Word: rambouillets
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...Rambouillet talks, which began in February, were premised on the idea that if Belgrade was presented with an ultimatum to hand the province over to NATO or face the alliance?s military wrath, Slobodan Milosevic wouldn?t risk a fight. The assumption was based on the Bosnia conflict, where he signed on to the Dayton Peace Accords after NATO began bombing Serb positions...
...Rambouillet hadn?t reckoned with the deep historical attachment to Kosovo across the political spectrum in Serbia. It would have been difficult for any politician to concede to NATO?s demands, let alone for Milosevic, who?d built his nationalist credentials on the promise to protect Kosovo?s Serbs, and whose officer corps was even more nationalist than he. Moreover, the Dayton analogy may have been stretched, in the sense that Dayton came after a three-year ground war that had left both sides exhausted. The Serbs called NATO?s bluff, leaving the alliance compelled to respond forcefully...
...even if there is no real political opposition to challenge him now, he cannot rest easy. He will try to put a worth-it-all face on defeat by claiming this peace agreement is more favorable than the Rambouillet plan, since it gives Serbia uncontested sovereignty over Kosovo. But with no troops there to enforce it, his legal ownership is a sham. And he was forced to swallow the humiliation of admitting foreign soldiers onto Yugoslav soil. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party voted against a deal it denounced as a total sellout. Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj...
...looking at where each side started -- and not at their latest stated aim -- that a real measure of victory or loss can be made. NATO launched its bombs and rockets after Milosevic rejected the take-it-or-leave-it proposals put to him at Rambouillet in March and launched his vicious ethnic cleansing campaign. Rambouillet envisaged the transfer of control over Kosovo to NATO authority, and estimated that the territory?s future status would be decided in a referendum held within three years ?- which would have allowed the Kosovo Liberation Army to realize its goal of independence from Yugoslavia...
...went into [the Rambouillet negotiations] without enough patience, with de facto support for the KLA," Jackson said...