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

To: James R. Barrett who wrote (10740)	5/31/1999 5:08:00 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 17770

James, Hmmm... well I can't replay the past so who knows. But I'm certainly not fooled the same way you are in believing that it was the NATO bombing that was responsible for dislocating all of these Kosovars. To believe that would be to suggest that our bombing of Belgrade should be resulting in hundreds of thousands of Serb refugees. We can provide another alternative future. Let's say that NATO chose not to bomb and attempted further negotiations. Milosevic would have had PRIME evidence that the West was unwilling to go to war over Kosovo and later on when things cooled down a bit, they would not intervene with any plans on taking Macedonia or repressing Montenegro. But there would still be a cleansing of Kosovo (maybe only a couple of hundred thousand) into the cities so the Serbs could keep a good eye on them, or they would have shipped them out to Albania and Macedonia anyway. Then Milosevic could start instigating actions against Albania for supporting the KLA, which would inevitably bring in Turkish involvement, which would also lead to the Greeks taking part... and so on and so on.... And then somewhere NATO would have to forcefully intervene in a much wider conflaguration. We would still be at square one, but only a year or two later, with a thoroughly confused and disheartened NATO/Europe floundering around trying to put band-aids on a gushing wound. James, we have to bear in mind that a dictatorship thrives on crisis. There ALWAYS has to be a greater threat created in order to justify the civilian population surrendering its freedoms of speech and movement to an authoritarian. Prove to me that Milosevic would not have been driven to generate further crises aimed at preventing the Serb people from becoming complacent (thus weakening his grip of fear over them), and I would grant you things may have turned out better. But I don't think you'll be able to offer any such proof. Milosevic govt requires crisis to sustain its internal repression. Maybe we gave him just the crisis he needed, but I think a showdown was inevitable and thus it is better that we made it a crisis where we dictated our response, and not have it dictated to us post-facto. You cannot simply state with any certainty that the same measure of cleansing would not have occurred had NATO not bombed. Regards, Ron