The Conflict in Kosovo: What's at Stake.

• Position: Brief Article

While many Americans were still trying to find the Serbian province of Kosovo on the map, the U.S. and its allies began bombing the region.

Diplomatic talks had failed to stop the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, from attacking Kosovo. Serb forces have tried to suppress Kosovo's ethnic Albanian rebels for more than a year. The war has taken more than 3,000 lives and left 575,000 people homeless, becoming Europe's biggest armed conflict since World War II.

The roots of the trouble are long and tangled. Serbia is the biggest remaining chunk of the onetime nation of Yugoslavia. Kosovo, whose population is 90 percent ethnic Albanian and only 10 percent Serb, once had a great degree of self-rule, with its own government, schools and culture. Yugoslavia broke apart in the early 1990s, but Kosovo stayed in Serbia. Milosevic ended Kosovo's self-rule, and banned the Albanian language. Ethnic Albanians rebelled, triggering the Serbian attacks that brought the bombings by NATO.

THE SERBS (YUGOSLAVIA)

WHO: Ethnic Slavs, Eastern Orthodox

LEADER: Slobodan Milosevic

WANT: Kosovo for Serbs

KOSOVO ALBANIANS

WHO: Ethnic Albanians, Muslims

WHAT...