Word: serb
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Kosovo began glowing on the radar screen of Clinton's foreign policy at the start of 1998. The province has a complicated genealogy: it is populated mostly by Albanians, but for 600 years it has been a lantern of Serbian passion. Serbs venerate the land because it is home to several important monasteries, and in 1389 their ancestors lost a decisive battle with the Ottoman Empire there, setting off 500 years of Turkish rule. The day of the battle is a national holiday--something that last week caused observers to note that understanding the Serb outlook meant understanding a country...
...Kosovo continued. And overseas Albanians poured millions of dollars into the province to help arm the growing K.L.A. The K.L.A. was anything but an efficient killing machine, yet its consistent pattern of knocking off one or two Serbian cops a week was enough to infuriate Milosevic and to increase Serb pressure for a reprisal. On Jan. 15 it came: a massacre of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians by Serb security police outside the town of Racak. Furious, Albright engineered an ultimatum that NATO delivered to the Serbs and the Kosovars: sit down and sign a three-year autonomy agreement. To back...
...also noticed a total lack of interest on Milosevic's part in a rational exchange of views and a total refusal to discuss Washington's positions. And finally, there was a sense of unreality in some of Milosevic's own views, as he insisted over and over that the Serb offensive the Western media were reporting in Kosovo simply was not taking place. "Yeah, there's a little bit of fighting down there, but it's just police actions against criminals," Milosevic told a stunned Holbrooke...
...used the contrast between sun-warmed tanks and cooler desert sand to help pilots target the tanks with infrared equipment. How well that will work in the forested Balkans remains to be seen. But retired Navy Admiral Leighton Smith--who ordered NATO's first-ever bombing raid, against Bosnian Serb targets in 1994--thinks the tactic may be deadly for pilots: "It would be absolutely stupid...
...Milosevic, opportunism has been a way of life. The Serb standard bearer does not talk about his parents' immigration from Montenegro to the town where he was born, Pozarevac in Serbia. He was the son of a teacher who had studied to be an Orthodox priest and a puritanical schoolteacher. They orphaned him through suicide while he was still a young man--his father first, and his mother a decade later. Despite his father's interest in religion, Milosevic never embraced the church. At 18 he turned himself into a Communist Party zealot, assuming so thoroughly the image...