Word: macedonias
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From the beginning of yugoslavia's violent dissolution a decade ago, the feared endpoint was war in Macedonia. Every knowing pundit said the conflict that first grabbed the international community's attention in Slovenia in June 1991 would roll inexorably eastward. In time, they said, it would run up against the uneasy ethnic mix in Macedonia, the Yugoslav republic cursed with a contested name and surrounded by historically ill-willed neighbors. Match Macedonia with "powder keg" on an Internet search engine and you'll get 1,340 matches; "tinderbox" yields 332. Plenty of less shopworn slogans were brought to bear...
...international community did something, but perhaps not enough. They ladled an alphabet soup of international bureaucracy onto the potential trouble spot, beginning with "fyrom," the initials of the awkward circumlocution - Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - meant to assuage the Greeks' opposition to the use of the very name Macedonia. Then there was unprofor, the United Nations Protection Force - later unpredep, for U.N. Preventive Deployment - which put a Nordic battalion and an American task force along Macedonia's northern and northwestern borders from 1992 until 1999. There was the OSCE - the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - and its presciently...
...people behind the latest unrest in Macedonia are mainly members of the Kosovo People's Movement (L.P.K.), the group that gave rise to the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1997. "This isn't the first time we're being called terrorists," says Emrush Xhemajli, president of the L.P.K. in Kosovo. "This isn't the first time we're being chastised. It's just a matter of time before NATO comes to its senses and embraces (the Albanian fighters in Macedonia), just as it did the old K.L.A." Full Story...
...return when the situation is normalized. They're taking shelter with relatives and friends rather than humanitarian agencies, so it appears that they see their situation as temporary. But if fighting resumes, it could easily become a humanitarian crisis. So once again, the question is whether the government in Macedonia is now able to take political steps to consolidate its short-term battlefield victory. Right now, the situation could still go either...
...human activity is warming the planet, and that the problem may reach catastrophic levels by the end of the century. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who is visiting Washington this week, has put climate change in the second spot on his agenda for discussions with Bush, following the conflict in Macedonia...