Word: kosovo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Late last week and over the weekend the bulk of the 4,500-strong NATO task force dubbed Operation Essential Harvest arrived in military transport planes, making Skopje's airport bustle as it hasn't since troops moved in for deployment in Kosovo in the summer of 1999. After a short visit to Macedonia early last week, Supreme Allied Commander General Joseph Ralston reported to the representatives of NATO's 19 member countries that the level of risk was "acceptable" for the alliance to launch the operation. The German Bundestag will meet in special session this week to sign...
...comfortable with the mission, however hedged it is against the prospect of becoming a longterm commitment. After almost six years in Bosnia and more than two in Kosovo, NATO is now present in force in a third remnant of ex-Yugoslavia, one where the firing is live and the very real consequences of a potential escalation would be dire for the entire region. Yet NATO insists that this action is different: it is not a peacekeeping mission, let alone a peacemaking one. The troops, most of them British, come at the invitation of the Macedonian government for a specific...
Israel was severely criticized when two boys were accidentally killed in a rocket attack on a Hamas building. That indeed was tragic. But no military campaign--not the NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo war, not the U.S. bombing of Baghdad in the Gulf War, not the current Israeli attacks on Palestinian terrorists--has ever been conducted without accidental deaths. There is, moreover, an ocean of difference between a targeted attack on terrorists that inadvertently harms civilians and the deliberate murder of civilians, which is the specialty of the very Palestinian terrorists Israel is targeting...
...greater civil rights alongside Macedonians. NATO's deployment, in support of a political deal according those rights, is, in one sense, a calling of the NLA's bluff. Then again, the risk-averse Western alliance showed little vigor in carrying out its mandate to disarm Albanian nationalist guerrillas in Kosovo or to clamp down on those guerrillas' ethnic cleansing of the province's remaining Serbs and on their export of nationalist insurgencies into Serbia and Macedonia. Which may mean there may be more than a handful of nationalist guerrillas in Macedonia who see NATO as a paper tiger...
...course, Macedonia and Kosovo are hardly unconnected. The Macedonian insurgency originated inside Kosovo, where NATO is supposed to be in charge of security. But the alliance has shown little inclination to effectively police the activities of Albanian nationalist guerrillas there, and it appears to have woken up rather late to the fact that those guerrillas were exporting an insurgency into Macedonia under NATO's very noses. Although it then moved very quickly to press the authorities to address the political grievances on which the insurgency was feeding, it did little to create disincentives for ethnic-Albanian nationalists to choose...