Word: bosnia
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Wedged between the turbulent Drina River and a dark mountainside in eastern Bosnia, the town of Foca is not a place that welcomes strangers. In the early 1990s it was the site of some of the worst atrocities of the Bosnian war. Muslims were driven from their homes, raped, robbed and murdered. Some were dumped in the caves that lace the crags above the town; others were dropped in the river, where at night, according to a resident, corpses could be heard hitting the surface "like logs." Recalls an elderly Serb, insisting on anonymity: "The rapes, the atrocities, everything they...
...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 (as in the Presevo Valley and Macedonia). The current events in Macedonia are a reminder that the Balkan wars...
...Mladic would fully address the acts and omissions that caused the Srebrenica massacre. The U.N. contingent's shameful performance there may actually have even facilitated it. U.N. forces had created a "safe haven" in the town, where they promised protection to refugees from the Serb offensive in northern Bosnia. But when the 600 lightly-armed Dutch peacekeepers came under attack from the Serb forces, they began to retreat. The Bosnian Muslim fighters who'd surrendered their weapons to the U.N. as a condition for entering the safe haven asked for them back, hoping that they could at least slow...
...presence of Western peacekeeping troops in the Balkans has stabilized Bosnia and Kosovo (except, of course, for those unfortunate enough to belong to any of the territory?s non-Albanian minorities). But the nation-building project remains somewhat stillborn: democratic elections in the various ethnic cantons of Bosnia routinely return ultra-nationalist governments who show little interest in moving the territory towards any sort of multicultural melting pot. And in Kosovo, even though the moderate Ibrahim Rugova trounced the hawks of the erstwhile Kosovo Liberation Army at the polls in local elections, it is those hawks that continue...
...expanded the indictment against Milosevic to cover some 300 newly confirmed Kosovar victims, and expects to add further charges to account for the Serb police's recent discoveries of mass graves. She has also signaled her intention to indict Milosevic for war crimes perpetrated during the earlier wars in Bosnia and Croatia. A trial on those charges would be explosive - it could, for instance, reveal what Belgrade knew about the massacre of at least 7,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica in 1995 - but would also present a more slippery case. Although many observers have suspected that Milosevic's secret police helped...