truedog,
I was distracted and didn't give you a proper response to your post.
We picked Kosovo because the Dayton Accords were threatened by a potential blow-up in Kosovo. Milo had made pledges that he would work out a political compromise with the Kosovars and when he reneged on that, the KLA became more of a force as the people saw fewer alternatives.
As for a wet team doing the "dirty deed", political assasination has been forsaken via executive order. (too many people worried about contracts going out on every world leader around, including ours). Yes, you are reading too many spy novels. It just doesn't work that way, no matter how much some of us would like it too.
Kosovo is more than a religious war. One of the reasons Serbs moved out of Kosovo and into Montenegro (the first and original Serb kingdom, btw) is because the region is economically defunct, isolated from any major merchant area, with little in the way of natural resources except for coal and lead (some gold).
But most of all, Milo made Kosovo the center of his nationalist play for power. Communism fell apart and all Milo had left was the nationalist card. I've read where he spent several years just before and after his election promoting Serb nationalism, exploiting any tragedy involving an Albanian killing a Serb as a moment of nationalist hatred and retaliation.
There is one example that I saw recently repeated in the Washington Post(Times?) where they quoted a New York Times reports on how an Kosovar Albanian conscript went mad and killed a number of people including a Serb soldier. Milo and his cronies organized a mass funeral for this Serb victim in which over 10,000 people attended and played it like the attack had been targeted specifically as an anti-Serb attack by a ethnic Albanian.
Unfortunately, it was never reported (except by Tim Judah, London Times Balkan reporter) that only one Serb had been killed and the other soldiers who had died were of completely different ethnicities, including an Albanian...
This is one example of how Milo WANTED to create Serb nationalism, wanted to create and foster the concept of a Greater Serbia, and place Serbia in a position to dominate the other provinces and the rest of the Balkans.
The problem with Nationalism is that it knows no boundaries. Once a people is fired up with their "uniqueness", they begin to think others are inferior. It is what partially happened in Nazi Germany, when all it would have taken would have been a show of force by France and Britain in the Rhineland to make Hitler think twice (at least for awhile).
Regards,
Ron |
