THE POST– COLD WAR WORLD ★^1079support for human rights to a central place in international relations. He
achieved only mixed success.
Clinton strongly supported a 1993 agreement, negotiated at Oslo, Norway,
in which Israel for the first time recognized the legitimacy of the Palestine Lib-
eration Organization. The Oslo Accords seemed to outline a road to Mideast
peace. But neither side proved willing to implement them fully. Israeli govern-
ments continued to build Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the West
Bank— a part of Jordan that Israel had occupied during the 1967 Six- Day War.
The new Palestinian Authority, which shared in governing parts of the West
Bank as a stepping- stone to full statehood, proved to be corrupt, powerless,
and unable to curb the growth of groups bent on violence against Israel. At the
end of his presidency, Clinton brought Israeli and Palestinian leaders to Camp
David to try to work out a final peace treaty. But the meeting failed, and vio-
lence soon resumed.
Like Carter, Clinton found it difficult to balance concern for human rights
with strategic and economic interests and to formulate clear guidelines for
humanitarian interventions overseas. For example, the United States did noth-
ing in 1994 when tribal massacres racked Rwanda, in central Africa. More than
800,000 people were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, and 2 million ref-
ugees fled the country.
The Balkan Crisis
The most complex foreign policy crisis of the Clinton years arose from the dis-
integration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic state in southeastern Europe that had
been carved from the old Austro- Hungarian empire after World War I. As in
the rest of eastern Europe, the communist government that had ruled Yugo-
slavia since the 1940s collapsed in 1989.
Within a few years, the country’s six
provinces dissolved into five new states.
Ethnic conflict plagued several of these
new nations. Ethnic cleansing— a
terrible new term meaning the forcible
expulsion from an area of a particular
ethnic group— now entered the inter-
national vocabulary. By the end of 1993,
more than 100,000 Bosnians, nearly all
of them civilians, had perished in the
Balkan crisis.
With the Cold War over, protec-
tion of human rights in the Balkans
gave NATO a new purpose. After
What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration
in the aftermath of the Cold War?Serbian refugees fleeing a Croat offensive during
the 1990s. By the fall of 1995, the wars that
followed the breakup of Yugoslavia and accom-
panying “ethnic cleansing” had displaced over
3 million people.