-----Original Message----- From: Tom Lehman <TLEHMAN at lor.net> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>In the stories you posted there are two big words. Those words are
>separatism and secession.
>In our own country in the last century we had a separatist movement that
>ended in secession and civil war. The southern states wanted automony
>to practice their peculiar regional institutions, that the northern
>states would not grant them.
I'm at not a believer in automatic secession for any minority group. And I certainly would not support secession of one minority group in order to better oppress a minority group embedded within that group- the case with the US Civil War (argument by historical analogy is treacherous, aint it?).
What I find compelling about the Kosovan odyssey is a dogged dedication to nonviolent democratic action for over a decade - of people streaming to secret polling places to register their desire for freedom from repression. It was only with the brutal suppression of that movement and the more recent creation of tens of thousands of refugees that the violent option turned from an extreme position among the Kosovans into a broadly popular position.
I find it ironic that a bunch of folks who harshly condemned Israel for its repression of Palestinian demands for dignity & freedom, and justified past regional Arab league wars against Israel in defense of Palestinian rights, turn around and declare border lines on the map involving Serbia-Yugoslavia sacrosanct. Both the PLO and KLA have unsavory members and suspect actions on their records, but their cause is just and if they have been chosen as the vehicles for expressing the democratic will of their communities, they have to be respected for that reason.
I hate war and violence and I will readily admit that violence as a means is fraught with peril and likelihood of misuse. But that is a reasonable debate over means that is always compelling, but in the question of ends, I think the defenders of Serbia and those seeking to delegitimize those fighting for Kosovan autonomy veer into the realm of defense of evil.
If we want a Civil War analogy, the better analogy is of Serbs as Southerners oppressing their internal minority and NATO playing the role of the Union side demanding that the Serbs abandon their peculiar institutions of repression and join the "free labor" pluralism of European standards. We can agree on the pitfalls and contradictions of those standards, just as we can on the contradictions of the North in the Civil War. But in the end, both the North's actions in the Civil War and NATO's (hopefully) today are justified for the sake of those to be freed from repression.
---Nathan Newman