>Chris--
>
>Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency (1965) is an intelligent book,
written
>as a response to Mao's equally or even more intelligent guide to
subversion of a
>central power.
> By those same
>criteria Milosovich also had a losing cause against the KLA:
>B) Therefore he couldn't isolate the guerillas from contact with the Kosvar
>population. They were the "fish that swam in the sea of the people"--which
>almost inevitably means that operations have to be undertaken against the
>undifferentiated mass of people in order to suppress the activiteis of a very
>small minority..
I agree. In 1998 a particularly robust attack by the Serb authorities against the KLA, not over-careful of the feelings of the local population, led to at least 1/4 million people leaving Kosovo.
Certain western sources have argued that was not strictly speaking ethnic cleansing but a bye-product of the war.
But I think most western government analysts correctly compared it to Bosnia and assessed that the Serb nationalists would if necessary essentially retaliate with a war against the Albanian population in response to the war of the KLA against them.
This meant the Albanians could either be driven out or accept their helot status indefinitely.
I think that Mao gives specific situations in which a people's war can succeed. It cannot succeed if there is no water for the fish to swim in. I think the Serb nationalists calculated they would consolidate their state on their terms - either pure Serbian or under Serb hegemony - and they were morally justified in imposing massive population shifts - regardless of loss of life - on not just Kosovo but also on Macedonia and Monenegro (important to secure an outlet to the sea).
The west could have stood by as the British government did in Bosnia, and lament Balkan behaviour while looking after British imperialist interests.
I agree with much of your post of course, but I do not see how the KLA had the terrain to fight a prolonged peoples war if their enemy were going to drive out the local population.
The Germans claim evidence in the form of Operation Horseshoe that they were preparing to do just that.
Chris Burford
London.