Word: kosovo
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...fire that has lasted to this day. In 1997, as President Clinton's special envoy, he stepped into the 24-year-old struggle between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and has so far achieved no major breakthrough. Last week he gamely turned his hand to the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, the site of a festering rebellion between 1.8 million ethnic Albanians and their Serb overlords, and quickly found himself in a diplomatic theater of the absurd...
June 23, 8:30 a.m., aboard a U.S. Air Force C-20 executive jet. Holbrooke flips through confidential State Department cables and contemplates the task ahead. He has been dispatched to persuade Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian rebels to stop shooting and start talking. As he prepares to face the Balkan furies again, Holbrooke sits quietly, looking anxious. "The goal is to prevent a war," he tells TIME, which was given exclusive access to the trip. "But it may be impossible...
...tempers on both sides are exploding as the Kosovars demand full independence and Milosevic bids to bring the rebels to heel. Since March, when the Yugoslav army began an offensive against the guerrillas known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, about 300 people have died and an estimated 65,000 have been driven from their homes. When Holbrooke arrives, 50,000 Serb forces and several thousand K.L.A. fighters are skirmishing all over the province, targeting civilians in one another's villages...
Tuesday, 10:30 a.m., Skopje. Holbrooke has made a brief stop to assure Macedonians that the U.S. will try to keep Kosovo's violence from spilling into their country. Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia who has spent considerable time with Milosevic in past negotiations, joins Holbrooke's shuttle. The envoys already conclude that the best Holbrooke might finagle from Milosevic is an agreement to pull some forces out of Kosovo, but Holbrooke must also persuade the Kosovar rebels to stop their advances. Concessions won't come easily from them either...
NATO is about to be dragged into a messy war in Kosovo that it doesn't want but may be unable to avoid. In a fierce battle Wednesday, Serb forces ousted the insurgent Kosovo Liberation Army from the coal mining town of Belacevac and prepared for an onslaught on the besieged town of Kijevo -- dubbed "the most dangerous place in Europe" by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke last week. "A full-scale Serbian offensive against the KLA will force NATO to take action against the Serbs," says TIME correspondent Douglas Waller, who last week accompanied Holbrooke on a futile peace mission...