Word: yugoslavia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other respects Hassner's comment is right on. The essence of Bush's "new world order," proclaimed shortly before the Persian Gulf war, was that quick, decisive action by international bodies would make the world unsafe for aggression. But when the next test came, in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the U.S. and its European allies floundered...
Like Saddam Hussein, Milosevic probably could have been halted only by force. But no one outside Yugoslavia was -- or is -- prepared to go to war against him. Military intervention, most believe, would be likely to land outside powers in a Vietnam-style quagmire and cost them heavy casualties. There may be universal outrage at the human carnage, but unlike Iraq's grab for oil-rich Kuwait, Serbia's depredations against Croatia and Bosnia do not threaten the strategic interests of the U.S. or European neighbors enough to justify the risks of sending in troops...
...year ago, Americans dismissed the senseless violence with a regretful tut-tut, while Europeans clung to the hope that people would soon come to their senses. But as the fighting has spread south and east, igniting Bosnia-Herzegovina and threatening to engulf other independence-minded regions of the former Yugoslavia, hope has evaporated that sanity will prevail. The toll is terrible: more than 12,000 people dead, tens of thousands missing and wounded, 1.5 million men, women and children forced to flee their homes. Those numbers only begin to hint at the horror, which U.S. Secretary of State James Baker...
...self-interest in seeing calm restored to the Balkans. When people run for their lives across not only internal borders but international ones as well, the financial consequences are heavy. According to the U.N., 1.25 million people, most of them Bosnians and Croatians, remain within the boundaries of old Yugoslavia. An additional 250,000 have sought sanctuary, mostly in Western Europe; tens of thousands more have probably slipped over borders illegally to stay with relatives. Already the largest forced movement of Europeans since World War II, this flood may be just the beginning. The UNHCR fears that if the fighting...
While the war is ripping apart the intricately entwined ethnic mix of the old Yugoslavia, the makeshift arrangements of the dispossessed sometimes forge new bonds. Jelena Pekez, 27, a Croat from the Bosnian town of Jajce, is married to a Serb. Vesna Gacic, 29, a Serb from the Bosnian town of Mostar, is married to a man of Croatian and Muslim descent. Both women fled to Kosmaj, south of Belgrade: Pekez left just ahead of a total blockade of her hometown, Gacic after a frightening 20-day stay in an underground shelter. When the two women's paths crossed...