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VetLegion
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Player1, if info in your profile is correct, we're about the same age. Milosevic rose to power when I was too young to follow politics, but it is my understanding that he did so on a wave of Serb nationalism.
Rallies with 1 million people attending and speeches he held in Kosovo, about how "nobody is going to beat Serbs" ... stuff like that.
Don't kid me about veto rights. Milosevic didn't revoke authonomy because of some veto rights. He did it because he was a nationalist and expansionist. He was also much worse.
About Albanians migrating and Kosovo. If you read the thread you could have seen me and paiktis discussing it. Indeed Kosovo was the most undeveloped region in former Yugoslavia.
However I would like to see how much of the funds that went into developing it came from Serbia and how much from Slovenia and Croatia. I am of opinion that everyone payed a share.
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player1
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Belgrade, YU
Sep 2001
time: 06:34
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quote:
Originally posted by VetLegion
Ned, take into account that I am biased, I am a Croatian from Zagreb, Croatia. I try to keep a cool head though.
Pozdrav player1, drago mi je da se citamo na ovom odlicnom forumu  |
Zdravo
Well, it's understandable that we don't agree on some points.
We are after all, from countries which were in war after all, and have different views on same situation.
quote:
Oerdin:
That's incorrect. The Albanians have been the majority since atleast 1945. A higher birth rate combined with an outflow of Serbs who were going from backwards Kosovo into more developed parts of Yugoslavia accounted for most of the increase though there was a slight amount of immigration from Albania. After 1948 Tito sealed the border and immigration from Albania went almost to zero. |
Hmm...
As far as I know, there were immigrants later from communist Albaina to Kosovo.
Also, I remember that many Serbian pre WWII colonist, were not allowed to return to Kosovo.
I don't kow, but maybe that was a way for Tito to satisfy Albanian population there.
quote:
Originally posted by VetLegion
Rallies with 1 million people attending and speeches he held in Kosovo, about how "nobody is going to beat Serbs" ... stuff like that. |
Nationalism, as a mean to the end, would never work if there were not some injusices to feed on.
Serbs did have some problems there at late 80's, and Milosevic used that to gain power and support.
"nobody is going to beat Serbs" was a response on a way how albainas treted Serbs
[QUOTE] Originally posted by VetLegion However I would like to see how much of the funds that went into developing it came from Serbia and how much from Slovenia and Croatia. I am of opinion that everyone payed a share. [QUOTE]
But, since Kosovo was (or is?) Serbian region is payed the most.
[QUOTE] [SIZE=1]Don't kid me about veto rights. Milosevic didn't revoke authonomy because of some veto rights. He did it because he was a nationalist and expansionist. He was also much worse.[QUOTE]
Reminds me of some other leaders in the region.
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VetLegion
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I wouldn't go too deep into how Kosovo was in the late 80's since I don't know much about it and I admit so.
Player1 what do you think should be done with Kosovo?
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Cort Haus
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London
Apr 2002
time: 05:34
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quote:
Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
I suppose that mass graves don't count. |
There were none of the mass-slaughter type graves being invoked found in Kosovo, where "mass grave" was described as a grave with more than one body in it.
2108 bodies were exhumed from the 98-99 period in the main investigation with a few hundred more found later - Serb and Albanian, civilian and military. Over a thousand were killed before the bombing, mainly by the KLA, and including many pro-Jugo Albanians - who were the first to die.
The Trepca mines mass-graves, freezer-trucks in the Danube, and more have all been debunked as BS stories justify to NATO actions.
What NATO did, but the Western Media can never admit to because of their complicity is this: They stoked, fuelled, propagandised for, and provided an air force for KLA facist terrorists in their drive to set up an ethnically pure, gangster statelet.
I'll dig out the quote from the USA's own general at camp Bondsteel, who video'd the attacks on his own KFOR troops and post it. Having a US official finally tell the truth about Kosovo after 5 years of deception and coverup is amazing. Watch this space ....
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Cort Haus
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London
Apr 2002
time: 05:34
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quote:
Originally posted by VetLegion
Oh yeah, paiktis you forgot to mention Serbs burnt the mosques in Belgrade and Nis. |
... and Muslims burned orthodox churches in Bosnia. These were individual criminal acts by football hooligans in Belgrade and their equivalents in Bosnia. Both will be dealt with by the authorities and steps taked to protect the religious sites. What happened in Kosovo was completely different, and no parallel exists. The Albanian Nationalist leadership in Kosovo refused to condem the attacks on non-Albanians, showing themselves to be the instigators of the terror themselves.
UNMIK, NATO, EU and even US officials are now unambiguously clear that this was both a co-ordinated act of ethnic cleansing and an attack on the UN and NATO. They also know who did it.
Don't worry, though. The perpetrators will not be punished. They never are. 300,000 non-Albanians ethnically cleansed from a land under NATO/UN protection, hundreds of murders and hundreds of destroyed churches over five years- all under NATO's watch and NOT A SINGLE CONVICTION.
KosovA's future is assured. The violence will be rewarded, and independence will come, no doubt whatsoever. It's what NATO are there for.
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VetLegion
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quote:
A thing you should know is that your behaviour is despised by the rest of us. And no one else is willing to join in your ridiculous game of each blaming the other. You are all exactly and precisely as despicable as each other. |
EST, you are being offensive.
The volatile situation as it is in the Balkans nowadays can not, and should not among reasonable persons, be justified by history or condoned because of it.
It is however a result of historical processes and not of a case of the average Balkan denizen being more violent or xenophobic than the average English gentleman.
In fact, Ireland breaking up with UK was a very similar situation to what is going on here. It happened through a lot of blood, and if you were not physically separated but had a contended border instead, it is concievable that there would have been a lot more. That was less than a century ago.
I could not care less about you despising me. But if you think you are any better than me, or that Britons are in any way better than Croats, I assure you it is not supported by fact. It is, actually, a product of your imagination.
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BeBro
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of the Krauts
Mar 2000
time: 06:34
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quote:
Originally posted by Cort Haus
The Nazi's themselves were horrified at the brutality of their own allies in WW2 Yugoslavia. Strangely, Hitler's allies were the same sides that NATO supported - with not only the might of 19 countires, but the biggest propaganda barrage ever seen. Hitler would be delighted with the current arrangements in the Balkans, with Serbia nearly destroyed as nation, Jews expelled, and nationalist independence for Croatia and Kosovo effectively assured. |
That is a strange analogy. If there are serious forces for an independence of the parts of ex-Yugoslavia (which always remained more a construct, unlike historical grown nation-states), would you rather advocate they should be oppressed, just to hold Yugoslavia at all costs - against the will of large parts of the non-Serbian people? That is exactly what the Serbs tried in Croatia and Bosnia before, not to mention the little dirty details, although warcrimes like ethnic cleansing were done without doubt by all sides.
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Arrian
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Kneel before Grog!
Jul 2001
time: 00:34
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I just came across this editorial in the Toronto Star. It's really about the UN, but it touches on both Kosovo and Iraq.
quote:
A glass house full of cracks
Battered on many fronts, the United Nations must clean up its own act before throwing stones at the United States
RICHARD GWYN
The attacks on coalition soldiers left 80 wounded and, among citizens, the death toll reached 28, with some 900 injured. The inter-religious and inter-ethnic riots resulted in damage to 30 mosques and churches while almost 300 houses were destroyed.
All of this wasn't happening in Iraq, though. It was happening in Kosovo. And the blame for the killings and violence rests not with the United States but with those proper multilateral institutions, the United Nations and NATO.
While the Americans have been trying to get Iraq turned around in the right direction for only a year, the U.N. and Atlantic alliance have been at work in the much smaller society of Kosovo for almost five years now.
Kosovo's economy, though, is probably weaker than Iraq's despite the ongoing insurgency in the Middle Eastern country. Kosovo's only successful "industries" (not counting those working for one or other of the many international agencies there) are prostitution, drug smuggling, money-laundering, illegal immigrant smuggling and car theft.
The only alternative to a unipolar world that revolves around the U.S. is a multipolar one revolving around the U.N., with, from time to time, international organizations such as NATO working jointly with the U.N.
This multipolar world has a political legitimacy that no U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" can ever match, even remotely. It combines the efforts and talents of all kinds of national partners.
That's the theory, and it's a good one. But does it actually work in practice? Can a multipolar world, in other words, actually make the world a better place?
In all kinds of small and practical, and often unnoticed ways, the U.N. and its agencies often do good work. But often, far too often, they fail abysmally.
And, as is really disturbing, the root cause is often the defining characteristic of multilateral projects. This is, that they involve many partners so that no one is responsible nor can be blamed— in contrast to all the contemporary never-ending barrage of criticism of the U.S. and of President George W. Bush. (Not that most of that isn't merited).
For quite a while now, the U.N. has escaped criticism, not least because so many commentators were anxious to shore up its credibility as a counterweight to the overweening power of the U.S.
Suddenly, the U.N. is in the spotlight. And it isn't a pretty sight.
Kosovo: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervened in Kosovo to end ethnic cleansing. Under U.N. rule, the cleansing has continued without interruption, except that yesterday's villains and victims, Serbs and Kosovo Albanians, have changed places with the Albanians now torching Serb houses and driving them out of the province.
Oil scandal: Far and away the most serious of the U.N.'s present troubles. While U.N. sanctions were in effect on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, many commentators blamed the organization for the high death toll there because of the lack of goods and medicines.
It turns out that the cause of many of these deaths was because the food was often bad and the drugs and medical equipment substandard. This, in turn, was because the supplier companies, most of them French and Russian, were paying Saddam a commission and reducing the quality of their goods.
At least $5 billion in kickbacks was creamed off the top of the revenues Iraq received from U.N.-approved sales of its oil.
The U.N. now claims it had no idea of this year-by-year scandal. One reason is that its own officials may have been involved. The program's director, Benon Sevan, has made accusations. The son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was a senior executive of the companies active in the scheme.
Insecure security: The principal cause of the terrible bomb explosion at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last year that killed 22 and forced the U.N. to leave the country, was, it turns out, the U.N. itself.
A scathing report published this week concluded that almost no security measures were implemented, not even blast-resistant film over the windows to prevent injuries caused by flying glass. Several senior U.N. officials have either resigned or been demoted.
And, this week, the U.N. was reminded of the worst single failure of its history. This was the 10th anniversary of the genocidal massacre in Rwanda that took some 800,000 lives because no U.N. peacekeepers were sent in to keep order.
This doesn't make the U.N. unfit to replace the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" to police the world or to push and pull and tug failed states toward reconstruction and even toward democracy.
But if the U.N. and others want the U.S. to do less on its own, they are going to have to do far, far better while doing it multilaterally.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Gwyn's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. |
-Arrian
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Cort Haus
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London
Apr 2002
time: 05:34
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quote:
Originally posted by VetLegion
US and Europe imposed a weapons embargo on the region when the conflics began.
A question for you: did the embargo help:
a) Serbs, in control of Yugoslavian army, at the time third strongest army in Europe by some, or
b) virtually unarmed Slovenians, Croats and Bosniaks, who had only what their police was left with? |
I was referring to the Kosovo campaign, rather than the break-up 10 years earlier, so I don't know what you mean about timelines, but since you mentioned it ...
First, the only people killed in the Slovenian secession were a handful of Jugo border-guards, so that can't really be called a war.
Second, the embargo was only for show, and the secessionists had the backing of the West from the off. Arms were covertly flooding in. 'Lift and Strike' became the unofficial policy. Saudi Arabia and Iran sent their ex-Afghan Muhajedeen (with US approval). In '95 The US (via MPRI) backed and trained Operation Storm in Krajina (250,000 expulsions). Britain also delivered arms to secessionists via Slovenia. Sure, maybe in '91 the JNA had the lion's share of available fire power, but I don't believe their opponents were short-stocked for long.
My bottom-line position is that Western intervention excacerbated, rather than alleviated the conflict. War might even have been averted in Bosnia had Warren Zimmerman not encouraged Izetbegovic to hold out for more.
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23-03-2004 01:15
with about as much sovereignity as they can have in this age of globalization (read - none).
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