Will NATO s military presence in Kosovo following the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces lead to a permanent peace in this part of the Balkans and greater stability in Europe?
NATO s tanks and personnel carriers rolled over the Macedonia-Kosovo border in early June 1999, to be met with a rapturous welcome from ethnic Albanians who had endured months of persecution at the hands of Yugoslav military and Serb police units. Western television reporters accompanying the NATO operation excitedly dispatched their footage of the event to audiences abroad, comparing it to the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule at the end of the Second World War. The historical parallel was apt, but probably not for the reasons commentators had intended. While NATO forces were entering Kosovo from the south, a contingent of Russian troops had arrived from the north, through Yugoslavia, taking up positions in and around the provincial capital, Pristina. There, the local Serb residents received their liberators with the same degree of enthusiasm as their Albanian counterparts had welcomed NATO. This extraordinary conjuncture of events served to underscore not only the extremely uncerta
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