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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (86877)	10/31/2000 1:55:36 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Joan, I'm not familiar with Kaplan's work in general, but yes, that article did come off like a travel writer posing as an analyst. I got the feeling he maybe came off a bit unbalanced mostly because he traveled in areas that were relatively safe to travel in and talked to people that were safe to talk to. You'd have to be pretty courageous to attempt to travel to Chechnya these days. You are right, of course, that it's pretty presumptuous to lecture on ethnic conflicts and then talk to just one side. Did you see Kaplan's article in the Sept. Atlantic? "The Lawless Frontier", theatlantic.com ? I though it was better than the Georgia article, it at least made an attempt to cover all the tribal/ethnic bases. I was always vaguely wary of Pakistan, dating back to Henry Kissinger's secret China mission through there while yet another ethnic massacre was ongoing. Reading that article made me wonder what could hold it together, it almost sounds like another Yugoslavia. Speaking of which, I noticed a new Timothy Garton Ash book reviewed in the Sunday NYT. I've read him occasionally, he seems a bit deeper than Kaplan. I'd guess you're familiar with his writing. He seems to have a better handle on ethnic conflicts. A little excerpt from the review: In its southeastern Balkan corner, Europe has already had its share of cataclysms in the past decade. Garton Ash backs into the story in the strangest of ways, with an account of the expulsion of the Serbs by a resurgent Croatian Army in 1995. This is a bit like beginning an account of World War II with the story of those Sudeten Germans ethnically cleansed after 1945. He refers to this expulsion more than once as ''the biggest single exodus'' of the Bosnian war. In fact, that dubious accolade belongs to the more than 750,000 Muslims driven out by the Serbs as they swept through Bosnia in the first months of the war in 1992. This exodus was also the result of one devastating, coordinated sweep. Yet the Serbian concentration camps through which many of the Muslims were processed merit not a mention. This lacuna is doubly strange because Garton Ash gets so much right. ''Hitler,'' he writes, ''should have been stopped when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936; Milosevic at the siege of Vukovar in 1991.'' Indeed. And his critique of the no-body-bags approach of Bill Clinton and the Pentagon in Bosnia and later Kosovo is superb: ''It is a perverted moral code that will allow a million innocent civilians of another race to be made destitute because you are not prepared to risk the life of a single professional soldier of your own.'' As Garton Ash explains, thousands of ethnic Albanian lives were sacrificed in 1999 because there was no readiness to accompany the NATO bombardment of Kosovo with the deployment of a ground force that could stop the marauding Serbian killers. Years before that, the dismemberment of Bosnia went as far as it did because of similar hesitations. For President Clinton to claim Bosnia as a success story, as he has often done since 1995, is simply extraordinary. Garton Ash now sees little alternative to allowing ethnic separation to be completed in the Balkans, a process that he hopes will eventually open the way for their reintegration. This, he suggests, is the European way; to fight it is to try ''to freeze history.'' http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/29/reviews/001029.29cohent.html Cheers, Dan.