Posted on 08/31/2005 3:27:34 PM PDT by mark502inf
The Serbian mistake of 1918, when the victorious kingdom gambled on [establishing] Yugoslavia, rather than consolidating a compact state of Serbia, continues to haunt Belgrade.
Territory governed from Belgrade continues to shrink. Next year, Montenegro can call a referendum to decide whether to secede. -snip-
Montenegro is not alone in contemplating exit. Negotiations are likely to begin this year on the status of Kosovo, formally part of Serbia, in reality a ward of the international community, and in the minds of almost all its ethnic Albanian citizens a putative independent state.
What goes around comes around. Kosovo was the launching pad for the crazed nationalism engineered by Milosevic as Yugoslavia began to crumble. Now it will, in all likelihood, be the last piece of Serbia to go ... -snip-
The problem, however, is that Serbia, ever quick to denounce ethnic Albanian "terrorism" in Kosovo, has scarcely begun to confront the crimes it committed on a vast scale in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
A video of Serbs killing Muslims at Srebrenica, shown in June, provoked a shock here. That was salutary. It was also a terrible indictment of the degree of Serbian ignorance ...
-snip- ... progress toward EU membership will not occur until two chief protagonists of Serbian violence, General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, are handed over to the international tribunal. ...
Within the army, younger officers, with an eye on potential NATO membership, favor Mladic's handover. But older officers cannot accept this. "They say they will never accept the arrest of a man with whom they fought in Bosnia," ...
That's interesting. One of Serbia's many fictions is that the Yugoslav Army never fought in Bosnia and the campaign there had nothing to do with Belgrade. Nonsense, of course, but Serbia remains ambivalent about reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
Not even Hoplite can save you on this one boy.
IMO, Serbia has nothing to apologize for until the thousands of murdered Serbs have been recognized as victims and honoured as such. The causes of the Wars for Yugoslav Succession lie in the early 1940s as much as they do in the late 1980s.
Bob, if the US troops go in and remove every latino in the local government and replace them with Anglos from out of state, dynamite their churches, close the schools, shut down the major businesses, surround the towns with armored vehicles & then shell them or shoot a few civilans before moving in and giving the populace 30 minutes to start walking to the Mexican border--to include those who've lived there for generations, then murder those who don't move fast enough; then yes, I'll condemn US troops. And until that starts happening, your analogy is distinctly imperfect.
You've just described to the very last detail the behaviour of the Croatian state in 1991. I don't know if that was your intetion, though...
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