders, however, aren't the only politicians who are a little uncomfortable with the proceedings unfolding in The Hague. A number of Western leaders had to deal with the strongman over the past decade, reaching deals and accommodations in efforts to stabilize the increasingly imperfect world of the simmering Balkans. Richard Holbrooke, Lords Carrington and Owen and other senior Western officials spent hours behind closed doors on Milosevic's sofa without even the presence of translators (the strongman had been a banker before he became president, and prides himself on his command of English). His performance on Tuesday suggests...