Word: kosovo
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...dealing here with entirely sensible people. The whiff of superpower attention went to the head of Kosovo's Albanians as they savored their first steps onto the world stage, prolonging the negotiations and frittering away pressure that was supposed to be reserved for the Serbs. Milosevic bathed in ego gratification as the world's diplomats trooped to his door. Both sides seemed to think, Why not keep this game going...
...Milosevic? His delegation came and went each day in Paris demanding pages of impossible changes, then kissed off the plan entirely as a "fake document." In the streets of Belgrade, Serbs reiterated their attachment to Kosovo but secretly believed a last-minute deal would be made to ward off NATO bombs. Not until Thursday night did Serbian state television even begin to hint that the threat of air strikes was growing real. And somewhere, burrowed into the rooms of the old Tito residence he rarely leaves, Milosevic was mulling over his difficult choices...
...Serb strongman was exactly where he most likes to be--at the pivot of an international crisis. He has built his career, as biographer Slavoljub Djukic puts it, by being both pyromaniac and fireman--igniting crises, then convincing people that only he can put the fires out. But the Kosovo conflagration he first lighted in 1989--by stripping away the rights of the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of the province's population--is proving tricky to put out. Now he faces a perilous calculus: Is it riskier to cave in to Western demands or to suffer through...
...steep slopes of central Kosovo, a magenta KIA 4x4 slows to a crawl amid the cheers of running children. Behind the wheel, the rebel Albanian commander known as Celiku, or "Steely," acknowledges their play-soldier salutes, greets several wizened old men and continues up the mountain to his hilltop compound. Sitting on the cushioned floor of his house, sipping thick Turkish coffee, Celiku, a commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army's "general headquarters," says there's only one way to end the war in the secessionist southern Serbian province. "Serbia has to be defeated militarily," he says. "Otherwise they will...
...population, an intimate knowledge of the terrain and a brutality that won its members the label of "terrorists" a year ago. Already they have killed hundreds of Serb security forces in ambushes and sniper attacks. By last week, as the Yugoslavs massed some 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo's borders, it may have looked like overkill in dealing with a small guerrilla force. But the K.L.A., funded by millions of dollars in aid from sympathetic overseas Albanians--and perhaps millions more in smuggling revenues--has become a legitimate power in the Balkans...