Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Move over, Iraq. Top White House aides have been meeting to prepare for the next international blowup they expect by March: Kosovo. Serbian President SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC halted his bloody crackdown of the rebellious province after NATO threatened to bomb him last October. But negotiations to reach a political settlement between Milosevic and the province's ethnic Albanians have stalled. U.S. diplomats managed to avert a major clash in the northern part of the province last Wednesday, when they persuaded Albanian guerrillas to free eight Serb army soldiers, but by the end of the week 45 ethnic Albanians were killed...
...Milosevic had earlier ordered the chief U.S. monitor, William Walker, out of the country after Walker blamed the Serbs for a massacre of 45 Albanians. Despite threatening air strikes, NATO is reluctant to act because the fundamental political problem -- the Albanians' demand for independence and the Serbs' refusal to grant even the limited autonomy favored by the West -- remains unresolved. "The KLA rebels are spoiling for a new fight, and Milosevic wants to scrap the cease-fire he agreed to last year," says Calabresi. "Everybody's now seen that the West is loath to intervene, so all the pieces...
...international community has responded with the requisite dose of public protestations, but you can be sure that the average Kosovan isn't holding their breath waiting for NATO warplanes to come to their rescue...
Slap this guy down or look like wussies. Those are NATO's options as its commanders issue an urgent warning to President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade on Tuesday. The Serb leader has already made clear his contempt for NATO's threats by expelling the U.S. head of an observer mission following last week's massacre of 45 ethnic Albanians. "Europe is outraged, and the climate for military action is a lot stronger than it was over Iraq," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "And unlike Iraq, where there was no clear target, the Serb armor and artillery in Kosovo...
...Besides the presence of 700 Western observers and opposition from Russia, NATO's prime concern may be to avoid taking sides in a war where they support neither combatant. "NATO doesn't want to be the air force of the KLA rebels," says Dowell. "But the Serbs have thrown down the gauntlet, and failing to respond would make NATO look impotent...