Kosovo is a southern province of Serbia, the core of the former Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic is currently president of Yugoslavia. He has been president in Serbia since 1989. In 1989, President Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its autonomous status and declared the Albanian language unofficial. Yugoslavia came on the edge of economical collapse under his role. The crisis and war he has started with Kosovo is his third war. Last year violence broke out between Serbian police (MUP) and rebels known as the KLA, prior to that there were many years of political struggle between Albanian organizations and the government of Serbia. NATO has decided to take military action after unsuccessful peace talks with Milosevic. The goals of NATO’s attacks are to bring down Slobodan Milosevic and stop the killing of innocent Kosovars. In response to the Kosovo Liberation Army’s guerrilla campaign for independence from Serbia, President Milosevic launched a brutal offensive against the region’s ethnic Albanian majority last summer. Serb forces attacked the civilian population, destroying villages and driving hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians from their homes. NATO countries were prompted to threaten military action against Milosevic because of civilian casualties and the mounting of refugee crisis. Under the threat of NATO air strikes, Milosevic signed a cease-fire agreement with the U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke in October.In January the conflict in Kosovo had started up again. The western diplomats had hoped that the cease-fire and the harsh winter would give them an opportunity to press both the Serbs and the KLA into a peace deal. The massacre of 45 civilians by Serb forces in the village of Racak signaled the failure of the October cease-fire deal. In February, NATO demanded that KLA and the Serbs meet in France and sign on to a Western-authored peace deal, or face military pressure. Both the KLA and t...
