"The Clinton administration intervened on the assumption that Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic would beg for peace as soon as the first American bombs fell. In fact, he held out for 11 weeks, which was enough time for Serbian forces to carry out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Brookings Institution scholar Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton national security aide, said the war had some unanticipated consequences: 1.4 million people expelled, thousands murdered and raped, the expenditure of $10 billion plus, and the worsening of relations with China and Russia.”
The long-term results have not been anything to brag about either. The United States still has 2,500 troops in Kosovo, part of a peacekeeping force of 21,000. That’s not enough to make the people there get along any better than before.
Once the war was over, the majority Albanian Kosovars, whom we had intervened to protect, began taking vengeance on Serbs and other minorities. Soon, they had driven out more than a quarter of a million people, most of whom fled to Serbia and most of whom are still afraid to go home.
Amnesty International recently published a report lamenting conditions four years later. “Minorities in Kosovo continue to be denied access both to their basic human rights, and to any effective redress for violations and abuses of those rights,” it concluded." |
