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Article: Does Balkanisation beckon anew?
- Article from:
- National Observer - Australia and World Affairs
- Article date:
- June 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Council for the National Interest. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When the Great War comes, said old Bismarck, it will come out of "some damn fool thing in the Balkans".
On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that led to the First World War.
In the spring of 1999, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 days to force its army out of that nation's cradle province of Kosovo. The Serbs were fighting Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). And we had no more right to bomb Belgrade than the Royal Navy would have had to bombard New York in our Civil War.
We bombed Serbia, we were told, to ...