Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week was one of the most remarkable in the 41-month-old Bosnian struggle. On Monday the Serbs committed their atrocity. Then from Wednesday through Fri day, NATO conducted the largest combat operation in its history, finally pounding the Serbs after endless bluffing. By Friday, a diplomatic breakthrough had occurred, with all parties agreeing to meet in Geneva this week for preliminary peace talks. After years of war and "ethnic cleansing," the brutal dialectic of aggression, retaliation and reconciliation seemed to have been telescoped into a matter of days. There is still a long...
Earlier in the summer the Western allies had warned unequivocally that a Serb attack like the one last Monday would provoke a massive response. But previous NATO bluster had led Serbs and Muslims alike to conclude that the alliance was all bark and no bite. Even after the shell had hit Sarajevo, vacillation appeared to be the likely outcome as the U.N. insisted on sifting the evidence to make sure the Bosnian Serbs were indeed the culprits. Then bad weather and a protective shift of British peacekeepers further delayed the nato attacks. As the hours ticked away, it seemed...
When the response finally came, however, it was just what NATO had threatened. Shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday, the first sortie of planes began bombing Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo. Artillery units of the rapid-reaction force, a multinational contingent assigned to protect U.N. convoys and peacekeepers, joined the attack. nato planes also struck Bosnian Serb targets near Gorazde and Tuzla, two other U.N. "safe areas." The warplanes focused first on the Bosnian Serbs' sophisticated air-defense network. Then they turned to ammunition depots and factories in Lukavica and Vogosca, surface-to-air missile sites throughout Bosnia, and the Bosnian...
...groundwork for last week's raids had been laid two months earlier, when the U.N. "safe havens" of Srebrenica and Zepa were overrun by the Bosnian Serbs. The inability of nato and the U.N. to prevent the fall of either town, despite their pledges to protect it, galvanized the allies' resolve to ensure that nothing like that would happen again. "The fall of Srebrenica was a blow to the credibility of the West, and we are the leader of the West," said a senior State Department official. "If we didn't respond with U.S. leadership, the situation was going...
...Once the conference was under way, it took 24 hours to convince the allies that the West had to change the way it did business. That effort eventually bore fruit in the form of several new moves, most of which were hammered out in a series of follow-up nato meetings in Brussels. Perhaps the most important change was insistence that the so-called dual-key arrangement, which gave U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali veto authority over nato air strikes, be scrapped. (Accordingly, the U.N. chief did not learn of last week's bombings until just after...