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THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
Kosovo Albanians. Milosevic, however, crushed protests through
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brutal crackdowns.
Unlike other rebellious regions of the FRY, Kosovo’s Albanian
political leadership under the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK)
took a nonviolent approach to its goal of independence in the early
1990s. Under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova, the LDK asked its
people for patience, believing that the international community would
eventually address their demands in an overall settlement for the
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FRY. When a potential opportunity for such an agreement arrived in
the form of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, Rugova, to his disap-
pointment, was not even invited and the Kosovo issue was completely
ignored. The Dayton Agreement’s primary goal was to end the war in
Bosnia. Kosovo was relatively peaceful in 1995 and bringing the
Kosovo Albanian demands into the negotiations would complicate
them and reduce the chances of reaching peace in Bosnia. Richard
Holbrooke, the key American diplomat at Dayton, for one, did not
believe that it would have been possible to win Milosevic’s agreement
on Bosnia if Kosovo were included. The other two parties at the
negotiations—Croatian president Franjo Tudman and Bosnian president
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Alija Izetbegovic—had no interest in the Kosovo issue.
The
outcome of Dayton became a turning point for the Kosovo Albanians,
who increasingly came to the realization that international attention
to their cause would likely be garnered only through armed struggle. 11
According to Ivo Daalder,
The failure to deal with Kosovo in Dayton left the Albanians to con-
clude that the way in which you get Western attention, in which you get
a Dayton-like conference, in which you get the President of the United
States to pay attention to you, is to use violence. That violence begets
international attention and that therefore one should start violence.
A policy that the Kosovars had been pursuing since 1989 of non-violent
opposition all of a sudden became less and less viable and as time goes
by, more and more people realize or come to the conclusion that the
way you get the West involved is to start killing people. 12
This conclusion took material form with the emergence of the
KLA, who engaged in their first significant armed clashes with
Yugoslav authorities in early 1996 and took on an increasingly public
profile by the end of 1997. 13 By 1998, these clashes erupted into a
full-scale guerrilla war. As predicted, the world finally noticed and
the Kosovo Albanians successfully managed to internationalize their
struggle. Having largely ignored the pacifist struggles of Rugova,