KLA takes charge

[Seth Ackerman]

Nathan wrote:

> >You can't generalize about these conflicts: some are truly
> >one-sided pogroms; others are tit-for-tat grudge matches that go on for
> >1,000 years. The Kosovo conflict is of the latter category.
> 
> 
> Well, in Hebron and a number of other towns in the Palestinian Mandate in
> the 20s and 30s, Palestinians murdered Jews.  We can also point to other
> "tit-for-tat" between the communities over the years throughout the
> centuries in the Islamic world (with more tats against the Jews in fact.)
>     Yet I find no justification for the Israeli expulsion and oppression
> of
> the Palestinians on that basis.
> 
	Neither side is justified in abusing the other's rights. The
question is how to settle these intractable conflicts. The way to do that is
to compromise. The difference between the Arabs and the Israelis is that the
Arabs have for the last 25-30 years accepted a reasonable compromise
guaranteeing everyone's basic rights, while the Israelis have never done
that -- not even really with the Oslo agreements. 

	In Kosovo, both the KLA and the Serbian authorities were guilty of
terrible crimes. But the Serbs at least in principle agreed to a reasonable
compromise -- the outline of a political plan drawn up by the Contact group
in January. The KLA never did that.

	I'm not trying to elevate the Serbs to the same moral position as
the Palestinians. I don't think the variable in these question is how
intrinsically moral each group is. Usually it's a question of power. The
Israelis and the KLA have in common -- to varying degrees -- the support of
the most powerful nation on earth. The U.S. became friends with Israel and
enemies with Serbia. The Serbs knew they and the KLA weren't going to be
allowed to fight each other indefinitely without a lot of pressure from the
Europeans, Russians, Americans, and the U.N to settle their differences.
That's why they decided to at least start to deal.

	But the KLA knew the Americans wanted, for their own reasons, to
bomb the Serbs and occupy Kosovo with NATO. So they had a lot of leverage.
That's why they flabbergasted everyone when they wouldn't sign Rambouillet
at first. That's also how they extracted the promise of a referendum on
independence, which violated the original Contact Group principles for
negotiations. (It was rejectionist, you might say.)

	Of course, the KLA had good reason to start fighting Belgrade:
non-violence wasn't getting the Albanians' rights back. But once the war
started attracting international attention and international pressure on
Belgrade, the Albanians should have accepted the compromise principles (as
Belgrade did at least officially) and lived with autonomy. Instead, they
decided to reject compromise.

	Remember that the Albanians wanted independence -- and occasionally
used violence in pursuit of it -- LONG before the Serbs revoked autonomy in
1989. 

> And the Kurds sought to destroy the Turkish state in its initial years znc
> ghd killings by the PKK have been horrendous.  Yet this in no way
> justifies
> the full-scale cultural oppression of the Kurds in Turkey.
> 
> The Kosovars were allied with the Serbs during World WarII and any earlier
> "tit-for-tatting" begins to be a rather hollow justification for
> indifference.  It sounds like rightwing Christian justification for
> poverty
> based on Christ's admonition that "The poor will always be among us."
> 
> There is reasonable discussion about Kosovar oppression of local Serbs,
> but
> there is no possible comparison between those conflicts and the 1000+
> Kosovars killed and the tens of thousands driven out BEFORE the NATO bombs
> began falling.  And there is no comparison between the 10,000+ Kosovars
> killed and the nearly 2 million expelled versus the "dozens" of Serbs
> killed
> in recent weeks.
> 
	During the civil war, about 1700 Albanians were killed. Many were
KLA fighters and many were civilians. Some were fighters who were not
fighting when they were killed. It's rather murky. But one hard fact is
that, according to the Albanian Council in Pristina, 837 of the dead were
women, children, or elderly. 

	Anyway, in "retaliation" for these crimes, the KLA brought on NATO
bombing which killed 1,500 to 2,000 Serb civilians along with a lot of other
damage. In "retaliation" for this, the Serbs killed... who knows? Maybe
5,000 civilians. I don't know. 

	But I'm baffled as to why you think one set of crimes is
"understandable" and the other is abhorrent.

> It was interesting travelling in Middle East countries often with little
> or
> no sympathy for US military actions; but the attitude was an absolute
> confidence of the rightness of the Kosovar cause with deep suspicion of
> NATO's actions.  Generally the attitude was the "right actions for the
> wrong
> motives"- an analysis I have great sympathy with.  That the Kosovars are
> muslims no doubt explains part of this sympathy but the fact that the
> United
> Nations ratified the agreement and peacekeeping forces indicates broader
> agreement on that judgement.
> 
	That's nationalism for you.