Less than four months after the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a major human tragedy continues to unfold near the heart of Europe.
Against a complex background of deeply rooted ethnic rivalries, deliberately exacerbated by the manipulation of nationalist forces, well over 1 million Kosovar ethnic Albanians have been stripped of their possessions and identity papers and driven from their homes at gunpoint. Of this number, over 600,000 have fled across borders to neighboring Albania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro in the last month.
This forced displacement is the direct result of a long-standing pattern of intimidation within the framework of a program of ethnic cleansing. The purpose of this campaign of persecution is to erase an entire population from the face of the map and is seen by many as one of the most deplorable episodes in modern European history.