Word: serbians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...Kosovo, it is also experimenting with new ways of handling the media. Bacon says that in the age of cell phones and the Internet, the Serbs have instant access to any military information put out to the press, meaning that even basic military info can be translated immediately into Serbian battle plans. "We've just decided to give them as little information as possible," he said on the NewsHour last week. There have been cracks in the armor: some Pentagon officials were upset when the Washington Post reported, two days in advance of an attack, that the U.S. planned...
...course, military briefings can never tell the full story of a war. But the conditions on the ground are even worse. Milosevic's expulsion of almost all foreign reporters from Yugoslavia and his crackdown on independent local journalists--have left Western viewers with little more than Serbian television images of towns smoldering from stray NATO bombs. The West calls it propaganda: U.S. intelligence officials say they have evidence that buildings in Kosovo that the government claims NATO destroyed were actually blown up by Yugoslav agents themselves. Sadly, the truth will likely remain buried in the rubble...
Kosovo is not a place preparing for peace. Every day the province is filled with awful violence. NATO warplanes are slamming Serbian troops with tons of munitions, guided by tiny drones that hum overhead. Deep in the Kosovo hills, the Kosovo Liberation Army is fighting defensive battles, trying to conserve its resources. And in the middle of all this, NATO now says that up to 700,000 refugees are wandering homeless, brutalized by Serbian forces and desperately seeking a way out. Slobodan Milosevic has tried to put a lid on the province--limiting media access and stemming the outflow...
Some of the estimated 40,000 Serbian soldiers and irregulars on the ground in Kosovo are now digging in deeper. In a clear message to the West, troops last week began laying mines along Kosovo's borders within sight of Western television cameras. The mining operation is probably also designed to help stop such incidents as the spasm of fighting that broke out late last week between Serbian forces and Albanian-based K.L.A. forces. The Yugoslav military issued a furious statement decrying the "aggression"--and reportedly lobbed some artillery shells into Albania for good measure. The image of a well...