Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Riots in Kosovo
- 2 Albanian Resentment Comes to a Boil
- 3 Armed Conflict Grows
- 4 Cease-Fire Breaks Down
- 5 Establishing the United Nations' First Colony
- 6 Living Under a Colonial Regime
- 7 Responding to the Wake-Up Call
- 8 The Politics of Purgatory
- 9 Enter Martti Ahtisaari
- 10 The Stage for Final Status
- 11 “Practical” Negotiations
- 12 Negotiations over Status Itself
- 13 The Ahtisaari Plan
- 14 The Plan Runs into Trouble
- 15 The Troika Takes Over
- 16 Independence Day
- 17 Kosovo's Future
- 18 Implications for the International Order
- Glossary of Acronyms
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
3 - Armed Conflict Grows
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Riots in Kosovo
- 2 Albanian Resentment Comes to a Boil
- 3 Armed Conflict Grows
- 4 Cease-Fire Breaks Down
- 5 Establishing the United Nations' First Colony
- 6 Living Under a Colonial Regime
- 7 Responding to the Wake-Up Call
- 8 The Politics of Purgatory
- 9 Enter Martti Ahtisaari
- 10 The Stage for Final Status
- 11 “Practical” Negotiations
- 12 Negotiations over Status Itself
- 13 The Ahtisaari Plan
- 14 The Plan Runs into Trouble
- 15 The Troika Takes Over
- 16 Independence Day
- 17 Kosovo's Future
- 18 Implications for the International Order
- Glossary of Acronyms
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Although it may have seemed otherwise to many Americans, the crisis in Kosovo had not developed overnight. The wars in Croatia and Bosnia were over and had dropped off the evening news, and now Milošević seemed to be up to his old ethnic-cleansing tricks in this place called Kosovo. A war in Kosovo had been incubating for a long time; its sudden emergence onto the front pages paralleled a last-ditch effort by the international community to bring under control a conflict that even senior policy makers did not understand much better than my students and I did, although close observers of the region had foreseen an escalating conflict there for some time.
The violence in Kosovo developed gradually; it was not a matter of a large guerrilla army taking to the field on the Albanian side, or of the VJ (the Yugoslav army) springing into a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. What happened instead is that the Serbian police were aggressive in enforcing Milošević's apartheid regime in Kosovo even as other parts of Eastern Europe were breaking free of totalitarian Communist rule, and other parts of Yugoslavia were fighting to set up their own states. The voices in the Kosovar Albanian community favoring separation from Serbia grew louder. As they did so, the police tried to arrest them. Often the Serbian authorities did not know who the separatists were, or if they did know the identities, they did not know their locations, so the police began to target friends and neighbors instead.
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- Information
- The Road to Independence for KosovoA Chronicle of the Ahtisaari Plan, pp. 31 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009