Word: serbe
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...gone to war. In the case of Kosovo, he'll argue that the operations he ordered were legitimate actions by a sovereign state to crack down on Muslim terrorists - meaning the Kosovo Liberation Army. And he'll sound a similar theme on Bosnia, saying that there, too, the local Serbs were fighting a war against foreign Mujahedeen fighters and other terrorists. He'll also probably try to distance himself from the Bosnian war, arguing that he was not responsible for the actions of the Bosnian Serb leadership. But that's a tricky one to sustain, since Milosevic himself signed...
...heavy peacekeeping presence, clashes between the rival groups have fallen off and an uneasy normalcy has settled in. At Mitrovica's Serbian Orthodox church, for example, Father Svetislav Nojic, 64, continues to hold sparsely attended Sunday liturgies, though worshipers must travel under armed guard to get there from the Serb side of town. Nojic says he needs an escort just to take a walk in his tiny garden. Still, most days he ventures out to tend his congregation north of the Ibar, hunkered down in an armored personnel carrier. "I have been a priest for 47 years," he says...
While extremists operate on both sides, they are most visible in the north, where Serbs have violently resisted efforts by the U.N. to return Albanians and impose "multiethnic" rule. At the first sign of an Albanian intruder, or an effort by the U.N. to return refugees, self-appointed vigilantes known as bridge watchers use radios, mobile phones and even car horns to summon hundreds of supporters within minutes. At one clash last year, Agim Ibrahimi, 42, lost his 17-year-old son when someone from the Serb side lobbed a grenade. KFOR estimates there are around 300 bridge watchers, while...
...Kosovo. The province is still legally part of Serbia and Belgrade continues to pay the salaries of northern Mitrovica's civil servants, though elsewhere in Kosovo the U.N. is in charge. Covic hopes to persuade Ivanovic and others to play along with the U.N. in exchange for assurances about Serbs' long-term security. "They have to face reality," Covic says. "The old days are over." One of Covic's proposals is to subsume the bridge watchers into a multi-ethnic U.N.-led police force. But Ivanovic says he would agree to that only if his men got their own operating...
Most longtime residents of Mitrovica insist that what has happened to their home town is the fault of a few extremists and outsiders. "The only thing worse than a Serb at war is a free Albanian," says Beke Abazi, 50, an Albanian magazine editor who is investigating the illegal seizure of property by organized gangs from both sides. "This is not a problem of neighbor-against-neighbor," he insists. "It's criminal gangs who are operating with impunity on both sides. All the good people have gone silent." With Milosevic on trial in the Hague, now may be the time...