I don't recall Mao addressing the issue of mass slaughter of the "sea of the people" as a response to guerilla warfare.
-gn.
Chris Burford wrote:
> At 16:35 14/06/99 -0400, Greg wrote:
>
> >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.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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