>If census figures suggest 50,000 Serbs were expelled
>from Kosmet, then why believe some Serb official who
>claims that 250,000 were? Please. A lot of his other
>numbers are off. And, frankly, I have no sympathy
>whatsoever for this "heart of Serbia" argument, which
>is just an excuse for all kinds of atrocities. Shall we excuse
>Israeli atrocities against Palestinians because Jerusalem
>is the "heart of the Jews"?
Not at all. Once again you're assuming that because I forward something I approve of it. My personal position is that no side has a monopoly on either vice or virtue in the Balkans. Robert Fisk is an excellent reporter who's done a lot of fine work over the years, including documenting Israeli and American abuse of Arabs. It's always worth reading and taking seriously what he's got to say. I have little sympathy for nationalism of any kind, and one of the many tragedies of the Yugoslav disaster has been the embrace of a particularly virulent nationalism - *all around* - and the death of any internationalist ideal. For all its many faults, there was something positive to the idea of a multinational Yugoslavia, no?
Doug