Why does the United States support independence for Kosovo?
“Kosovo has a very special place for the United States in its diplomacy,” says Frank Wisner, the American representative to the Kosovo talks. That is because of the former Serbian government’s so-called “ethnic cleansing” campaign of the 1990s, he says. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia reported that Serbian military and paramilitary groups killed thousands of people in an effort to drive out the ethnic Albanians who made up most of Kosovo’s population. Encouraged by the United States and Britain, NATO launched a bombing campaign in 1999. It eventually forced the Serbian military to withdraw from Kosovo, but not before hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians had been driven from their homes. Can’t the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians work out some sort of compromise? The divisions are deep and bitter. “We’ve been working to get a negotiated settlement for two years,” says Wisner, “and there’s no agreement to be found.” He adds that years of Serbian repressio
