Western diplomats had hoped that the cease-fire and the harsh Balkan winter would give them an opportunity to press both the Serbs and the KLA into a peace deal. But by January the conflict was back on the boil, with the massacre of 45 civilians by Serb forces in the village of Racak signaling the failure of the October deal. In February, NATO demanded that both sides meet in France and sign on to a Western-authored peace deal, or face military pressure. Two weeks of talks at Rambouillet failed to produce results after both the Serbs and the KLA refused to accept the deal. When the talks reconvened in mid-March, the KLA accepted the peace deal, but the Serbs refused. Milosevic then escalated the crisis by launching another large-scale offensive in Kosovo. Stopping that offensive is the principal objective of NATO's current air strikes.  
 

Claims on Kosovo: Why They're Fighting  
Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the core of the former Yugoslavia. Because 90 percent of its population are of Albanian rather than Serb origins, the region enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in the old Yugoslavia. President Slobodan Milosevic revoked that autonomy in 1989 in keeping with his nationalist campaign for a "Greater Serbia." As the site of an historic defeat by the Ottoman empire in the 14th century, Kosovo has great emotional significance to Serbian nationalists.  

The revoking of Kosovo's autonomy sparked the current conflict, as the territory's ethnic-Albanian majority sought to restore their cultural rights. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has radicalized the conflict by taking up arms and demanding full independence in the face of Serb determination to hold on to the province.