Word: serbians
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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...
...government--something it had enjoyed since 1974--and instead demanded local Albanians follow orders from Belgrade. Every year the noose got tighter, and by last year Kosovo was home to a nascent guerrilla movement. Occupying Serbs had become targets. On Feb. 28, 1998, an Albanian hit squad killed two Serbian policemen working in Kosovo. Milosevic, in a typical response, unleashed his security police and paramilitary units in a brutal reprisal that left 300 dead and 65,000 homeless. From Washington the killings looked like Bosnia, Part Two. No one--particularly not Albright and Holbrooke--wanted that on his conscience...
...almost immediately. The unarmed monitors sat by helplessly as the killings in 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...
...rescue of the pilot gladdened Pentagon hearts, but the downing remained a reminder that air power, despite its omnipotent, high-tech gloss, does have stark limits. Whether it was the sleek $2 billion radar-eluding B-2 Stealth bomber or the hulking, duct-taped $74 million B-52 pulverizing Serbian targets last week, the essential character of air warfare didn't change: air power, old or new, can always punish a foe but can rarely force him to change his mind. And like any kind of combat, it has mortal risks...
...passing phase. His wife, a fervent Marxist, says ideology has never meant as much to Milosevic as it does to her. When he saw a chance to grab power, he pushed the communists aside and refashioned himself as a nationalist. In 1987 he went to Kosovo, the cradle of Serbian identity, to soothe the grievances of local Serbs, and he made his name by declaring, "No one shall be allowed to beat you." Milosevic was moved less by Serb nationalism than by its power to electrify. "After that night," recounted a Serb journalist, "there was a psychological change...