Word: serbe
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What form that self-rule would take is still undecided. One problem is that parts of Kosovo--particularly in the north and west--contain the Serbian Orthodox Church's holiest shrines. Giving Milosevic access to the region in a postwar world would reward Serb aggression. But not letting the Serbs in might be worse, making lasting peace impossible...
...solution to that problem may be partition. Under one scenario, only a small parcel--perhaps no more than 10% of the province--would be partitioned off for Serb holy shrines and the tiny Serb population that remains. Russian troops, whom NATO wants to join the peacekeeping contingent, would supervise this area, while the alliance's soldiers watch over the rest of the province--probably for years...
...addition to the military struggle, the Serbs are evidently continuing their campaign of generalized terror. In particular, there are reports of rape inside Kosovo, something that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees' Chris Janowski calls credible. But allegations of an orchestrated rape campaign by Serbs, he says, have not yet been confirmed. U.S. satellites do seem to have picked up solid visual evidence--pictures of abandoned towns and farms--of the ethnic cleansing, which has now flushed Albanians from almost all of western Kosovo. One stark image shows Serb armor apparently "herding" a group of civilians out of their village...
...furious at how NATO commander General Wesley Clark first handled reports that one of his jets had mistakenly attacked a refugee convoy last week. Within hours of the Wednesday strike, which may have killed more than 70 ethnic Albanians, Clark told a news service he had "strong evidence" that Serb forces had fired at the refugee column. By the next day, embarrassed NATO officials admitted that their first claim was wrong and that an American F-16 had indeed attacked civilians. NATO tried to recover, releasing an audiotape of an F-16 pilot who may have struck the civilian convoy...
...Pentagon officials, some of whom still suspect that Serb forces killed the civilians, now say that the pilot was describing another military convoy he had struck. "It wasn't handled well," a senior administration aide said of NATO's response to the tragedy. NATO knew there would be civilian casualties during the air war, and when they occurred, "we had all agreed we wouldn't jump the gun and say things" before knowing for sure who was responsible, said the aide. Clark's gaffe handed Belgrade a propaganda windfall: a tragic accident that became a weeklong media flap over NATO...