A while back I wrote a series of posts about the 1998-9 Kosovo conflict. If you’re interested, here they are: Prelude to War, The Serbian Ascendancy, Things Fall Apart, And So To War. This post continues that story up to the unsuccessful Rambouillet peace conference of February-March 1999.
So by early 1999, the Serbian province of Kosovo was the scene of an ugly guerrilla war. Civilian casualties were mounting rapidly. There were bombings and curfews and disappearances. Over 100,000 people were already refugees, and the situation was clearly going to get worse and not better.
There was a concerted effort to solve the problem by holding a peace conference in the spring of 1999. This was the Rambouillet Conference, and its goal was to produce a peace agreement between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians. It failed, leading directly and immediately to the Kosovo War.
Does an unsuccessful peace conference from the previous century hold any lessons? Or is this purely of academic interest?
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