Word: rambouillet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Before intervening in Kosovo, the West had championed the case of the Kosovars. The Rambouillet peace conference tried to force Belgrade to turn Kosovo over to NATO. East Timor, on the other hand, has been championed by no one. Bill Clinton is the fifth consecutive American President to ignore its struggle for independence. It was the Indonesians themselves who set the current train of events into motion by unexpectedly allowing a referendum on independence...
...towns would be emptied to depopulate the province. The VJ would shell villages so the police and paramilitaries could move in to put the population to flight, torch their houses and kill any residents who refused to go. While the West was trying to negotiate a diplomatic settlement at Rambouillet, Milosevic was positioning his forces. By the time NATO started bombing in late March, the VJ, police and paramilitaries were operating in concert across Kosovo--in Pec, Pristina, Podujevo. The tactics were always the same, and slaughtering civilians was the essential prod to the exodus...
...commanders were shot dead in a bitter struggle for control of the organization. Thaci has denied the allegations. Of course, such skulduggery might be par for the course in guerrilla movements, but the KLA has been implicitly anointed as Washington?s political partner in Kosovo. As early as the Rambouillet talks in February, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright initiated a friendly photo opportunity with Thaci and his delegation, and last week pressed unsuccessfully for NATO to agree to the KLA's forming a provisional army for Kosovo. Last Monday, her spokesman, James Rubin, held a joint press conference with Thaci...
...Rambouillet hadn?t reckoned with the deep historical attachment to Kosovo across the political spectrum in Serbia. It would have been difficult for any politician to concede to NATO?s demands, let alone for Milosevic, who?d built his nationalist credentials on the promise to protect Kosovo?s Serbs, and whose officer corps was even more nationalist than he. Moreover, the Dayton analogy may have been stretched, in the sense that Dayton came after a three-year ground war that had left both sides exhausted. The Serbs called NATO?s bluff, leaving the alliance compelled to respond forcefully...
...even if there is no real political opposition to challenge him now, he cannot rest easy. He will try to put a worth-it-all face on defeat by claiming this peace agreement is more favorable than the Rambouillet plan, since it gives Serbia uncontested sovereignty over Kosovo. But with no troops there to enforce it, his legal ownership is a sham. And he was forced to swallow the humiliation of admitting foreign soldiers onto Yugoslav soil. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party voted against a deal it denounced as a total sellout. Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj...