Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...refugees, stupid. As NATO planes conducted their heaviest bombing yet on Thursday night, the alliance's political leaders were hard at work shoring up flagging public support for the campaign. President Clinton again compared Slobodan Milosevic's campaign in Kosovo with the Holocaust, and the First Lady visited refugees in Macedonia Friday and likened their plight to that of the characters in "Schindler's List" and "Sophie's Choice." Meanwhile, Germany's Green party, the junior partner in Chancellor Schroeder's coalition government, called for a temporary halt to bombing to give diplomacy a chance. "The administration is emphasizing...
Intensified bombing inevitably brings intensified "collateral damage," and NATO Friday was investigating Serb reports that 50 refugee civilians were killed and as many wounded after the alliance dropped eight cluster bombs on a village near the Kosovo city of Prizren. Images of civilian casualties function as a kind of counterweight to the refugees' tales of trauma, adding to the pressure for a diplomatic solution. Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin heads back to Belgrade next week, this time accompanied by Finland's president, Martti Ahtisaari, who is reportedly acting as an envoy for the Western powers. With talks about talks continuing...
...into creating its own made-for-TV events. The Yugoslav army staged a tiny "troop withdrawal" Thursday, moving about 120 soldiers out of Kosovo before assembled Western reporters at a border post. A senior officer then spun the reporters the line that the only thing slowing Yugoslav withdrawal was NATO's continued bombing. It was a lame stunt, but it pointed to the key obstacle to a Russian-mediated peace process: Moscow wants a simultaneous Yugoslav withdrawal and cessation of NATO's bombing, but NATO won't stop bombing until Belgrade backs down on a number of fronts. "Milosevic...
...doubt by signs that Milosevic's will to resist may be crumbling. Belgrade Thursday upped its official casualty toll in the conflict to 1,200 killed and 5,000 wounded, double the previous figures -- the enlargement may be designed to prepare the Serbs for a compromise by Milosevic. For NATO, the political dynamic may be getting easier, with 50 days of continual attacks having made the Western public more accustomed to the air war over Kosovo. "The key thing there is lack of casualties," says Thompson. "As in the slow-simmering war over Iraq, the West can endure as long...
...only Belgrade's peace offensive that challenges NATO's control over events in Kosovo. The peace framework agreed to last Thursday by NATO and Russia makes the U.N. Security Council the central vehicle for peace in Kosovo, requiring its endorsement of an international peace force. But both Russia and China have veto power in the council, which makes it unlikely that NATO will have everything its own way in a peace deal. "Washington's ability to control the situation is waning as pressure mounts for a deal," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "Even among countries that have supported NATO...