At "Kosovo, What Do We Do Now?" a panel discussion held last night at the Institute of Politics' (IOP) ARCO forum, the Yugoslav region now at the center of the world's attention was called "a place where nothing is learned, nothing is forgotten."

Many say the current crisis in Kosovo first reared its head in 1989, when Kosovo, an autonomous province since its incorporation into Yugoslavia in 1912, was stripped of its autonomy by Slobodan Milosevic, the current president of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

At a speech earlier yesterday, however, Oberlin College Assistant Professor of Sociology Veljko Vujacic argued that the conflict reaches farther back, perhaps as far back as the middle ages. Since that time, ethnic Albanians--who are predominantly Muslims--or ethnic Serbs, primarily orthodox Christians, have alternately held control of the province, usually oppressing the other group.

Panelists last night agreed that there would be no easy solution to the current crisis, but said that NATO should send ground troops into Kosovo to prevent what some panelists called the "genocide" taking place there.

According to the panelists, since NATO first started bombing Yugoslav government installations on Mar. 24, it has become clear that NATO's leaders had made gross miscalculations in their initial approach to the crisis.

"Ordinarily in military involvements, you have a clarity of ends, and you keep your means obscure. In this particular case, the situation has been reversed," said General William Nash, former commander of the U.S. First Armored Division in Bosnia.

Throughout the discussion, panelists bemoaned NATO's public declarations about the extent of force they were willing to use to accomplish their goals.

"How could Washington be so naive that you could win such a thing with an air strike? Impossible! Why did Clinton declare on TV that we would not send in ground troops? Of course we should go in, we are much too late," said Ruud Lubbers, a former prime minister of the Netherlands.

Steven Van Evera, a professor of political science at MIT, said that air campaigns were historically ineffective without accompanying ground forces to prevent enemy troops from scattering.