Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...words sounded drearily familiar. Bosnia's Serbs "have gone too far," intoned German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel. "This is where we draw the line." NATO Secretary-General Willy Claes asserted that "the international community cannot accept any longer to be humiliated" -- just as so many other statesmen had insisted so many, many times in the past three years...
...seemed that this time, for once, words would be matched with action. And they were, sort of, in what might be called a Balkan-style chain reaction. A heavy NATO bombing raid was swiftly countered by Serb shelling of supposed "safe areas"; that brought a second, more intense NATO bombing attack, which in turn prompted the Serbs to take more than 200 U.N. peacekeepers as hostages against still more air raids. There the explosive situation stalled, as everyone from troops on the ground to diplomats on their cellular phones teetered between the dangers of excess belligerence and empty bluster...
...lead-up to this showdown began with increasingly open Serb violations of a heavy-weapons exclusion zone enforced by NATO around Sarajevo. The Serbs had already been shelling the Bosnian capital from inside the zone, breaking the February 1994 agreement. Last week they made the nose thumbing official by brassily pulling three artillery pieces and a mortar out of a U.N. impoundment depot, firing them at Sarajevo and ignoring a U.N.-NATO ultimatum to hand them back. That was too much even for Yasushi Akashi, the top U.N. official in Bosnia. He had vetoed several previous requests by local...
...Serbs released some 126 of their nearly 400 UN hostages today, but took at least 46 new French and Canadian captives. Serb leader Radovan Karadzic says the remaining hostages will not be freeduntil the NATO gives a good-faith gesture of its own, such as a pledge to stop bombing raids on Serb territory...
...NATO officials have launched a massive search-and-rescue mission to locate the pilot of an American F-16 fighter shot down this morning over northern Bosnia near the Bosnian Serb town of Banja Luka. The plane was flying at approximately 20,000 feet on an air patrol mission enforcing the no-fly zone over Bosnian Serb territory when it was hit by a Russian SA-6 surface-to-air missile. Only the pilot was aboard. It is not yet known whether he survived the crash. The Pentagon has not yet released his identity. This is the second time...