peacekeepers and partition

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. rosserjb at jmu.edu
Thu Apr 29 10:09:00 PDT 1999


More civilian dead and more massacres, ugh, and now Vuk Draskovic is out in Belgrade for advocating a UN peacekeeping force.

Which gets us back to Yoshie's nice sounding peace proposal allegedly issued by Belgrade. Well, yesterday the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry made it clear that it will only accept unarmed civilian "peacekeepers' and that NATO troops must withdraw from the border area, although Chernomyrdin claims they will accept an armed peacekeeping force. We shall see.

With respect to all the talk about partition, well, maybe that will still happen, but it will be extremely difficult and the sort of vague talk about a northern zone for the Serbs (with their "monuments") and a southern zone for the Albanians remains ridiculous. Presumably Albanian zones would be centered on where there are still Albanians and where they might even have local control. Well, reports indicate that the KLA zones of control are not fixed and keep moving around, They have been strongest in Drenica in the northwest and also in the northeast and in the far west not far from the Serbian "Jerusalem" of Pec, which has been ethnically cleansed. Indeed all the big cities (such as they are) have been largely cleansed of Albanians, except for those still hiding in basements, as has most of the south. Any partition is either going to be an artificial creation (NATO ground forces conquer a section of Kosovo-Metohija and declare it an Albanian enclave) or a bizarrely shaped entity without cities.

BTW, Dennis Redmond now has an ally. Right-wing Republican Senatro Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania has just declared that the US is the "slave" of the Europeans, although he was specifically referring to dealing with the refugee situation. Barkley Rosser



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