The underlying theory here, discounting the strange thought processes of international lawyers, is that by focusing on Milosevic's guilt, the Serb public will be motivated to distance itself from Milosevic. This view contains several major fallacies. First, the Serbian people do not believe that they or their government have committed crimes against humanity. Their view, one that is very sincerely held and for which some evidence is provided, is that the claims of war crimes have been manufactured by NATO powers as a justification for attacking Serbia.
Overall an interesting and well written article. Was that from Stratfor?
But I disagree with the above paragraph.
One of the tenets of the bombing has been to avoid civilian casualties (that will not likely change), but also to incrementalize the amount of disruption and inconvenience that the Serbian people have had to suffer. For weeks they continued to have power and all of the niceties that go with that utility, like fresh water and sewage. They have lost it and will likely face continuing interuption of service so long as Milosevic is in power.
Now the Serbian news might like to lead us to accept that the Serbs don't believe that there forces have committed atrocities and that they don't understand why we're bombing them over those nasty, ungrateful, Kosovar Albanians.
But they do understand the logic of War Crimes and how that pertains to Milosevic and his gov't, and not necessarily to them as a people.
They can blame Milo for their problems and he can now become the focus of how to end the crisis and get back to some semblance of normality.
And they should blame Milo as I've stated before. He led them down this path, and utilized the overwhelming military power of the army Tito created to subjugate and terrorize the other ethnicities.
We haven't been successful in forcing Milo to terms thus far, so now it is an issue of making it CRYSTAL CLEAR that NATO has no beef with the Serbs, but with Milo. Get rid of Milo and the bombing will be over and the electricity will come back on.
Risky, but better than being forced to invade.
Regards,
Ron |
