Word: serb
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...envoy, he stepped into the 24-year-old struggle between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and has so far achieved no major breakthrough. Last week he gamely turned his hand to the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, the site of a festering rebellion between 1.8 million ethnic Albanians and their Serb overlords, and quickly found himself in a diplomatic theater of the absurd...
...Balkan conflicts are complex, but this one is a dilly. The province, about half the size of New Jersey, is internationally recognized as a territorial part of Serb-ruled Yugoslavia, land they hold dear as their sacred ancestral home. But its 2 million inhabitants are 90% ethnic Albanians, known as Kosovars, who have long felt stifled under the domination of Belgrade. Their patience has been running out since 1989, when Milosevic revoked their autonomy and two years later launched a violent crackdown...
...independence and Milosevic bids to bring the rebels to heel. Since March, when the Yugoslav army began an offensive against the guerrillas known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, about 300 people have died and an estimated 65,000 have been driven from their homes. When Holbrooke arrives, 50,000 Serb forces and several thousand K.L.A. fighters are skirmishing all over the province, targeting civilians in one another's villages...
...with Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister--in town to make sure Milosevic sticks to a promise he gave Boris Yeltsin to resume talks with Rugova--Holbrooke arrives at Milosevic's presidential palace. The two tuck into a four-hour dinner of steak, lamb and fish, while Holbrooke warns the Serb leader that NATO air strikes are inevitable if his army continues its clampdown. "What's left of your country will implode," Holbrooke says...
NATO is about to be dragged into a messy war in Kosovo that it doesn't want but may be unable to avoid. In a fierce battle Wednesday, Serb forces ousted the insurgent Kosovo Liberation Army from the coal mining town of Belacevac and prepared for an onslaught on the besieged town of Kijevo -- dubbed "the most dangerous place in Europe" by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke last week. "A full-scale Serbian offensive against the KLA will force NATO to take action against the Serbs," says TIME correspondent Douglas Waller, who last week accompanied Holbrooke on a futile peace mission...