Rambouillet Peace Conference - Hawaii Pacific University

Boshkovich 19
Interestingly, Pandora‘s Box in Kosovo was not open during civil war in other parts of
Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina). Mr. Simic said that reasons
for that, one can find in these three theories: 1) Separatists in Kosovo were not satisfied
with the balance of power in Kosovo, and they wanted to wait until Serbia became
exhausted from civil wars; 2) Neighboring Albania was going through post-communist
transition and turmoil; 3) Until the Dayton peace conference in 1995 regard ending of
civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albanians in Kosovo hoped that international
community would put Kosovo‘s question in Dayton‘s negotiations. Since this never
happened, separatists ceased to support peaceful Mr. Rugova, and started to support so-
called KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), which was established at the end of 1993. 36
The conflict culminated in 1998, when the USA threatened Serbia for the first
time with intervention due to ―ethnic cleansing of Albanians‖ and police brutality. To
make clear, Serbian security forces would overreact here and there. Those cases were
usually among police members, not in the army, because the police were local and
sometimes its members had relatives who were killed by KLA. 37 Besides that, bad people
exist everywhere. Even US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had an incident in which
soldiers raped a 14-year-old girl and killed her family. Another example are pictures from
Abu Graib prison where US soldiers sexually assaulted Iraq prisoners, somehow they
even used dogs. Fortunately, no one bombed the USA because of these couple lunatics.
Different than what an international audience could read in newspaper, Serbian
36 Predrag Simic, Put u Rambuje: Kosovska Kriza 1995-2000 (Beograd: Nea, 2000), 23-25.
37 YouTube Online, Aidan Laverty and Tom Giles, ―Moral Combat - NATO at War - Part 3,‖ BBC
Production , 2000, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7J2Uqxh194&feature=related