Involvement in Kosovo War has been waged in the Balkans for thousands of years. Yugoslavia has been divided, reunited, divided again, undergone wars and been through depressions. Each country within the Yugoslavia region has experienced hardships due to a failing economy, poor leadership, and civil wars. In the past few years, a major upheaval in the political structure and the disputes concerning land between the different religions and ethnicity's has caused a civil war. .
The country and ethnic group of this dispute is Serbia and Kosovo. The Albanian Kosovars want their independence from Serbia, while the Serbs consider Kosovo the location in which their cultural and ethnic identity is placed. The United States became involved in the Balkan conflict in the end of 1998 ("Kosovo" 1). U.S. involvement in Kosovo made matters worse for the innocent people of Kosovo. .
Kosovo, a small area in the center of the former Yugoslavia, played an important role in the Balkan conflict. In the summer of 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) decided to launch a guerilla warfare attack on Serbia in attempts to liberate themselves and gain their cultural rites. The President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, refused to allow Kosovo to break away from Serbia without a fight. Kosovo was a site of great emotional significance to the Serbs; it is the site of a historic defeat by the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century. From this defeat, Kosovo became the cradle of Serbia's cultural and ethnic identity. Milosevic began an ethnic cleansing campaign in which he killed thousands of ethnic Albanians. NATO forces, as well as the United States, began stepping in in the winter of 1998. The United States made a cease-fire contract with Milosevic, which ended in the early months of 1999 (1).The United States believes that they benefited Kosovo by intervening. Many diplomats are saying that U.S. involvement in Kosovo didn't help the Albanians because it is stopping the ethnic cleansing by Milosevic.