CNN - 1999 Year In Review

"Damn all those evil people, devils, who for the last 10 years have built their happiness only on the misery of others -- those who have killed so many people, who have taken so much blood, who have destroyed so many countries."

-- Vuk Draskovic, Yugoslav opposition leader

(CNN) -- NATO's air campaign last spring against mostly strategic targets in Yugoslavia was its first ever military action, and it had to be good. An effete show of force against Yugoslavia would have proved, as NATO's critics had claimed, that the alliance was hollow. Ever present, in news accounts if not in NATO war rooms, was the specter of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, when thousands of civilians died even as an international peacekeeping force was standing guard.

NATO's goal was unprecedented -- to protect an oppressed people within their own borders. In the end, the action may help define the role of collective security alliances in the post-Cold War world.

For months, the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic had refused to sign a peace plan that would have ended officially sanctioned persecution of the ethnic Albanian majority in its province of Kosovo. The final straw came when Yugoslavia finally promised to sign, then backed off. Yugoslavia was clearly teasing the alliance, and possibly stalling to solidify its air defenses.

NATO launched its air campaign March 24. The assault included air and sea-launched cruise missiles and bombing runs by American, German and French airplanes.

The NATO attacks created two unintended crises. One that still reverberates, particularly for neighboring Macedonia and Albania, was the torrent of ethnic Albanians numbering in the tens of thousands who fled from renewed Yugoslav attacks and have yet to return.

The other was the accidental dropping of five bombs by NATO planes on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7. Three Chinese officials were killed and two others injured. Beijing rebuffed NATO's apologies and rejected its claims the embassy bombing was a mistake. Demonstrations against the United States and NATO erupted in 20 Chinese cities, but Sino-U.S. relations have since improved.

With better weather NATO's air bombardment intensified into June, when the Belgrade government relented and agreed to withdraw its troops from Kosovo.

Many Kosovars who fled the region have returned to find their homes and towns destroyed. Also discovered have been numerous mass graves containing hundreds of victims, allegedly the work of Yugoslav-Serb death units. The region remains tense. Despite the presence of international peacekeepers, local Serbs in Kosovo say ethnic Albanians have launched revenge attacks against them.

Opposition to Milosevic's government has grown. Demonstrations in Belgrade have demanded free and fair national elections. But Milosevic -- renounced for his role in the Bosnian war and declared a war criminal by a U.N. tribunal for alleged atrocities in Kosovo -- remains in power, and apparently beyond the reach of the West.

NATO goes to war over human rights in Kosovo