Word: balkanizing
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...Balkan war has produced as many broken promises as broken bodies. Though the warring parties agreed to begin new talks next week in Geneva, some of those closest to the crisis are giving up hope. Britain's Lord Carrington, the European Community negotiator, resigned after a year of fruitless labor -- including more than 30 cease-fires, all broken. And George D. Kenney, a career diplomat who heads the State Department's Yugoslavia desk, resigned to protest America's failure to act decisively against Serbian "genocide." The London conference, he said, was "a charade...
...help to save the remaining Muslim areas from Serbian conquest. In the British view, the formation of cantons would avoid a total Serbian victory and avert another looming nightmare: mass deaths -- perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 -- among refugees inside the former Yugoslavia who might not survive the rough Balkan winter. An end to the fighting would enable international relief organizations to supply food, shelter and clothing that would keep the refugees alive...
Unfortunately, setting up cantons might not stop bloodshed in the Balkans any more than the Munich agreement headed off World War II, which exploded a year later. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has already announced plans to resettle 140,000 Serb refugees in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. Western officials are worried that he may well clear room for them by "ethnic cleansing" of the province's majority Albanians and then attempt a conquest of independent Macedonia in the guise of protecting a Serb minority there. Reports are filtering in to London of ethnic purges carried out by both Serbs...
...rebuild his military. Thus the continuing fixation on the V word has figured decisively in the two great foreign policy failures of the Bush Administration: it was too quick to end the Gulf War, and it has been too slow to mobilize a multinational intervention that might end the Balkan...
...testified that economic sanctions against Serbia were working fine; two days later, after Bill Clinton said Bush should "do whatever it takes to stop the slaughter of civilians," the President was driven to announce a flurry of new measures -- full diplomatic recognition of Slovenia and Bosnia, international monitoring of Balkan borders and a call for a U.N. resolution authorizing force to deliver humanitarian aid -- but hardly enough to frighten away Milosevic and his henchmen...