1080 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy
considerable indecision, NATO launched air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces,
with American planes contributing. UN troops, including 20,000 Americans,
arrived as peacekeepers. In 1998, ethnic cleansing again surfaced, this time by
Yugoslavian troops and local Serbs against the Albanian population of Kosovo,
a province of Serbia. More than 800,000 Albanians fled the region. To halt the
bloodshed, NATO launched a two- month war in 1999 against Yugoslavia that
led to the deployment of American and UN forces in Kosovo.
Human Rights
During Clinton’s presidency, human rights played an increasingly important
role in international affairs. Hundreds of nongovernmental agencies through-
out the world defined themselves as protectors of human rights. During the
1990s, the agenda of international human rights organizations expanded to
include access to health care, women’s rights, and the rights of indigenous
peoples like the Aborigines of Australia and the descendants of the original
inhabitants of the Americas. Human rights emerged as a justification for inter-
ventions in matters once considered to be the internal affairs of sovereign
nations. The United States dispatched the military to distant parts of the world
to assist in international missions to protect civilians.
New institutions emerged that sought to punish violations of human
rights. The Rwandan genocide produced a UN- sponsored war crimes court that
sentenced the country’s former prime minister to life in prison. An interna-
tional tribunal put Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosˇ evicˇ on trial for sponsor-
ing the massacre of civilians. It remained to be seen whether these initiatives
would grow into an effective international system of protecting human rights
across national boundaries. Despite adopting human rights as a slogan, many
governments continued to violate them in practice.
GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
In December 1999, delegates from around the world gathered in Seattle for a
meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a 135-nation group created
five years earlier to reduce barriers to international commerce and settle trade
disputes. To the astonishment of residents of the city, more than 30,000 persons
gathered to protest the meeting. Their marches and rallies brought together
factory workers, who claimed that global free trade encouraged corporations
to shift production to low- wage centers overseas, and “ tree- huggers,” as some
reporters called environmentalists, who complained about the impact on the
earth’s ecology of unregulated economic development.
Some of the latter dressed in costumes representing endangered species—
monarch butterflies whose habitats were disappearing because of the widespread