Word: strongman
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Disagreements would not erupt in war, Winston Churchill said, unless the other side also believed it could win. The strongman of Serbia has once again confounded the best-laid plans of the West by fighting back when he was supposed to fold. He ceded the skies to NATO, letting the bombs and missiles rain down while barely activating his air defenses. Meanwhile, on the ground, his army pursued two-pronged tactics: pushing tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars out of the country and engaging in a murderous offensive against the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army...
...sense, the Serb strongman was exactly where he most likes to be--at the pivot of an international crisis. He has built his career, as biographer Slavoljub Djukic puts it, by being both pyromaniac and fireman--igniting crises, then convincing people that only he can put the fires out. But the Kosovo conflagration he first lighted in 1989--by stripping away the rights of the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of the province's population--is proving tricky to put out. Now he faces a perilous calculus: Is it riskier to cave in to Western demands or to suffer...
...future of Kosovo, all they got was a promise in theory from the ethnic Albanians to subscribe to the NATO plan a couple of weeks down the road. What Belgrade got was a delicious reprieve from American dictates and the missiles that NATO had threatened to launch if Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic failed to accept the deal. The whole business will have to be gone over again when the talks resume on March...
Albright has long believed that the only things Milosevic understands are blunt words and brute force. She's been contemptuous of the Serb strongman ever since her first visit as Secretary of State to Belgrade in 1997, when he patronizingly told her she was a neophyte in Balkan politics. Albright, who spent three years in Belgrade as the daughter of a Czech ambassador, shot back, "Don't tell me I'm uninformed. I've lived here...
...make moral sense of how America treats its local dictators? We ease "Baby Doc" Duvalier out of power in Haiti and into a chateau in southern France, and we send the Haitian generals to a comfortable retirement in Panama. Manuel Noriega, Panama's onetime strongman, languishes in a Florida prison. The other thugs remain free. Why does Noriega rot while the others bask...