Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...official objective is to smash Milosevic's war machine so badly that it will be unable to continue its genocidal onslaught against the Kosovo Liberation Army (K.L.A.) and Kosovar villages. But so far at least, NATO's onslaught wasn't doing much to release the pressure. As strikes against air-defense systems continued, Kosovar Albanians were struggling against a quickly escalating ground war. Serbian troops, who had been massing on Kosovo's borders for weeks, began to squeeze the province, forcing many units of the rebel K.L.A. to fight for their lives. "We are encircled," a K.L.A. commander told TIME...
...already the allies seemed to be adjusting their attacks to help take pressure off Kosovo. NATO, which had planned for a "pause" between the first two phases of the campaign, decided instead to roll smoothly into new attacks. Officials had hoped that Milosevic would accept a cease-fire after the initial bombings, but his strike into Kosovo--which was widely anticipated inside the U.S. intelligence community--seemed as clear a gesture of defiance as the three-fingered Serb salute his thugs were waving to photographers in Belgrade...
There was another problem: holding NATO together. The alliance includes 19 member nations and makes decisions by unanimity. The U.S. worries some allies may be wavering under local pressure. As the campaign rolls forward, Albright and her staff are launching an offensive of their own to keep nervous allies on board...
...cleansing." And again in his formal speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, he put the humanitarian issue first. Sooner or later, he said, the U.S. would have to get into the fight, and probably at a higher cost, because other countries would be swept in too, possibly NATO allies...
...knocking off one or two Serbian cops a week was enough to infuriate Milosevic and to increase Serb pressure for a reprisal. On Jan. 15 it came: a massacre of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians by Serb security police outside the town of Racak. Furious, Albright engineered an ultimatum that NATO delivered to the Serbs and the Kosovars: sit down and sign a three-year autonomy agreement. To back it up, she would put 28,000 NATO peacekeepers, including 4,000 Americans, on the line. After weeks of talks in France, the Kosovar Albanians signed on March 18. Milosevic refused, saying...