Word: balkans
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...aboard a U.S. Air Force C-20 executive jet. Holbrooke flips through confidential State Department cables and contemplates the task ahead. He has been dispatched to persuade Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian rebels to stop shooting and start talking. As he prepares to face the Balkan furies again, Holbrooke sits quietly, looking anxious. "The goal is to prevent a war," he tells TIME, which was given exclusive access to the trip. "But it may be impossible...
...Balkan conflicts are complex, but this one is a dilly. The province, about half the size of New Jersey, is internationally recognized as a territorial part of Serb-ruled Yugoslavia, land they hold dear as their sacred ancestral home. But its 2 million inhabitants are 90% ethnic Albanians, known as Kosovars, who have long felt stifled under the domination of Belgrade. Their patience has been running out since 1989, when Milosevic revoked their autonomy and two years later launched a violent crackdown...
...well as the moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, insist that outright independence is the only acceptable solution. Milosevic shows no willingness to countenance that and has stalled on negotiations in order to launch his crackdown. The West frets that escalation of the conflict could lead to a Balkan war wider and more destabilizing than Bosnia's, drawing in Albania, Macedonia and even Greece. Holbrooke's aim is to cajole everyone to the bargaining table...
Although Milosevic is no Lincoln, he has a keen interest in maintaining the integrity of the borders of his country. Indeed he should feel obligated to keep the nation intact. And the U.S. certainly has an interest in ensuring that the Kosovo situation does not explode into a wider Balkan conflict. JOHN DAVID JOHNSON Heidelberg, Germany...
Amid the tenuous Balkan peace, the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo is rising in revolt against the heavy-handed nine-year rule of the Serb minority. Tired of domination by Belgrade, alienated by linguistic, cultural and religious differences, the Kosovars, as the Kosovo Albanians are called, have long pushed peacefully for freedom from Serb-run Yugoslavia. Now they insist on nothing less than full independence, but Serbia's strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, who set the bloody standard for nationalist retaliation when Croatia and Bosnia tried to break away, is just as determined to block that. As the hatred builds and hard...