Serbs

Among the factors inhibiting Western countries, including the United States, from a more forceful intervention in Bosnia to curb the aggression of the Serbs is the memory of the formidable guerrilla forces that made Yugoslavia such a hell for the Nazis during World War II.The awareness of the mettle of those forces operating in the forests and mountains of their homeland was sufficient later to discourage Josef Stalin from sending his army into the Balkans...

PARIS — Novak Djokovic felt "more nervous than usual" as he faced his first serious test at the French Open on Saturday, but he continued his amazing unbeaten run by knocking out Juan Martin Del Potro to reach the fourth round. World No. 2 Djokovic, who has a 40-0 record this year, including his title at the Australian Open, triumphed 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 against the 2009 U.S. Open champion in a match played over two days. The match was interrupted due to darkness on Friday just as Del Potro had evened it at 6-3, 3-6, but the stoppage robbed the Argentine of his momentum and gave Djokovic, looking for his first Roland Garros title, time to regroup.

PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- In chaos compounded by heavy snow, Serbian forces ringing Sarajevo stepped up efforts yesterday to place their heavy weapons under United Nations guard or pull them back from the besieged capital in compliance with a NATO ultimatum.With the deadline less than 36 hours away, U.N. troops seemed to be scrambling to keep track of the operation, and it was by no means clear in the snow-covered hills whether the peacekeepers could control the arms that were handed over.

ROBERT `RED' SHIPLEY, 70 WAMU-FM radio host Robert "Red" Shipley, a longtime Washington radio host who specialized in country, Southern gospel and bluegrass music, died Saturday of cancer at the University of Virginia Medical Center, said Kay Summers, director of public information at WAMU-FM. The Tennessee native was a fixture of the Washington region's airwaves for four decades, and until last month hosted WAMU-FM's Stained-Glass Bluegrass program on Sundays for 25 years. The International Bluegrass Music Association named him the 2006 Broadcaster of the Year, based on voting by his peers.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The wounds of war and world condemnation are causing a historic split between Serbs in the Yugoslav heartland and fellow Serbs in Bosnia that is shifting the ground beneath the war effort, interviews with politicians, voters and diplomats revealed.Across a spectrum of economic and intellectual classes, Serbs in the republic of Serbia -- the central republic of old Yugoslavia -- are angered that they are labeled the aggressor state for acts of war carried out by ethnic Serbs native to neighboring Bosnia.

Claremont, Calif. -- DEFEAT, some say, is the Serb form of happy ending.Rebecca West, who loved the Serbs as only a fellow romantic could, devoted the most profound pages of "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," her study of the South Slavs, to a meditation on "Kosovo Polye," the Serb national epic.In that poem, which recalls a battle of 1389, the Serb leader, Prince Lazar, is betrayed to the Turks by one of his followers.Yet it is not the betrayal that causes the ensuing catastrophic defeat. In the hour of decision, Prince Lazar chooses defeat because nothing is more poignant, more perfect, more heroic than death for a sacred cause.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Widespread irregularities prevented many Serbs from voting in national elections in Croatia yesterday, in a flunked first test of U.S.-backed plans to lead the last rebel enclave in the Balkan country back to Croatian rule.Voting was so chaotic in Eastern Slavonia, a Serbian-held enclave in the eastern corner of Croatia, that United Nations officials first ordered polls to stay open an extra two hours last night and then for nine more hours today.International monitors had hoped that the Serbs of Eastern Slavonia would feel safe enough to vote in the election as an indication of their willingness to remain in the region and live under a Croatian government.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Serbian nationalist fighters poured through breaches in the Bosnian army defense lines around the United Nations-declared "safe area" of Gorazde Monday night and yesterday, setting fire to a dozen villages and forcing more than a thousand Muslims to flee, U.N. officials said."

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Bosnian Serbs, in their most brazen attack on a Muslim enclave this year, advanced tanks and infantry on the U.N.-protected pocket of Srebrenica yesterday, killing civilians and taking 32 U.N. peacekeepers hostage.Pushing a 2-day-old offensive, the Serbs overran four U.N. observation posts and moved their tanks to within a half-mile of the eastern Bosnian town where more than 40,000 Muslims are harbored.Seventeen Dutch peacekeepers were taken captive by the advancing Serbs yesterday, adding to 15 seized Saturday, U.N. military spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Coward said.

GENEVA -- A raging battle between Serbs and Croats in a United Nations-protected area near the Adriatic Sea derailed Western-mediated peace talks in Geneva yesterday and threatened to plunge the remains of Yugoslavia into a fiercer and deadlier phase of war.In violation of a promise to halt a 3-day-old military aggression, Croatian government troops infiltrated several miles into Serb-occupied territory near the coast and continued to fight along a 65-mile...

Time's up. Serbian politicians will never agree to an independent Kosovo. So Kosovo will just have to become independent without their consent. For eight years now, ever since the NATO air war drove Serbian forces out, Kosovo has been in limbo. The Kosovar Albanians want sovereignty, and the U.S. and the European Union - albeit with serious qualms - have decided there is no alternative. But they've been trying to jolly the Serbs along, to entice them to recognize that Kosovo is lost to them.

NOVI PAZAR, Serbia -- Security officials in this region of southern Serbia say they have found a base about 20 miles north of town that they believe was a training ground for radical Islamists who were planning an attack on members of the local Muslim community. Four men were arrested during a raid March 17, and two more were arrested three days later in connection with the camp, a series of tents hidden under pines on the edge of a plateau, according to police. All six detained men come from Novi Pazar, the main city in the heavily Muslim Sandjak region.

My smart and ambitious Serbian language teacher in Belgrade last summer spoke for an entire generation of young people in the former Yugoslavia when she unleashed a bitter tirade on the difficulties of obtaining a visa to travel abroad, even to nearby Austria or Italy. "I feel like I'm in a prison," Marija complained, "and I don't even know who to blame!" Not all of Marija's friends are so unsure. Many, she told me, feel the European Union is blackmailing Serbs by requiring their government to arrest Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic - indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity - before restarting its "stabilization and association agreement" with Belgrade.

LAS VEGAS -- President Bush recently echoed Vice President Dick Cheney's support for Croatia to join the European Union, a bid that has been stalled because of the former Yugoslav republic's slowness to own up to and prosecute its 1990s war crimes and its failure to ensure protections and rights for minorities, including returning Serb refugees. Croatia also faces the possibility of being excluded from the 2008 European soccer championship because when an Italian team's fans taunted the Croatian team's fans at a match in August by waving Yugoslavia's old communist flag, the other side took great offense and showed the competition what it was really made of: They formed a giant human swastika and gave Nazi salutes.

As if the world needed another crisis, Kosovo is moving onto the front burner. For seven years, it has been an ill-defined - and relatively ill-run - international protectorate, but now time has run out. The Kosovar Albanians were promised that the United Nations would devise a final status for their territory by the end of this year, and the implication was that it would include a formal severing of ties with Serbia. The U.N. has put off that determination until the end of January, in an effort not to inflame Serbian parliamentary elections.

VIENNA, Austria -- Serb and Kosovar leaders reluctantly met face to face yesterday for the first time since NATO bombs drove Serbian forces out of the Albanian-majority province in 1999. A United Nations special envoy called the meeting in Vienna, Austria, to make progress on Kosovo's future status: Kosovars want independence and Serbia opposes division. Statements after the meeting made clear that the sides are far apart and cast doubt on a negotiated solution. Kosovars and Serbs refused to appear together at the news conference; each side held its own briefing.

UNITED NATIONS -- President Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader of the Bosnian government, will address the General Assembly this week, and advisers are pressing him to use the opportunity to propose a territorial compromise with the Serbs.The official aim of Mr. Izetbegovic's trip is to explain why the Muslim-led Bosnian Parliament last week rejected the latest version of a peace plan that would split the country into three ethnic states.Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia's representative to the United Nations, said yesterday that he also expected Mr. Izetbegovic to "launch some new ideas when he explains our position to the General Assembly on Wednesday."

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia -- Grooming the next battlefield for Yugoslavia's roving civil war, Serb police arrested ethnic Albanian activists, seized ballot boxes and harassed U.S. election monitors yesterday in a vain attempt to disrupt an independence vote in Serbia's restive southwestern province of Kosovo, adjacent to Albania and Macedonia.Despite intimidation by heavily armed Serbian police and Yugoslav federal troops patrolling in armored vehicles, Albanians flooded to secret polling places to vote for a president and Parliament committed to independence from the Serbian republic.

SKOPJE, MACEDONIA -- Averting a humanitarian catastrophe was NATO's stated justification for bombing Serbia and its Kosovo province in 1999. But initial successes quickly succumbed to the reverse ethnic cleansing of more than 200,000 Serbs and other minorities by Albanian militants. Now, despite seven years of U.N. policing and donor largess, Kosovo's remaining minorities still live in fear, and the economy and infrastructure remain in shambles. Behind their faM-gade of optimism, Western leaders negotiating Kosovo's future status are panicking.

BELGRADE, Serbia and Montenegro -- In its harshest terms yet, the European Union sharply criticized Serbia's failure to hand over accused war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic and broke off talks yesterday with the Balkan state aimed at admitting it to the EU. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said his government has been unable to find and arrest Mladic and urged him to surrender. The escalating crisis threatened to undermine Kostunica's fragile grasp on power, and his reform-minded deputy quit in disgust.