Word: kosovo
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...Macedonia has long been treated by the West as the model democratic citizen among the reprobate states and provinces of the former Yugoslavia. It was commended for its support of NATO during the Kosovo conflict, and had looked likely to be the first of the former Yugoslavian territories to make it into the European Union. When President Boris Trajkovski visited the White House in March this year, he and President Bush prayed together. And NATO's initial response to the Albanian insurgency was to dismiss the NLA as "murderers in the hills" (to quote the organization's secretary general, Lord...
...escalation of fighting in Macedonia poses an acute dilemma for NATO. After all, in most other Balkan conflict the question has been should the alliance send troops, but in Macedonia there are already considerable numbers of NATO troops - it's the logistical rear area for the entire Kosovo peacekeeping mission. So the question facing Western leaders if full-blown war breaks out will not be whether they should send soldiers, but what orders to give those who are already there...
...term nation-building was bandied about with more than a hint of sarcasm when President Bush was bashing what he deemed the Clinton administration?s misguided use of the military abroad. And yet, as the President lunched with U.S. peacekeeping troops at Kosovo?s Camp Bondsteel and sought to reassure the world that - contra his campaign rhetoric - the U.S. had no intention of leaving the Balkans before its NATO allies do, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush team has been forced to embrace the very policy of long-term peacekeeping they had been so quick...
...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...
...surprising, therefore, that President Bush has no taste for deepening that commitment. He made abundantly clear, for example, that Washington has no appetite for direct involvement in heading off the looming civil war in neighboring Macedonia. He simply urged all sides to return to the negotiating table and urged Kosovo?s Albanians to stay out of the fray. But renewed fighting in the town of Tetovo, sparked by rebel forces taking advantage of a Western-brokered cease-fire to occupy new territory, underlined doubts that NATO?s diplomacy - preemptive nation-building, if you like - will be sufficient to stop...