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A L S O+T O D A Y
Bombing the baby with the bath water Milosevic's proposal
T A B L E+T A L K Has Larry Flynt delivered dynamite revelations or dirty laundry leftovers? Dissect the Flynt Report in the Politics area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Endgame? Postcards from Yugoslavia A raft of refugees Calling Kosovo The empires strike back - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO THE BALKANS | PAGE 1, 2
Milosevic revokes Kosovo's autonomy He rose quickly to become Serbian president. In 1989, Milosevic engineered the revision of the Yugoslav constitution, revoking the autonomy Kosovo had enjoyed since 1974. Overnight, ethnic Albanians became second-class citizens in a province in which they made up a 90 percent majority. The Serbs took over all of Kosovo's state jobs: the courts, the police, the university, the schools, the businesses. In effect, the entire province was "Serbianized." Kosovo's Albanians protested the loss of their autonomy with a mass boycott of the Yugoslav state. The Serb authorities helped their marginalization by firing them from their jobs, kicking them out of the Kosovo university and adopting a set of laws under which ethnic Albanians became de facto outlaws for wanting to have a university education in their own language. Exiled from state institutions, universities and jobs, the Kosovo Albanians created their own, parallel, private Albanian-language university, health care and tax systems. In 1989 they elected the Sorbonne-educated Shakespeare scholar Ibrahim Rugova to lead them in resistance to Serbian rule. Rugova's movement, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), advocated nonviolent resistance to their oppression. For a decade, Kosovo Albanians peacefully protested their repression under Milosevic. While the international community praised their peaceful resistance, the fact that Kosovo was relatively quiet compared with neighboring former Yugoslav republics kept Kosovo off the international radar screen. Yugoslavia dissolves: war in Croatia and Bosnia In 1991, with the end of the Cold War, and nationalist tensions simmering, the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence; they were soon followed by Bosnia and Macedonia. Both Croatia and Bosnia had large Serbian minorities. Backed by the might of the Yugoslav National Army, Milosevic led Serbia to fight for a "Greater Serbia," to include Serb-populated territory in Croatia and Bosnia. Those wars, from 1991 to 1995, killed almost 300,000 people, many of them Bosnian Muslims and Croats killed in massacres, concentration camps and by "ethnic cleansing" -- the deliberate use of terror and violence to drive ethnic populations out of territory another group wanted to keep. A series of horrible killings in 1995 finally triggered NATO to intervene in Bosnia with airstrikes, to try to bring the war to an end. Finally, after three years of war that killed 200,000 people and displaced almost 2 million, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke brokered the Dayton peace accords, under which 60,000 NATO-led troops would implement a peace agreement for Bosnia, that awarded Serbs 49 percent of Bosnia, provided it stay part of a nominally multiethnic Bosnia Herzegovina. Kosovo Albanians, who had been conducting a nonviolent campaign of resistance to Serbian oppression, watched the results of the Dayton peace accords, and saw that the use of force by Bosnian Serbs was rewarded with territory. Still, it took three years before armed opposition really took hold in Kosovo. Peaceful resistance gives way to war Finally, it was the outbreak of fighting in March 1998 that compelled the international community to pay attention to Kosovo. It was then, in a small village called Donji Prekaz, in the central Kosovo farming region of Drenica, that Serb forces brutally killed 53 members of the Adem Jeshari family -- men, women and children -- in their farmhouses. The Serbs suspected Jeshari of leading a group of armed rebels called the Kosovo Liberation Army. Until the massacre in Donji Prekaz, few Kosovo Albanians even knew about the Kosovo Liberation Army. But the killings mobilized the entire population to take up arms -- or to at least support those who did -- in a new, militant phase of resistance to Serbian repression. A year of conflict has ensued and killed more than 2,500 people and displaced some 500,000 Kosovo Albanians. Last October, U.S. envoy Richard Holbooke negotiated a cease-fire for Kosovo. It collapsed in February. U.S. and European mediators summoned ethnic Albanian and Serbian negotiators to Rambouillet, France, that month for peace talks. Three weeks later, the ethnic Albanian delegation signed the agreement while the Serbs balked. Shortly thereafter, Milosevic moved 40,000 Yugoslav army troops and his best tanks into Kosovo and began a major offensive aimed at wiping out the KLA. NATO countries -- after months of threatening -- launched airstrikes against Serbian military targets March 24. On Monday, Serbian forces assassinated one of the ethnic Albanians who signed the Rambouillet agreement. Fehmi Agani was murdered in Pristina, after attending the funeral of a slain human rights lawyer, Bajram Kelmendi, along with four other Kosovo Albanian moderates.
Laura Rozen is covering the Kosovo crisis for Salon.
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