Word: kosovo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When discussing the Clinton administration's actions in Kosovo--which critics have often claimed could have come far earlier--Berger characteristically portrayed the Clinton administration's actions as making a chance for peace...
...Presevo Valley NATO ordered a "phased and conditioned" narrowing of the 5-km-wide buffer zone between Serbia and Kosovo in an attempt to flush out Albanian extremists operating there. In a sharp rebuke to Albanian rebels, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "This is not the time to start a new conflict in Europe." Details of the narrowing have yet to be worked out, but Serb troops would have to withdraw first from the frontline. Established after the nato bombing of 1999 as a no-go area for Serbian troops and intended to keep nato and Serbian forces...
...Where NATO had been happy to fight alongside the KLA against the Yugoslav army in Kosovo, the alliance is now confronting those former KLA elements who are bent on destabilizing Serbia and Macedonia. Not only that, NATO has actually enlisted the help of the same Yugoslav army against which it fought in Kosovo. To the consternation of Kosovo's Albanian leaders, NATO this week asked Belgrade to send troops into the buffer zone inside Serbia established as part of the cease-fire agreement that ended the war in Kosovo. The symbolic significance of that decision cannot be understated...
...NATO's new assertiveness, of course, considerably raises the danger facing Western soldiers serving in the KFOR peacekeeping mission. Armed Albanian nationalists have shown increasing assertiveness both inside Kosovo as well as in Macedonia and the Presevo Valley since the beginning of this year, sensing that the demise of Milosevic and their continued ethnic cleansing of the territory's remaining Serbs has cooled Western sympathy with their demand for formal independence for Kosovo - which the KLA saw as the first step to its incorporation into a "Greater Albania...
...NATO may have remained largely passive in the face of attacks on Kosovo's Serbs and even the minor insurgency in Presevo, but by taking their campaign to Macedonia, the nationalist guerrillas may have crossed a NATO red line. Macedonia was the only former Yugoslav republic to break away without bloodshed in the early 1990s, and Western observers have long been concerned that the conflicts in the surrounding republics could spark a disastrous showdown between Macedonia's 30 percent Albanian population and the Slavic majority - even more so since the Kosovo war increased tensions between the two communities. Still, Macedonia...