I'm a bit surprised that nobody has brought this up, given that this week marks the tenth anniversary of the war's outbreak.
So, no Kosovo War. [handwave] Let us say the POD is a negotiated climbdown at Rambouillet. Freely granted, that's a stretch. OTL Milosevic seems to have treated Rambouillet as a joke. He certainly wasn't going to let NATO ground troops into Kosovo. And he seems to have thought the bombing would be like the NATO bombings a few years earlier in Bosnia -- a few days, then back to the negotiating table.
But let's say Slobo has a sudden attack of reality and realizes that double-downing the world's most powerful military alliance is sort of a dumb idea. So he goes with the Rambouillet proposals of February 1999. (Note: these did not include the controversial annex allowing NATO forces to move through the rest of Yugoslavia.) These grant broad political autonomy to Kosovo, but not independence; the KLA, meanwhile, is supposed to disarm.
Odds of this working?
If it breaks down, how so, and what happens then? (Note that there will now be ~28,000 NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo.)
Effects on Serbia? On Milosevic?
(BTW: it would be nice if we could have a thread about the 1990s Balkan conflicts without nationalists from one side or the other popping up to insist that peace on these terms would be IMPOSSIBLE, because the other guys are BLOODTHIRSTY DOGS, gangsters human traffickers drug dealers fascist apartheid oppressors blah blah und so weiter et seq. Worth a try?)
Doug M.
So, no Kosovo War. [handwave] Let us say the POD is a negotiated climbdown at Rambouillet. Freely granted, that's a stretch. OTL Milosevic seems to have treated Rambouillet as a joke. He certainly wasn't going to let NATO ground troops into Kosovo. And he seems to have thought the bombing would be like the NATO bombings a few years earlier in Bosnia -- a few days, then back to the negotiating table.
But let's say Slobo has a sudden attack of reality and realizes that double-downing the world's most powerful military alliance is sort of a dumb idea. So he goes with the Rambouillet proposals of February 1999. (Note: these did not include the controversial annex allowing NATO forces to move through the rest of Yugoslavia.) These grant broad political autonomy to Kosovo, but not independence; the KLA, meanwhile, is supposed to disarm.
Odds of this working?
If it breaks down, how so, and what happens then? (Note that there will now be ~28,000 NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo.)
Effects on Serbia? On Milosevic?
(BTW: it would be nice if we could have a thread about the 1990s Balkan conflicts without nationalists from one side or the other popping up to insist that peace on these terms would be IMPOSSIBLE, because the other guys are BLOODTHIRSTY DOGS, gangsters human traffickers drug dealers fascist apartheid oppressors blah blah und so weiter et seq. Worth a try?)
Doug M.