U.S.foreign policy toward Balkans

In 1996, a U.S. State Department official met with Adem Demaci, the main political representative of the fledgling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic Albanian guerrilla force formed in 1996 to drive the Serbian authorities from the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and achieve independence. Demaci had advocated Kosovo’s secession since the 1950s, when he hoped to split Kosovo from Yugoslavia and attach it to Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist Albania. Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito threw him in jail three separate times for a total of 18 years for advocating a greater Albania. By 1996, Demaci and the KLA had grown impatient with Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova’s strategy of passive resistance and favored winning independence by violent means, pointing to the example of Bosnia, which in December 1995 had its independence confirmed with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement.
The State Department official warned Demaci that Bosnia already had paid an incalculable price—over three years of a devastating war—for its independence, according to the same official. Demaci stared intently back at the U.S. diplomat through his heavy glasses and stated ominously, “If there are rivers of blood, if there are rivers of blood, we will be independent.”
Three years later, Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, had to hunt Demaci down in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, of all places, to lobby him to persuade Hashim Thaci, the KLA’s young political leader, to sign the Rambouillet Accords, knowing that Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic would never sign it, and thereby provide the United States and NATO the pretext to bomb Serbia, according to the State Department official. NATO’s war thus was given the green light by a man described at the time by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer as “a woodsman from Kosovo” and, most ironically, a hardcore Stalinist. After 78 days of NATO airstrikes, Milosevic agreed to withdraw Serbian security forces from Kosovo and allow the U.N. and NATO forces to administer Kosovo, until the province’s final status is resolved.