"The violence started with the KLA around 1996. There was no ethnic violence perpetrated against the Albanians until the KLA started killing and terrorizing Serb police and civilians around then."
I agree, Joan. However, Milosevic clearly went beyond the pale toward Albanians when his forces brutally attacked villages and started throwing out Albanians from their homes, killing them at random and expelling the others. This was an ethnic cleansing. My position is this: Serbia and Serbs have political rights to Kosovo so both Serbs and Albanians should make a compromise that would insure that Kosovo does not become fully independent from Serbia and Serbs can live securely in Kosovo (enforced by NATO martial law for a while), while Albanians should have security guarantees too. The ordinary Albanians deserve to live in Kosovo too where they lived for generations. They could have some Western guaranteed semi-independent (but not fully independent) quasi-state with Serbia retaining the right to veto specified political decisions (related to foreign policy) made by the Kosovo legislature and political leadership. Also Serbs should be able to live and settle in Kosovo freely without any restrictions. Basically, I'm proposing a loose, NATO supervised union of Serbia and Kosovo.
The bottom line is--I'm against Kosovo independence. No sane person wants an officially Islamic State in Europe with AL-Qaeda allies KLA at the top.
I Clinton hadn't bombed Serbia, I believe the Serbs would have gotten fed up with Milosevic themselves and chucked him into prison.