Word: kosovo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vision menacing the fragile Balkans is "Greater Albania." Clashes between Albanian nationalist guerrillas and U.S.-trained Macedonian army units intensified Friday, despite the direct intervention by U.S. troops Thursday to drive the guerrillas out of their stronghold in the Macedonian village of Tanusevci. The guerrillas are remnants of the Kosovo Liberation Army who have taken their fight across the borders both into southern Serbia, where their objective is to annex the Presevo Valley, and into Macedonia, where they're attempting to seize control over predominantly ethnic-Albanian areas...
...Remember Kosovo? According to Clinton administration spin during the 1999 bombing campaign, NATO was rallying to the defense of helpless ethnic Albanians and their brave champions in the Kosovo Liberation Army who were fighting a David-vs.-Goliath struggle against Belgrade's genocidal army. Well, guess what? Not only has NATO now declared armed Albanian nationalists of the KLA stripe to be the primary security problem in the region, the Western alliance is also considering asking the selfsame Yugoslav army to help NATO troops police the border between Kosovo and the neighboring former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia. NATO secretary general...
...sensibilities of Kosovo's Albanian leaders may have diminished in importance in NATO eyes as the territory has become a launching pad for Albanian nationalist insurgencies inside Serbia proper and in Macedonia. Those developments have put Western troops, who are charged with controlling Kosovo's borders, on a collision course with elements of their erstwhile allies in the KLA who are now seeking new targets. U.S. troops on Wednesday wounded two ethnic Albanian guerrillas in a firefight near the Macedonian village of Tanusevci, marking a dangerous new escalation of the risk to NATO forces in the region. With Yugoslavia...
...proposal to invite Yugoslav troops to help rein in Albanian nationalists appears to be a 180-degree turnabout for the Western alliance, that may be because NATO's original Kosovo intervention has failed to resolve the region's fundamental political problem. Nobody in the Balkans took particularly seriously the idea of a democratic multiethnic Kosovo championed by President Clinton and others, and no sooner had those Albanians driven out by Serb ethnic cleansing returned to the territory than KLA elements were launching their own ethnic cleansing campaign against Kosovo's remaining Serbs and other minorities as NATO for the most...
...most dramatic setback suffered by Kosovo's Albanian nationalists was probably the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. Once Yugoslavia had elected a president with whom the West could do business, prospects for winning NATO support for formal independence for Kosovo dimmed even further. That, and President George W. Bush's campaign promise to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from the Balkans, may have prompted Albanian nationalists across the region to step up their campaign for a Greater Albania, by launching new insurgencies in Serbia's Presevo Valley (which falls in a demilitarized buffer zone adjacent to Kosovo) and in northern...