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00:01Nice sentiments, not ones in evidence the next day,
00:05when a British cameraman crept up a hill overlooking a small village called Prakash.
00:10I went forward and put the camera above the canopy of these trees to see into this small valley.
00:23I remember the sun was directly in front of me,
00:26and so I was frightened of reflection off the lens, which would give me away.
00:37They were destroying the village and looking for survivors.
00:44In Belgrade, Cook's weapons were merely words. Milosevic had the real thing.
00:52Serb police had moved in on Prakash, the home of a clan leader
00:56identified with a shadowy group that had started hit-and-run attacks on the Serbs,
01:01the Kosovo Liberation Army.
01:05His name was Adem Yashari,
01:07and Yugoslav intelligence were convinced that he'd been involved in guerrilla attacks on policemen.
01:17Three days of fighting began.
01:24We could hear the sounds of gunshots and tanks.
01:29Uncle Adam told us not to be afraid, and we went into the basement.
01:34We lay on the floor and carved ourselves with blankets.
01:41In the battle, Adem Yashari and many of his fighters died defending the village.
01:55At the end of it all, Basata Yashari was still sheltering with her grandmother, mother, brother, sisters and cousins.
02:10They threw in a grenade. Grandma was blown into the next room.
02:14Almost everyone was killed.
02:20My sister started begging for water and calling out,
02:24Mother, Mother.
02:26But their mother had been killed.
02:30Twelve-year-old Basata was found playing dead in the wrecked cellar.
02:34She was the only member of her immediate family to survive.
02:43One policeman was a doctor,
02:45and he wanted to give me an injection,
02:47because he saw I was covered in blood,
02:49and a bone was sticking out of my trousers.
02:56I said, I'm not wounded.
02:58Then I started to cry.
03:02I said, you've killed all my family.
03:09In all, over 50 members of the clan died in the battle.
03:24The Serb authorities said they were terrorists,
03:28but to the Albanians they became overnight heroes.
03:36The KLA was now on the map.
03:39The Serbs were determined to crush it,
03:41and so the clock started ticking to another war in the Balkans.
03:47Back then, Western leaders were haunted by the memory of the war in Bosnia.
03:51It had left more than 200,000 dead.
03:54It had shamed Europe's claim to be able to run its own affairs.
03:58It had embarrassed successive American administrations.
04:02And now, in places like Downing Street,
04:04the spectres of another Balkan war, slit throats, grieving mothers,
04:08were swirling around once more.
04:11You could almost hear the thought, not again.
04:15I was doing everything I could to try and get a negotiated settlement,
04:18because I knew what it would be like if we didn't.
04:21But there was, at the back of our mind,
04:24the thought and, in a sense, the obligation to use force if we had to.
04:39Three days after Prakash,
04:40Cook hosted a meeting of Western foreign ministers in London.
04:44In the Bosnian endgame,
04:46NATO had bombed Serbs forces to the bargaining table.
04:49For the American Secretary of State, the lesson was simple.
04:53Toughness paid.
04:54We need to remember that the only kind of pressure President Milosevic understands
04:59is the kind that imposes a real price on his unacceptable behavior.
05:04So, I think that...
05:05I think we all knew that unless you're prepared to use force,
05:11or have the threat of the use of force,
05:14it's difficult to deal with someone who only understands force.
05:21Born in Czechoslovakia, a refugee from the Nazis,
05:25Albright called herself a child of Munich.
05:28She knew all about appeasement,
05:30and she thought the West had been spineless during much of the Bosnian War.
05:36But this was her moment.
05:38Forget the gentle touch.
05:40The lady was a hawk.
05:41It is not often that you get a second chance.
05:45And I believed that it was very important to make clear that the kinds of things that Milosevic does,
05:53which is decide that because you are not his ethnic group that you don't deserve to exist,
06:00is unacceptable.
06:03Time for another mission to Belgrade.
06:06This time by a familiar face,
06:08the man who in 1995 had brokered the Bosnian peace deal with Milosevic,
06:13Richard Holbrook.
06:14The sparring partners were back in the ring.
06:18Holbrook had a message, and it wasn't one that Milosevic would appreciate.
06:22In Christmas 1992, Washington had warned Milosevic that if he messed around in Kosovo,
06:29he'd hear the buzz of American bombers.
06:31True then, said Holbrook.
06:33True now.
06:34On instructions, I repeatedly reaffirmed the Christmas warning.
06:39His reaction was, Kosovo's an internal matter.
06:42We said, we accept the fact that Kosovo is inside the Yugoslav national boundary,
06:49but that does not give you the right to squash its people.
06:54For that matter, Kosovo's people had no intention of being squashed.
06:59As summer approached, the guerrilla war intensified.
07:03For the KLA, this was a fight for a just cause.
07:07But their tactics were subtle.
07:10They knew the Serbs always overreacted to provocation,
07:14sometimes in plain view of the world's TV cameras.
07:23Inside Kosovo, the time for talk and diplomacy was long past.
07:30It had reached the level of open confrontation.
07:33The dilemma over whether the war was to be avoided or not had finished.
07:37It was at this time that face-to-face war between the Kosovo Liberation Army
07:41and the Yugoslav army and police started.
07:51Serb forces burned villages, driving their inhabitants into the hills and the arms of the KLA.
08:03Serb forces burned their inhabitants into the U.S.
08:04Ethnic cleansing, Balkan style, was back.
08:12In authorizing the military action, Milosevic had raised the stakes.
08:23In the face of the attacks, would Washington live up to the Christmas warning and bomb?
08:33Not on its own it wouldn't.
08:35Or at least, that was the skeptical view of Sandy Berger,
08:38President Clinton's politically savvy national security adviser.
08:43We believed that there needed to be a NATO commitment,
08:47not just an American commitment.
08:49Because whether we could sustain unilaterally action against Milosevic,
08:54I think was, under these circumstances, an open question.
09:01Enter NATO, the most powerful military alliance that the world has ever seen.
09:06Well, up to a point.
09:08For if the U.S. on its own couldn't decide what to do,
09:11what hope was there for a talking shop of 16 defense ministers?
09:15Not much.
09:16So, hoping it would frighten the tiger,
09:19NATO decided not to fight, but to noisily plan to fight.
09:24If he had learned that the politicians were making statements,
09:28but nothing was happening in terms of preparation, military preparation,
09:32and be it in terms of the development of plans,
09:36then he would have concluded this is all a bluff.
09:41We started with planning an air option.
09:44We obviously looked at what we would do if we'd done an air campaign
09:47and he still didn't want to yield, then what would we do then?
09:51And then if we'd gone in on the ground and he still didn't want to stop the fighting,
09:55then what would we do?
09:56So we had a whole variety of plans. There were a dozen or more.
10:02But planning to break eggs won't make an omelette.
10:05So NATO's 16 members managed to agree on one more thing.
10:09They showed off their arsenal, sending 80 planes to buzz the borders of Yugoslavia.
10:15Critics in the West called it the Balkan Airship.
10:19Milosevic's men, meanwhile, were not impressed.
10:28As far as NATO's threats were concerned, we didn't have any valid reason to believe them.
10:39They had no reason to protect the terrorists.
10:42They had no reasons to get involved in the internal politics of another country.
10:51Because of these reasons, we couldn't believe them.
10:54They had no reason to believe them.
10:57Throughout the summer of 98, the Serbs stepped up their attacks on the KLA.
11:02The guerrillas were on the run, whole villages were emptied, families were flushed out of their homes.
11:08And Washington's and a high-level delegation to sniff the air for themselves.
11:14We'd go from village to village.
11:16You wouldn't hear anything but a dog barking.
11:20No sign of human life, no movement.
11:24And it was pretty obvious to us that, you know, this was a tragedy in the making.
11:32Dole went to the White House. Milosevic, he said, thought the West was bluffing.
11:38I told the press that there have been so many empty gestures that I don't believe Milosevic really believes anything
11:45will ever happen.
11:47That was sort of my message.
11:51Here's a guess. The message didn't get through.
11:54Clinton had, shall we say, other things on his mind that summer.
12:01Monica, do you have sexual relations with the president?
12:05The Balkans now needed full-time attention.
12:09They didn't get it.
12:10The press was a little preoccupied with Monica Lewinsky,
12:13and I think it's fair to say without disclosing what was said that we talked about that.
12:21So I think it was a distraction.
12:22I think the whole Lewinsky thing.
12:24I've said I think Kosovo was maybe the first casualty of the Lewinsky affair.
12:39Still, Clinton couldn't escape Kosovo.
12:42Within weeks, more dreadful pictures were on the world's TV.
12:49I managed to get to Aubria, which is in the heartland of the KLA.
12:55The villages were utterly distraught.
12:59I saw one woman rocking forward and back, and she was saying,
13:03the children, the children, why the children?
13:09I'd been told off the record by a diplomat that one of the reasons that the West weren't really keen
13:14on getting involved was, you know,
13:15the sense that people weren't really being killed by the Serbs.
13:18This event disproved that, and so I was really determined to shoot it as well as I could
13:24and try and get the most emotional pictures possible.
13:33I went through a wooded area, and I then saw the bodies.
13:41Entire families had been killed.
13:43With hand grenades and rifle fire, the Serbs have murdered over 20 women, children, and old men.
13:59The oldest child I lost was my nine-year-old son, Jeton.
14:03Then there was Valmir, who was 18 months old.
14:07He still had his dummy in his mouth.
14:09Then there was four-year-old Menda, Gentiana, who was five, Doneta, who was six.
14:17Each body I found looked worse than what had gone before.
14:20It was difficult dealing with those damaged bodies.
14:32I managed to find my daughter, six-week-old Ditoria, who was still alive.
14:39She was under my wife's body.
14:42She was covered in blood, but it was not her blood.
14:45It was her mother's blood.
14:48I picked her up, and I left to tell my friends that she was all that was left of my
14:53family.
14:54It was her mother's body.
14:57It was her mother's body.
14:58It was her mother's body.
14:59It was her mother's body.
15:03Ditoria had been left without food or water.
15:07She died two months later.
15:22When the picture showed up, there was this sense that I'd had from the very beginning of the year,
15:27that we shouldn't be allowing these kinds of things to happen.
15:30So I always felt terrible that we had not been able to stop something like that.
15:42We knew Milosevic was ruthless.
15:44We knew he was brutal.
15:46We were witnessing a very deliberate and brutal repression of the Kosovo Albanians.
15:53It was six months since Cook had confronted Milosevic in Belgrade with pleas for toleration and compromise.
16:02He'd wasted his time.
16:04The Serb leader was now calling NATO's bluff.
16:25The President's foreign policy team met in the White House to discuss the gathering storm.
16:30Kosovo couldn't be ignored.
16:33The New York Times front page that day carried a picture of one of the victims of Aubria.
16:39The Times sat in the middle of the oak table in the middle of the Situation Room.
16:46A terrible photograph of that dead person in that village was a reminder of a reality and it had a
16:53very real effect on the dialogue.
16:57As they met that day, the President's advisers wanted to threaten Milosevic with bombing unless he agreed to a ceasefire.
17:04But without soldiers on the ground, it was hard to see how any ceasefire between the KLA and Serb forces
17:11could be made to stick.
17:12In the middle of the Lewinsky affair, Clinton standing with Congress was pathetically low.
17:18So there was no chance of sending armed GIs to Kosovo.
17:22It was clear that the Congress would not support a deployment of NATO ground forces similar to the one in
17:32Bosnia.
17:33Which both Secretary Albright and I had argued was essential to keep any ceasefire viable.
17:41So our negotiating instructions were to threaten the use of force, but to introduce only civilian forces into the unarmed
17:51civilians into the Kosovo area.
17:58Holbrook went back to Belgrade. Milosevic must allow refugees to go home and reduce his forces.
18:06Civilian monitors backed by U-2 surveillance aircraft would verify a ceasefire, otherwise it was bombing.
18:12But he had with him the man who'd do it.
18:16Milosevic leans forward and he looks at me and says, so, you are the man who is going to bomb
18:21me.
18:22And I said, well, Mr. President, in essence, you're right.
18:25I have U-2s in one hand and B-52s in the other, and the choice is up to you.
18:32Milosevic said to me, are you crazy enough to bomb us over these issues we're talking about in that lousy
18:41little Kosovo?
18:41And I said, you bet we're just crazy enough to do it.
18:49For Milosevic, the choice was easy. NATO was pushing at an open door.
18:54His offensive in the summer had almost done for the KLA.
18:57Now he just had to put up with unarmed observers of a ceasefire.
19:01They might even be useful to him, as NATO soldiers quickly appreciated.
19:06The mission looked like it was going to place unarmed people at risk.
19:11And, in addition, it was going to place people on the ground whose very presence would enable them to be
19:17taken hostage,
19:18and therefore checkmate the air threat.
19:27Filled with misgivings, General Clark set off from NATO headquarters in Brussels.
19:32His mission, to sort out the precise timetable for a reduction of Serb forces in Kosovo.
19:42Clark's only real sanction was NATO's so-called activation order, putting NATO forces on standby to bomb.
19:50He said, Mr. President, you're going to withdraw your forces that don't belong here, aren't you?
19:56He said, there are no such forces.
19:58I said, well, have you ever heard of the 211th Armored Brigade?
20:03He said, no, I have not.
20:04And he looked over at General Perisic, the Chief of Defense Staff,
20:08and Perisic says, oh, yes, that's in there, in Serbian.
20:14And Milosevic looked back at us, he says, okay, we have such a unit.
20:18It will be withdrawn. Now, he said, what will you do about the activation order?
20:23Because he didn't like this activation or this threat.
20:26You're threatening my country, he said.
20:30So who held the better hand?
20:32NATO had backed off in the past.
20:34How could Clark convince Milosevic that this time, honest, the Alliance meant business?
20:41I called President Milosevic aside and I said, no, Mr. President, you have to understand that NATO is very serious.
20:48You'll have to pull out the excess forces.
20:51If you don't, there's an activation order.
20:55And if they tell me to bomb you, I'm going to bomb you good.
21:00Well, Milosevic wasn't, he wasn't happy about this and he put on the Balkan Macho Act at first.
21:09It was sort of, well, General Clark, NATO must do what I said, come on, Mr. President.
21:14You don't want to get bombed by NATO.
21:16You tell your generals to cooperate, you figure out a way to get those forces out of here.
21:22After days and long nights of talk, drink, and roast pork, Milosevic eventually agreed to the deal.
21:30There wouldn't be a war.
21:32Time for a little celebration.
21:35He was feeling self-assured and confident and he passed out the pear brandy.
21:42And he said, in his, in the way that he has come to look at Western military people, he said,
21:49well, now, General Clark, he said, you understand, we know how to deal with these Albanians.
21:54We've done this before.
21:57And I said, well, when, when was that and where and how did you deal with them?
22:01He said, in Drenica, 1946, he said, they were murderers and bandits and killing their own kind.
22:10What did you do, Mr. President?
22:11He said, we killed them, we killed them all.
22:14It took several years, but we killed them all.
22:19He then proceeded to sign the promises to NATO, saying he wasn't going to use anything but, but normal policing
22:24methods.
22:31By early November, the civilian peacekeepers had arrived, but the KLA were trying to regroup.
22:37The chances of a real ceasefire were slim.
22:39It was the only deal we had, it was the only show in town, and therefore we did our best
22:44to make it work.
22:45But, from the start, I had doubts whether we could make it work without an armed presence within Kosovo.
22:53Cook had every reason to be gloomy.
22:57Two months later, near a village called Ratchag, the KLA killed four Serb policemen.
23:03The response was predictable and brutal.
23:10At about half past six, they started firing with heavy artillery.
23:17We left the house in the place we had on and started running up the hill.
23:29My husband was killed instantly.
23:39My thirteen-year-old boy was further down the hill, lying down.
23:42I thought that he was alive.
23:46It was only when we started running from the bullets again that I realized that he was dead.
24:00I did not dare stop to take a look at him.
24:03I left him in that state.
24:05I left him like that.
24:09We entered a nearby house to hide in it.
24:11I was wounded and hid under the staircase and lay there for eight hours.
24:17Serb police entered the village and began pulling men from the cellars.
24:25They separated us.
24:26They got us out.
24:28They started to beat us.
24:30They were swearing at us.
24:32They hit us with sticks.
24:34My neck still hurts because a policeman crushed it with his boots.
24:39Then they lined us up and told us to go to Ranunj, a village where the KLA had a base.
24:43They said we were to go to them.
24:45And so we were relieved because we thought they were letting us go.
24:53As the men walked along this path, the police opened fire.
24:58The police opened fire.
24:59Two men died beside me.
25:03Then four or five more.
25:05I did not know what to do.
25:12I reached a hollow in the ground and hid there.
25:14Bullets went through my jacket, my pockets, hit my belt.
25:18A bullet even hit my eyebrows.
25:20But they didn't hit me.
25:22It was my destiny to live.
25:36The police opened fire.
25:37Next morning, Bill Walker, the head of the ceasefire monitors, arrived in Ratjack.
25:42I guess we went, I don't know, 500 yards, something like that.
25:46And we came across the first body.
25:49And it was a body of a man.
25:52And they, there was a, there was a small blanket over where his head should be.
25:57And they lifted the blanket to show me that his head was gone.
25:59I'm not sure if we can cut off different pieces of skull.
26:02Jesus Christ.
26:07It's okay. I mean, let's give them the dignity of covering them up.
26:16I was a little shaken by this thing with the head gone and, but we started up the hill again
26:23and every 15 or 20 yards there was another body.
26:28All in sort of grotesque postures.
26:38All of them were obviously peasants.
26:43There was no sign of uniform.
26:44There was no sign of weapon.
26:49We finally reached a place where there was a pile of bodies.
26:54Maybe 17, 18, 19 bodies just helter-skelter in a big pile.
27:00All of them in these clothes that peasants in that part of the world wear when they're out in the
27:06fields doing their jobs.
27:19There were people coming up and discovering it was their husband, their father, their son.
27:26I was angry and I think I was, I was somewhat at a loss to know what the heck we
27:34were going to do now.
27:36Serb authorities would later claim that civilian clothes had been put on dead KLA soldiers during the night.
27:43Nothing I saw had anything in common with what the government's first story was,
27:50which was this clash with uniformed, armed KLA and that 15 had been killed.
27:57Everything I saw was consistent with what the villagers were telling me.
28:02We came down off that hill feeling that nothing was going to be the same again.
28:07This had changed the landscape completely as far as the mission was concerned.
28:13And we were, I certainly felt that this was a turning point.
28:27There was a sense of shock as a result of that, at the barbarity of it, and a recognition that
28:34this might not be negotiable.
28:41Still, one more negotiation would be tried.
28:44Three days later, Clark and his NATO colleague Klaus Naumann made the well-worn trip to Belgrade again.
28:51We said, let's talk about the massacre. It's not a massacre, he said.
28:56Our people, our people would not do such a thing.
29:00Once more, the NATO team tried to convince Milosevic that this time they were really, really serious.
29:07He got very emotional.
29:09He told us that he was fully aware that the greater fertility of the Albanians had changed the demographic balance
29:19over the time.
29:20And that, for that reason, he had to find the solution that the Albanians could not outnumber the Serbs once
29:28again.
29:28He told us again and again, these Kosovars, they are murderers and they are killers and rapers.
29:37He, he really got a little bit, well, emotional on this.
29:45We had to stop him a couple of times and say, Mr. President, we're not even talking about the Albanians
29:50here.
29:51We're talking about your obligations to NATO.
29:54And he would, he would be, he would stop and then he'd creep back into this.
30:00So there was certainly a black spot inside him.
30:09In Washington, yet another atrocity, yet another meeting.
30:13I had gotten increasingly frustrated.
30:15I think I used the term that we were kind of like gerbils on a wheel and just going around
30:20without resolving anything.
30:22And that things were getting worse and that we needed to take action.
30:29In fact, Albright was winning the argument.
30:32America might not want a war, but it suddenly looked likely to get one.
30:36We, at that point, said in that meeting,
30:38Rauchak was so brutal that I think there was, in Europe and here, a much clearer sense that we had
30:51to take action.
30:53Serb brutality, KLA tactics, NATO's uncertain diplomacy, and now, the grief of the bereaved.
31:02Europe was stumbling into war.
31:05To what end and for what purpose, those perhaps were questions best left unasked.
31:27On a Balkan winter's day, before the world's press and TV, the victims of Rauchak were buried.
31:41NATO's very credibility was now on the line.
31:53War seemed just days away.
31:55Couldn't it? Shouldn't it be averted?
31:58I thought it was still possible that we could get Milosevic to see sense.
32:02I didn't quite see what the point, from his point of view, was in getting into a battle with NATO,
32:08that in the end, if we had the will to see it through, he was bound to lose.
32:14President Clinton agreed with Tony Blair, and so, under pressure from the Americans and Europeans,
32:20the Serb and Albanian leaders agreed to meet in Rambouillet, outside Paris.
32:24Optimists still hoped for a deal, one that would give Kosovo autonomy,
32:29backed by an international force to prevent more Serb violence.
32:33If there wasn't an agreement, war seemed inevitable.
32:37The omens weren't good.
32:40As the KLA guerrillas came down from the hills to fly to France,
32:44they nervously watched their backs.
32:47Justine Airport was really close to the main power base the Serb army and police had.
32:52The airport was anything except safe.
32:57The Albanians were carrying more than passports.
33:01The delegation were fearing for their lives.
33:04They were all carrying weapons.
33:06They had some really nasty guns with them.
33:10In fact, many of the Albanian delegates had never met each other before.
33:15People felt an enormous boulder of responsibility over their shoulders.
33:21That we are writing the history of our own people, now we have this enormous responsibility.
33:36The destination was a famous French chateau where the delegations would be locked away and with luck do a deal.
33:43The hope that Rambouillet would be an elegant European version of the talks at an old airbase in Dayton, Ohio,
33:51that had ended the Bosnian War.
33:55We meet today in a place of tranquillity and beauty.
34:00But we are here to change a scene of violence and fear.
34:05Both sides came to the talks from very different points of view.
34:09There was a lot of blood that had been shed over the previous year between them.
34:13It was never going to be easy making sure that you could bridge that.
34:17In fact, it was impossibly hard.
34:20The Albanians wanted NATO's protection, but the Serb delegation was low level and took its cue from Milosevic back in
34:26Belgrade.
34:31His key point agreed to nothing that meant NATO troops on Yugoslav soil.
34:37The Serbs would not accept an armed military presence.
34:42None of us were going to go back to the Holbrook package, which had an unarmed presence, which they could
34:47then bully and intimidate.
34:50But the Albanians were proving just as difficult.
34:53They too were getting a message from back home.
34:56Autonomy wasn't enough, no deal, unless it leads to full independence for Kosovo.
35:06We must not forget that I had about 20,000 armed people in Kosovo who asked for explanations.
35:14There were difficult moments. Personally, for me, it was very difficult.
35:24Riding in from the west came Albright, putting her personal prestige on the line, hoping that a diplomatic triumph was
35:30within reach.
35:32And carrying a piece of intelligence that she hoped would knock sense into the Albanians.
35:37We knew that the Serbs were organizing themselves for a spring offensive.
35:44We had some intelligence information that indicated that they were massing around the borders of Kosovo.
35:54A senior member of the delegation was Ibrahim Rugova, a long-time pacifist leader of the Albanians.
36:05Mrs. Albright asked us, do you want this agreement with the US and NATO in Kosovo, or don't you want
36:12it?
36:12In which case, you'll be left under Serbian oppression and at their mercy.
36:20Sensing the deal was slipping away, Albright went public.
36:24Let me say that if the talks crater because the Serbs do not say yes, we will have bombing.
36:32If the talks crater because the Albanians have not said yes, we will not be able to support them.
36:39And in fact, we'll have to cut off whatever help they are getting from the outside.
36:45A deadline was set for February the 23rd.
36:48When the Albanian delegation arrived, they were ready to sign.
36:52Albright seemed to have salvaged something from the talks.
36:57But then the KLA man again heard from the military commanders back in Kosovo, to sign would be a betrayal.
37:05We were in toilet because it was at some point the safest place to discuss.
37:11And he said, you should realize that if I go back with something my people doesn't want, I may get
37:18a bullet in the head.
37:22The deadline approached.
37:24Perhaps neither side would sign.
37:27Thatchi told his colleagues that he had to go back to Kosovo and consult with the hard men in the
37:32mountains before he could sign anything.
37:36A frustrated Madeleine Albright turned up in the corridor outside the Albanian delegation's room.
37:43She just showed herself on the door.
37:47And one member of the delegation who didn't realize who was she.
37:52And probably thinking that she was some cleaning lady because it was after midnight.
37:58And he simply said to her, like, give us five minutes.
38:02And please go away.
38:06Mrs Albright started using the explicit language which the translators never could translate into Albanian.
38:21She'd got nothing from the Serbs and all she'd got from the Albanians was a promise.
38:26They went home saying they'd come back to Paris and sign the agreement if they were allowed to.
38:33They used the interval in between the Romboi phase and the Paris phase to sell it to the people.
38:39And indeed, thatchi went round the commanders of the different regions.
38:44And they did get agreement that this would represent a way forward for Kosovo.
38:48The Serbs used the same interval to toughen up their position and to prepare their people to rejection.
38:56Three weeks later, the Albanians signed the Romboi Accord in Paris.
39:01In effect, the guerrillas of the KLA were now a NATO ally.
39:06Once the Serbs had said no and the Kosovars had said yes, it was a very clear choice and it
39:13was, that was what triggered the pasta, made it clear that the use of force had to take place.
39:25On March the 19th, the civilian monitors of the non-existent ceasefire were pulled out.
39:32They'd feared they might be held as hostages.
39:34In fact, the Serbs couldn't wait to see them go.
39:40Our last people coming out were saying, you know, right behind us were the tanks, right behind us were the
39:45APCs, the Armored Personnel Carriers.
39:48And it was obvious that the Yugoslav forces, one, had a plan to move in right behind us.
39:54Two, wanted us out of the way as soon as possible so they could start doing what they were going
39:59to do.
40:00And then did it.
40:03The next day, Saturday the 20th of March, the Serb army started a major new offensive against Albanian positions, the
40:11biggest since the summer.
40:14It was just as NATO intelligence had predicted.
40:19We saw clear indicators that large scale military operations against Kosovo were about to take place.
40:25What we were saying was, we expect the Serbs to be quite merciless in their treatment of the Kosovar Albanians.
40:32Clinton gave Holbrook a last throw of the dice.
40:35On Monday the 22nd, he returned once again to Milosevic's palace. Sign now, or it's war.
40:42I went back with our team, and we presented to Milosevic the ultimatum, that if he didn't sign the agreement,
40:50that the bombing would start.
40:54He went on and on about how Serbia had done everything right, and the international community, especially the U.S.,
41:01had double-crossed him.
41:03He understood that we were on the edge of war, and he would not engage in any meaningful way.
41:12Holbrook left the meeting and rang Albright.
41:15I talked to Ambassador Holbrook, and it was evident to me that what Milosevic was doing was playing games.
41:24It was evident that he was just jerking us around.
41:30It would be the emissaries last night in Belgrade.
41:34I went back alone, and I sat there alone with Milosevic.
41:39And I said to him, you understand that if I leave here without an agreement today, bombing will start.
41:49Almost immediately.
41:51And he said, yes, I understand that.
41:53And I said, you understand it will be swift, severe, and sustained.
41:56And I used those three words very carefully after consultations with the Pentagon.
42:02And he said, you're a great country. You're a powerful country. You can do anything you want.
42:07We can't stop you.
42:08There was an air of resignation to him.
42:11I said, you're absolutely clear what will happen when we leave?
42:15And he said, yes, very quietly.
42:18You'll bomb us.
42:28This was it.
42:30This was war.
42:32After months of soul-searching, NATO's might had been unshackled.
42:38The politicians still hoped that a short bombing campaign would do the trick.
42:43That's all that Alliance politics would stand.
42:49The man in charge of the air war had once planned for a sustained attack on hundreds of targets.
42:55No dice. It couldn't be done. It wasn't needed.
43:00I had been told, I can't tell you how many times.
43:04The instruction I got is, Mike, you're only going to be allowed to bomb two, maybe three nights.
43:08That's all Washington can stand.
43:10That's all some members of the Alliance can stand.
43:13That's why you've only got 90 targets.
43:16This will be over in three nights.
43:32And then came one last extraordinary bid to avoid war.
43:37Someone from NATO pulled a mobile phone of the Serb army commander in Kosovo.
43:46A voice told me that in a few moments, the aggression against our country was about to begin.
43:52And that I was being given a chance to save the Serbian people.
43:56Of course, I turned off the phone.
44:04Clinton went on TV and took another gamble. It would be war from the air only.
44:12My fellow Americans, today our armed forces joined our NATO allies in airstrikes against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality
44:21in Kosovo.
44:22There were no plans to send GIs to a Balkan quagmire.
44:27But I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.
44:31Had there been introduced, at that stage, a debate about ground forces, about which there was not a consensus, not
44:39then, not later,
44:41there would have been disunity instead of a united front.
44:45Still, at NATO headquarters, some listened in disbelief.
44:49Betting all on the bombers was one gamble too many.
44:53Politically, removing the threat of a ground war might make sense.
44:57To do it in public was just crass.
45:00I do not hesitate to say all those politicians who ruled out in public the use of ground forces made
45:12it easier for Milosevic to calculate his risk.
45:17And this may have encouraged him to make the attempt to write it out, and by this we prolonged the
45:23war.
45:30The most intense and expensive war in Europe for 50 years had begun.
45:38To do it, I will, since we had the time I was in the medical emergency.
45:47There was an escape from the outside of the building at this building on the building,
45:48We used to say the first day, and the latter came to a place and the second day.
45:50The first day of the construction on the building, and the third day closed the building.
45:50All the doors were in the building and the third day closed the building.
45:57The second day of the storm was a great city, and the third day closed the building.
45:59It was not a heavy city where we started, but not all the doors were built and were made.
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