Posted on 12/31/2003 7:35:46 AM PST by SJackson
The recent parliamentary elections in Serbia, which greatly strengthened nationalist and anti-Western parties, are an example of how Western intervention in Serbian affairs may have negative consequences.
These elections, as well as the recent presidential election in which the indicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj, now in detention in The Hague, received the largest number of votes (but was not elected president because less than 50 percent of registered voters went to the polls), are a clear indication of the nationalist, anti-Western backlash which has characterized Serbian politics in the last years, greatly encouraged by insensitive Western policies.
NATO did the right thing to intervene in 1999 to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian atrocities. After years of idly standing by while Milosevic and his henchmen perpetrated numerous war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia, the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo set international standards which will be a future benchmark against genocide and ethnic cleansing.
In Serbia itself, intervention also led to a bloodless uprising in Belgrade, which put an end to Milosevic's rule.
But the international community went to the other extreme: from passivity it moved into high gear. The UN, whose blue helmets were complicit, by their neutrality between murderers and victims, in the massacre in Srebrenica, viewed the extradition of the fallen and defeated Milosevic as a condition for re-admitting Serbia into the family of nations.
This was a cardinal mistake. The newly elected liberal prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, inherited a country defeated, humiliated and in dire economic straits. He needed Western support, political and economic, to steer a democratically-oriented course under extremely difficult conditions. Despite Milosevic's downfall, many of Serbia's citizens, brainwashed by more than a decade of propaganda, still viewed the fallen leader as a national hero. Serbia's tortured history is replete with sagas of victimization and persecution. Instead of helping Djindjic in his difficult role, the West made economic aid contingent on the handing over of Milosevic to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. When Djindjic did this, reluctantly, he became viewed by many Serbs, including many who opposed Milosevic and his policies, as forfeiting his country's sovereignty for 30 pieces of silver.
THE FACT that at the time of his extradition Milosevic was already under house arrest and was about to be indicted in Serbia on a variety of charges – albeit not on war crimes – made many people feel that the insistence on extradition was counterproductive to a peaceful transition to democracy in Serbia. Better, many argued, to let the Serbs themselves sort out their history, incomplete as the process may be.
Since the extradition Djindjic was a marked man, especially as the democratically-elected president of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica – a dour, legalistic nationalist – opposed the extradition and claimed that it was unconstitutional.
The anger against Djindjic greatly weakened his democratic coalition, which was also torn by internal strife and accusations of corruption. His assassination nine months ago by members of the security services connected with criminal gangs eliminated the single democratic politician who, for all his faults, appeared as the only person able to lead Serbia toward a democratic transition. The government crackdown, after Djindjic's assassination, was not limited to nationalist extremists or mafia gangs: it seriously hurt civil rights in a country struggling to extricate itself from a lengthy history of autocracy.
After the successful ousting of Serbian forces from Kosovo, the international community failed once again to take the measure of the complexities of the situation: rather than easing Serbia's way in coming to terms with its defeat and history, it rubbed the rest of Serbia's pride in the dust and helped turn Milosevic – who was ousted by a popular uprising – into a national hero, and made Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, whom most Serbs abhor for his war crimes in Croatia and Serbia, the leader of the largest party in the land.
The scandal is that it is the same Western and UN politicians who did nothing when Serbian forces murdered and raped for years all over former Yugoslavia who became the most ardent proponents of bringing Milosevic to The Hague. By this they were making the transition to democracy even more difficult in Serbia.
You're simply ignoring it and going with the bodycount straw-man.
When Saddam threatened our oil supply, we confronted him militarily. He hadn't threatened it since and is no longer in a position to do so.
Had he moved against the Kurds in Northern Iraq, we would have intervened - he didn't, so we didn't.
No, it wasn't, was it. So ergo there must be some hidden reason the Bush Sr. administration took the actions it did, because you can't wrap your brain around something new or out of the ordinary - right?
Given the the Clinton administration lurched from one scandal to another, anything it undertook can be viewed as damage control, but then not everybody was looking to the administration for their world news, were they? Are you really trying to sell the hypothesis that NATO's European nations and Canada resorted to military action in order to cover Clinton's butt? You just haven't pondered how stupid that is, have you.
They, like I, have arrived at my 'line' independent of what the Clinton administration was selling, and the fact that your only recourse is to retreat to this last line of defence in your argument merely points out the weakness of your position.
Why don't you check out what some of the writers of the material you are relying upon are saying about our current involvement in Iraq? A "No blood for oil" t-shirt would go great with your "Free Slobo" one.
Look, you're proving to be a rather dense subject to engage in a discussion - I have already laid out the reason behind our intervention in Kosovo previously. It's the same reason we police inner city neighborhoods that don't provide any tax revenue - if we don't the blight will spread.
I'm sorry you're siding with the thugs on this one rather than the cops, but ultimately that's your problem, not mine.
Lastly, back to the oil rationale, it's been used to try to delegitimize our involvement from Vietnam to Kosovo to Afghanistan and pretty much everywhere in between at some point. Hell, I could even propose it as the rationale behind the Serbian take over of Eastern Croatia, what with Arkan using the Oilfields in Eastern Slavonia to fuel part of his black market empire during his brief stay there and all, but you know, I won't, because I know better.
And in your case, you should too.
What's this guy talking about? Serbia was a democracy and Milosevic twice elected. It no longer was a democracy when NATO (US) dumped 20 some million dollars into the country to hire malcatents to throw Milosevic out. Even then the votes ousting Milosevic were never counted.
Unlike in Somalia, or even Iraq, the Milosevic regime threatened the stability of Europe and our NATO allies, that is why it was correct for the US to take the lead in rallying NATO forces to end the destabilizing atrocites.
You want to bicker over how many corpses fouled the mass graves. Is there a majic number? Do we go to war over 4001 and but not 4000?
Allowing Milosevic to perform genocide unchecked whould have destabilized Europe and then you would author threads about how Clinton's failure to act in the former Yugoslavia was a traitorous act of cowardice etc.......
You are blinded by a hatred of Clinton so badly that you would side with a murderer just to oppose Clinton's actions against him.
I'm no CLinton fan but to side with Milosevic is siding with a villanous demon.
How could little Bosnia "drag us all along"??? It's the big powers that sucked up little Bosnia. Austria extended its reach past Croatia into Bosnia and then when the Archduke was assassinated while touring his stolen property, Austria took advantage of the opportunity to try to subjugate Serbia too -- they wanted obedient minions in the Balkans. The whole world objected. Don't blame little Bosnia or even little Serbia. The nuts are the greedy big powers. Your grasp of the situation is amazing and ridiculous but maybe this forum will give you a little enlightenment.
Milosevic did not perform genocide and had no plans for genocide. That's a fact. Destabilizing Europe is a catchword used after the fact since it's hard to explain to those who didn't give a damn about the area, the real reasons for the whole mess.
What twaddel, out of all the mass graves the bodies of Serbians were found in three fourths of them. Genocide was going on alright, genocide by Al Queda extremists against Serbians. Of course the "innocent" muslims had nothing what so ever to do with genocide, they merely stood by and applauded.
This is a fallacy. Other than the appeal to WWI nostalgia, there is no evidence whatsoever that the war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia threatened to spread on its own outside the borders of that territory. If you knew the history, it was not the assassination of the Archduke that caused Europe to spiral into WWI - it was the intervention of the great powers. So if we are using WWI as the guide, it is the intervention and not the existing crisis which was the greater threat to stability. The kind of stability we have now, due to the occupation of the area by NATO forces, will be no more lasting than the stability under Tito. What has changed, that you think the area won't slide immediately back into war the moment we pull out the occupation forces?
You want to bicker over how many corpses fouled the mass graves. Is there a majic number? Do we go to war over 4001 and but not 4000?
Is there a magic number for casualties that justifies intervention? I would say no, there is not. If you challenge the existence of that magic number, then you are also challenging the rationale for the war itself, which was largely based on the grossly inflated magnitude of the official estimates of casualties.
Allowing Milosevic to perform genocide unchecked whould have destabilized Europe and then you would author threads about how Clinton's failure to act in the former Yugoslavia was a traitorous act of cowardice etc.......
Milosevic performed genocide? Where? When? How? There is much evil about Milosevic, but genocide is not a substantiable charge. And we had a very good alternative option, which was to support a strong pro-democracy movement in supplanting him - but we deliberately chose to ignore it!
I think you need to study a few topics: Ustashe, the Handzar division, the Turk conquest of Constantinope and Smyrna, and the involvement of Islamic fascism on the side of the Bosnian and Albanian Muslims. Given the historical background and the facts on the ground, the only way to justify Western intervention would be to argue that we should have intervened on the side of the Serbian people.
What I'm showing you is that you don't know squat - you don't get to make it up as you go along, and if you're unable to grasp the implications of the Somalian oil comments, then I suppose, in retrospect, I sholdn't really be all that surprised, should I.
How exactly did he threaten the stability of Europe and the Allies? Your statement is both preposterous and paradoxical, because it is Europe (namely Germany & Austria) that exacerbated a largely local political crisis into a full-blown civil war. Not that the U.S. is completely blameless, but Europe had allowed things to get out of control by recognizing the unilateral and unconstitutional secession of Slovenia and Croatia (the secession of 11 Southern states precipitated the U.S. Civil War - and this is exactly how the Yugoslav civil war started; by a forced and forceful withdrawal of the two republics from the union). They stupidly allowed the external borders of Yugoslavia to be changed, yet stubbornly insisted on preserving its internal boundaries, arbitrarily drawn by a bunch of drunken Commies somewhere in the hills of Bosnia, in the winter of 1943.
You want to bicker over how many corpses fouled the mass graves. Is there a majic number? Do we go to war over 4001 and but not 4000?
Do you go to war over 4001 corpses, but not the millions in Rwanda? Just a question...
Allowing Milosevic to perform genocide...
What genocide? Did I miss something?
I'm no CLinton fan but to side with Milosevic is siding with a villanous demon.
No one here is siding with Miloshevich. You can't see the forest for the trees, my friend.
Physical evidence and the testimony of witnesses establishes Milosevic as a genocidal tyrant. Any other premise is the same as stating the sky is green and the grass is blue.
Europe had allowed things to get out of control by recognizing the unilateral and unconstitutional secession of Slovenia and Croatia (the secession of 11 Southern states precipitated the U.S. Civil War - and this is exactly how the Yugoslav civil war started; by a forced and forceful withdrawal of the two republics from the union
You're speaking with a southerner (Southeast United States)- raised to believe secession is not contrary to the premise and promise of democracy.
Do you go to war over 4001 corpses, but not the millions in Rwanda? Just a question...
I'm sorry- I missed the volume of posts that you authored during the Rawandan massacre where you demanded intervention. Perhaps you can direct me to your efforts elsewhere if they were not posted here. Is there hypocrisy in your smuggness?
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