Bill Clinton, at age 46, was the youngest person to be elected president of the United States since John F. Kennedy in 1960, at the age of 43. Despite his youth, Clinton entered the White House with considerable experience in government. At the time of his election in 1992, he had already served for nearly 12 years as governor of Arkansas. He was the first Democratic president to win two terms since Franklin Roosevelt and only the second president ever to be impeached and tried by the Senate. Clinton worked during his two terms as president to protect the middle class from budget cuts, to resolve many overseas crises, and to expand domestic social programs, yet these accomplishments were often overshadowed by the personal scandals that followed him through his presidency. View this essay
The 1999 war in Kosovo plunged Europe into its worst refugee crisis since World War II. In retaliation for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic began deporting hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. As the refugees gathered in Macedonia and Albania, the international community scrambled to deal with the unexpected turn of events.
In Kosovo, the deportation was swift. In dozens of villages, block by block and house by house, Serbs confiscated the identity cards and passports of ethnic Albanians. The Albanians were loaded onto trains headed for the Blace border in Macedonia. Upon arrival at the border, the refugees found themselves treated terribly by Macedonian soldiers, who didn't want refugees in their backyard. For days the refugees were forced to stay in muddy open fields with no shelter or food. Thousands of other refugees were trapped in a no man's land just inside Kosovo, in cold and miserable weather, unable to move across the border into Macedonia.
Some brave Albanian men, living in Macedonia, quickly organized an underground network to smuggle trapped families out of Kosovo to the safety of the camps. Once in a refugee camp, they faced harsh conditions and were isolated behind barbed wire. The refugees dreamed of a day they could be reunited with their families back in Kosovo. By midsummer of 1999, the war was over and refugees returned home to Kosovo, only to find the country they once knew so well destroyed by Serbian soldiers.
Yunghi Kim photographed the experiences of these refugees who were forced from their homes. The following photo essay won Kim a first-place award in the 57th annual Missouri School of Journalism's Pictures of the Year contest and helped her secure the title of second-place Magazine Photographer of the Year in the same contest. View this essay
