Good. More substantial. To tell the truth, I am more concerned about what the next five years will bring about in Russia than I am in the outcome of Balkan War, Act IV, scene III.
I know that I accused you of using simplistic explanations for what is going on in Yugoslavia, but now I'm going to turn around and do the same thing and offer a simplistic explanation of my own. The root of the current hostilities can be traced directly to Josip Bruz Tito's death in 1980. The scramble for power than ensued following his death resulted in the emergence of Slobodan Milosevic as the front runner to lead a post-Tito Yugoslavia. He achieved his position of prominence by rekindling the fires of ethnic hatred that had been suppressed and subjugated to Tito's iron will. An interesting side bar to Milosevic's rise to power is that he has turned against and betrayed every single political ally he's had on his rise to the top. At each level of power he has used these allies and then discarded them, either dimissing them from power or having them imprisoned.. He currently wields virtually autocratic power in Yugoslavia with the only other person with any true influence being his bizarre, pseudo-mystic, Orthodox/Wiccan priestess, alleged murderess wife, Mirjana Markovic. His grown daughter and son use Yugoslavia as their personal fiefdom, indulging whatever whims they want. The two are referred to as the Milosevic Mafia and to cross them or deny them what they want is reported to be very dangerous.
If you can find a copy or access it on the internet, there is a very revealing book, published in 1995, based on the diary of Borislav Jovic. (who has since mysteriously disappeared from public). Jonic was the president of Yugoslavia until shortly after the Milosevic bartered conflicts with Croatia and Bosnia started.. Jonic unabashedly describes how he abetted Milosevic in his orchestrations to bring about ethnic conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia and how they arranged so that matters would be decided in Serbian favor by doing such things as removing all Yugoslav soldiers who were not Serbs from Bosnia and replacing them with Serbs who had been stationed in Serbia. In this way, about 90,000 Serb soldiers remained in Bosnia, ostensibly neutral but actually under the command of Bosnia Serb leadership with genocidal results.
That's much the same pattern as Milosevic has been orchestrating in Kosovo for several years now. A military force, supposedly for the security of all Kosovar citizens but in truth, rabidly anti-Muslim and pro-Serb. The birth of the Muslim KLA is a direct result of Milosevic's disenfrachisement of the Muslim Kosovars and his instigation of a state sponsored apartheid to favor the Serb minority in Kosovo.
I did say I was going to make this a simplistic explanation, didn't I? Sorry, here goes. The current crisis in Yugoslavia can be laid at the feet of Slobodan Milosevic. More so than any other single person since Hitler, or perhaps Stalin, he is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, his own countrymen, all so that he can wield power for power's sake. All other considerations aside, he should be stopped and as much as possible, the damage he has done, reversed. |
