Saturday 8 April 2006

Slobodan Milosevic

A nasty man with a nasty wife.
That said, why did the neocons (many of them still Democrats -- they switched parties because even Clinton was not sufficiently enthusiastic in pursuing their Balkan agenda) hate him while loving Alija Izetbegovic, who was practically a Wahhibist (indeed, he was honoured and decorated by the House of Saud), and who was an erstwhile recruitment sergeant for the SS, with which the Bosnian Muslims had enthusiastically collaborated? He was one of the very few people to whom the currently modish word "Islamofascist" was properly applicable. Likewise, the neocon (and Clinton) darlings of the Kosovo Liberation Army insisted that their shirts be black, in deference to their fathers' and grandfathers' struggle in their 12,000-strong division of the Waffen SS. Yet aren't many of the neocons Jewish? And wasn't (indeed, isn't) Madeline Albright? It is all very strange.
Yugoslavia was a multinational state not unlike the United Kingdom (oh, that it had retained its monarchy!), except that at least three of the main ethnic groups (Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims) were, at least by the early 1990s, more difficult to tell apart than are the constituent nations of the UK, and certainly much more so than is the case in, say, Belgium, or Switzerland. But, it seems to me, tiny states obsessed with "ethnic purity" (a concept as ridiculous in the Balkans as in these islands) were more useful to international capital; so Yugoslavia simply had to go.
Milosevic was not concerned with a "Greater Serbia", but with preserving Yugoslavia: it is not clear how much, if any, control he had over Mladic or Karadzic; nor have the wrongdoings of others been given anything like the coverage that they deserve.
Kosovo is now run by the Mafia (with its political connections in the US and in Berlusconi's Italy, of course), while the original order for the (multiethnic) Yugoslav Army to fight the Slovenian and Croatian separatists was given by an ethnic Croat (the then Federal Prime Minister, Ante Markovic), and the expulsion of the Serbs from Croatia was the worst case of "ethnic cleansing" in the whole conflict, which itself derived from German recognition of Croatian and Slovenian UDI. There could have been no such recognition if Britain or France had insisted that there be none, but John Major's price was Britain's exemption from the Maastricht Social Chapter. While I am the first to believe that such things should be enacted by our own Parliament (o else there is no point to the Labour Movement), this does seem rather a high price to pay, or rather, to cause to be paid by other people.

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