Word: rambouillets
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...peace talks scheduled to begin in France in less than a week, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill flew to Kosovo Tuesday for further consultations with leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA officially assured Hill on Monday that they accept the deal but -- as they did at the Rambouillet talks -- they asked for more time before signing...
...something good could still come out of Rambouillet. The 17-day negotiating marathon concluded in an embarrassing mess: U.S. officials pleading in the last seven minutes before the final, final, final deadline for any concession that might keep the peace process alive. Instead of signatures on a blueprint for the future of Kosovo, all they got was a promise in theory from the ethnic Albanians to subscribe to the NATO plan a couple of weeks down the road. What Belgrade got was a delicious reprieve from American dictates and the missiles that NATO had threatened to launch if Serb strongman...
...should be surprised that Rambouillet came a cropper. NATO's fragile construct was designed to avoid answering the question at the heart of this Balkan war: Should Kosovo be an independent state? "The beauty of the interim accord is that no one has to give up their dreams," explains U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill. "We've created this gray thing that one side will call an elephant and the other will call a mouse." Trouble is, some members of the Albanian delegation saw through that and demanded a written guarantee of eventual independence. No way, said NATO. "Sure, they...
Anyhow, in Rambouillet the Kosovars balked at Washington's half-elephant, half-mouse formula precisely because it avoided deciding on independence. In the march of history, borders change, states come and go. How the West settles Kosovo is going to set precedents for how our era manages that, like...
...instead of bombs, the Serb president got another three-week extension -- bombing Milosevic into acquiescence wasn't an option as long as his enemies played hard to get. Says TIME reporter Dejan Anastasijevic, "While the U.S. and the international community are playing down the extent of the failure at Rambouillet, Milosevic is the only winner here because the refusal of the ethnic Albanians to sign has allowed him to wriggle out undamaged...