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

To: jbe who wrote (34167)	4/9/1999 11:21:00 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

A country has a right to kill its own citizens. We have killed ours for various reasons, and Russia never bombed us for doing it. It is my opinion that in International law clear rules make for peaceful times. If we intervened swiftly and surely when Nations attacked one another, but refrained from intervening in civil wars we would save ourselves a lot of headaches. I grant you we might not be able to make super special speeches about how we stand up against ethnic cleansing, and genocide, but since that is all hogwash anyway, I won't miss it.

To: jbe who wrote (34167)	4/9/1999 5:31:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

In each specific case, we have to recognize that the conflict is probably much more complex than that, which requires us to clarify what the situation actually is. That is indeed the hard part, as I tried to emphasize by underscoring the gap between fantasy and reality. One of the more difficult aspects of the notion of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries is the management of national leaders who pose a clear threat to their neighbors, their regions, and their own people. Our beloved Saddam H. and Mr. Milosevic, as current examples, Hitler as perhaps the most obvious. Surely their must be some middle ground between ignoring them while they gather their strength and trying to assassinate them, but I'm not sure what, on a practical level, this would be. In the Balkans, one problem - though I am probably less and expert than you are - seems to be an unshakeable conviction among Serbs that they are the natural heirs of the state formerly known as Yugoslavia, and that they have the right to manage the other ethnic groups of that state as they choose. Those ethnic groups coexisted peacefully with the Serbs under a government that did not give the Serbs unqualified power over them; if they are faced with the prospect of Serb domination, they will resist, particularly if the Serb leadership has Milosevician tendencies. It is possible to conclude that the answer is to reconstruct Yugoslavia and a government that would allow the ethnic groups to exist without giving one power over another, but of course neither we nor anyone else can put that version of humpty-dumpty back together again. Some might conclude that forcing the Serbs to replace Milosevic would help; I am not convinced. He represents a strong, possibly dominant set of Serb opinion, and he or another like him would probably return. My answer is that their is no answer, only a choice among evils with no clear indication of which is lesser. Which is why I hesitate to criticize, though I do think that it would help if the European powers played a proportionally larger role in the action.