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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cody andre who wrote (15355)	11/23/1999 7:34:00 AM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 17770

From Wall Street Journal editorial Contains a lot of BS but some true statements Greek Tragedy We wonder whether Bill Clinton was nostalgic for his Vietnam protest days when he was greeted with riots during his visit to Greece. Just as the President was arriving, a police cordon turned back hooded protesters around the U.S. embassy; protesters responded by firebombing banks and businesses. Mr. Clinton later offered a statement "acknowledging" America's failure "to support democracy" during the 1967-1974 rule of the Greek junta. He might instead have spoken some undiplomatic truths by acknowledging Turkey for finally helping Greece to get rid of the junta by resisting when it tried to annex Cyprus. A large and vocal section of Greek opinion, it seems, remains out of step with the values that today define the West. In fairness, it is a climate that pre-dates the installation of Prime Minister Costas Simitis, who displayed some courage in even inviting Mr. Clinton--widely unpopular in Greece for leading NATO into the war against Slobodan Milosevic. Mr. Simitis, a Socialist of Blairite bent, has used his almost four years in office to try to undo the vast damage done to his country during the long tenure of his far-left, nationalist-minded predecessor, Andreas Papandreou, who did nothing to change Greece's status as the poorest member of the European Union. The Prime Minister's mistake was to allow the momentum of the protests to build, perhaps even to imagine they might be turned to diplomatic advantage. The underlying difficulty is that no amount of diplomacy can gloss over the very real problems that divide Greece from its ostensible allies in the West. Greece is the only country on the continent, for example, in which indigenous terrorist cells still operate; the Greek government has never succeeded in arresting a single member of the notorious November 17 gang. There is also a long record of giving aid and comfort to foreign terrorists, such as the now-captured Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. These attitudes toward terrorism, moreover, of are of a piece with Greek attitudes toward their Balkan neighbors. Though Mr. Simitis signed on to NATO's actions in Kosovo, Greek sentiment has looked with favor on Milosevic's program of a "Greater Serbia" at the expense of the Bosnians, Croats and Kosovars. Greece has also served as a kind of blockade runner for Serbia, helping it for years to evade the U.N. embargo. In part this has to do with Greece and Serbia's shared Orthodox faith. Traditional Greek hostility toward Albanians also played a role, as did a pattern of reflexive anti-Americanism, heavily abetted by Greece's still powerful (and largely unreconstructed) Communist Party. Mr. Simitis has not, to his credit, fallen prey to these prejudices. His decision to stand with NATO in Kosovo was particularly commendable given that he faces an election next year in which the issue will surely be used against him. He has also moved to improve relations with Turkey, wisely judging that the grudge match between the two countries serves neither of their interests. Mr. Simitis recently accepted in principle Turkey's bid for pre-accession status to the EU, no small departure for a country whose entire foreign policy seemed until recently exclusively directed at punishing its neighbor. The challenge now for Mr. Simitis is to move his country further away from the nationalist and statist shibboleths that still have the power to bring thousands of protesters into the streets. To do so, he'll have to show ordinary Greeks that they have more to gain from closer political and economic integration with the rest of the world than from a politics of score-settling. That task was not much advanced by events last week.