Global Refugee Crisis

After a NATO bombing campaign that lasted more than two months, the United States and its NATO allies forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to stop driving ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. While the “ethnic cleansing” has stopped, it has produced Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II. The military intervention was but the latest in a series of efforts to stem a rising tide of refugees fleeing ethnic conflicts and civil wars that have erupted the world over in the 1990s. Critics of U.S. military involvement say the bombing only made the refugees' situation worse. But supporters of military action call it an unqualified success. Still other critics say that resettling the refugees in the United States makes it unlikely that they will ever return home.