A Quarter Century after Liberation, Kosovo Suffers from America's Tight Embrace

A quarter century ago, Kosovo, part of ever- shrinking Yugoslavia, was ready to explode. An ethnic Albanian insurgency burgeoned, fed by Belgrade's brutal military crackdown. Not eager to jump back into the Balkans militarily, the Clinton administration temporized. Ambassador Robert S. Gelbard, Washington's special envoy, criticized Yugoslav government violence but dismissed talk of independence, condemning the Kosovo Liberation Army as "without any questions, a terrorist group." Around that time, summer 1998, I visited Kosovo, traveling with a Serb military patrol and later wandering into a KLA checkpoint. Kosovo evidently was headed toward full- scale war. By the following year, proposals for Western intervention were proliferating. Ultimately, Gelbard's superiors abandoned any reservations about the KLA. In March 1999, the U.S. started bombing Belgrade and pushed Kosovo's independence in the ensuing peace. The ethnic Albanian majority declared the new nation of Kosovo in 2008. Some 4,500 NATO troops remain on station, officially for peacekeeping but sometimes performing what amounts to international social work.