I'm suprised I didn't find any threads on the most recent debacle in Kosovo considering all the chaos that's been unleashed over there. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040324/ap_on_re_eu/kosovo_charred_churches_1 Nothing like a rampage of violence that destroys dozens of churches, many of them 500-600 years old. There appears to be some belief that the destruction was the result of planning and not just random targets: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040324/wl_afp/serbia_kosovo_unrest_040324074826
There's no oil, so who cares? You know, when cultural monuments of any stripe is destroyed, all humanity loses.
We had one last week and it degenerated fast. https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=101478&page=1&pp=15 It's a damn shame that NATO didn't send in ground troops until after the damage was done.
All i gotta say is that the Ethnic Albanians have done most of the accusations this round. They have accused the serbs, who are already living in fear and isolation of murdering 2 kids, whom drowned after being presuambly chased by vicious dogs of the serbs.... It was push comes to shove scenario, and i think right now over 75 people died... Tragic...NATO tragic.
"canadians don't care about upper slobia attacking lower slimea." don cherry, cbc sports that sums up most people's feelings about east auropean tribal conflicts. i actually saw a documentary about the last kosovo war on sundance recently. it was a hungarian production featuring interviews with children who had lost one or both of their parents. yada yada. they all hate each other. whatever.
It "amuses" me that everybody takes such a nonchalant attitude towards this. Everybody seemed mighty pissed off when they though it was Serbs doing it to Albanians. Now all of a sudden this is an insignificant conflict? Our country went to war on behalf of the same people committing these atrocities just a few years ago.
by the time the west did anything about "the former yugoslovia," the srbs had murdered, raped, ethinially cleansed etc., croatia, slovenia, bosnia-herzegovina. it took about 7 years of raping and pillaging before anyone took any action against the serbs.
The point is that this stuff is happening under the nose of UN troops. I'd rather them just say "F*** these people, we don't care" than have all this false concern. If they aren't going to protect people, why are they there?
Less the blaming.. it was a 3 ring cirucs between all the groups. Croatian killing Bosnians, Bonsians killing serbs, serbs killing bosnian, albanians killing bosnians, macedonians killing albanians, albanians killing macedonians and so on... Fact is, that the war is finished and borders are met. Except for the fact that in a place where a conflict took place and was finished...ethnic minorities are being threatened. The reaosn why the U.S and the west should open its eyes is that the same resistant group that allied itself with the U.S, also allied itself with Al Qaida... I think the issue is big, but should not go or blow out to proportion. It is a simple push comes to shove scenario.... I just hope both sides can solve there differences...and less the blood shed!
Great question. NATO and the Western governments never seemed to have a good answer in Bosnia, and they obviously still don't in Kosovo. Going in half-assed, looking for a cheap way to acheive peace without justice doesn't work. Seems like everybody on this thread gets it--why not some people in charge? Once again, the West tried to maintain some theoretically neutral status quo that let the underlying tensions fester. Leaving the KLA in charge of the place seems to have been an even dumber idea than it seemed at the time.
do you object to people shrugging off massacres in africa, for example on the basis that it is just blacks wasting other blacks? actually, most people think that way, so you are just keping it real, to be honest.
There was what appeared to be a lucid seeming op-ed piece in today's Boston Globe about Kosovo. http://www.uexpress.com/georgieannegeyer/ I don't know enough about Geyer to have a complete conclusion on her positions, but the Universal Press Syndicate classifies her as one of their conservatives. The gist of her opinion in this piece is: That is, she regards NATO as having done too little beyond squelching the original violence. NATO troops in Kosovo did nothing (of course) about the Albanians there with sleezy motives, and the recent violence appears to have been planned and carried out by such people. I would hope that the relatively small number of posts here is as much a reflection of ignorance as of apathy. I am interested in what happens in the Balkans, but I don't feel as though I know enough about the situation as it stands now to make strong statements.
Ignorance and apathy for me. But yeah, it does sound like very little has been done in the area. Well, except for the stopping of mass killings and ethnic cleansing. But besides that, NATO has really done squat, don't ya think? It seemed that the US drove for intervention, but then left it up to Europe to sort out the future in their backyard. Which they really haven't done much of for good or bad reasons. But leaving things in an ethnically tense status quo with some murders per year is probably as good as it might get in the region until people start learning how to live together.
That's sort of true. Initially Yugoslavia was suposed to be a test for Europe to work together at the end of the cold war. It was called a "European problem for Europeans". In otherwords, "Dear USA, Let us show our stuff. Love, France and Germany". However they were not able to handle the Serb army and needed US help. The US did not want to get involved and even for all the lofty talk of a "humanitarian mission" and such it was really a case where the US had to prevent European embarisment. In fact at one point the Europeans had left themselves without a retreat plan and could have been trapped by the Serb army without even an avenue for resupply. Here is a quote, It was quite a mess.
Geyer - After the Dayton Accords of 1995, all the linked situations in the Balkans were frozen, not resolved. I don't agree. Slovenia and Croatia are independent nation states, have finally shed being subjected to outside rule, whether by Austrian, Italy, Germany or a Serb-dominated Yugoslavian ideal, and are for the foreseeable future insulated from outside attack by others with some historical claim to land or conquest. This should not be underestimated. Macedonia and Bosnia are more tenuously established and have the difficulty of piecing together multi-ethnic and multi-religious nations. Montenegro is a bit dicier being part of Serbia but having an internal independence movement. Europe and NATO should do whatever it can to hold these situations together. Serbia proper (in modern terms) is in a similar position as Croatia, being freed from Milosovic. The unique problem of Kosovo, or "old Serbia" is that the land is almost mythically important in Serbian history and lore, it is boundary-wise part of Serbia, the current population is 90% Albanian, and the next-door neighbor Albania is in a dreadful state. Neither the multi-ethnic nation or province, nor a ethnically homogenous nation state model seem to work in the case of Kosovo. If anyone has any doubts on the importance of this piece of land to Serbs, google "Kosovo Polje 1389". Here's one vote against apathy on the Balkans.
That's probably a big part of the problem. Several million individuals being treated as "a test" and not human beings.
The problem with the United Nations in the Balkans was they never seemed willing to enforce the peace. The term "Peacekeeping" only works when their is a peace to keepin the first place. Most missions reqiure a form of "Peace Enforcement" which needs the use of lethal force to keep the peace. The UN also has the problem that it's troops are their largely because the governments involved get money for each troop they send on these duties. When NATO troops came into the Balkans, they came with the knowledge of what they were doing and the means to carry it out. The question being asked in NATO countries now is "Do we still need troops in the Balkans"?
an only marginally related link about the killing of Serbian soccer official http://www.foxsportsworld.com/content/view?contentId=2269446
Back up. When EU troops came in, they failed. When US troops (under NATO) came in, they were criticized for acting too tough, for having too much of a "presence" yet they succeeded. To the topic on the other thread about "Where are the real liberals" it's important to remember that the US did not want to get involved, when it did initially it was just with air support and we did not put in ground troops until their was a negotiated peace. It was a very, very risk adverse intervention on the US's part.