What is emerging is that talking with Serbs is like talking with white South Africans during the era of apartheid. Of course there were nice liberal English speaking ones, not like the nasty Afrikaner ones who ran the brutal police. They regarded themselves as very international. They regretted the excesses of their regime but they regretted more that how the international community regarded them as pariahs.
The were active lobbyists for the maintenance of international links. Their smugness and arrogance knew no bounds. Every bit of evidence against the racist regime was in reality discounted, or belittled.
Like white South Africa, Serbia is a society that runs on lies.
Yesterday the vice-president was interviewed by Sky television, and said there is not one village in Kosovo that has been emptied by Serb forces. He said he would take the interviewer to see!
Such departure from reality is not accidental. The society is racist to the core. The opinion of non-Serbs does not matter, because they always lie. Hence the lies of Serbs are at least lies by good people.
Hear the comment from the editor of the youth paper of the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia on marxism-unmoderated.
>Of course that I can not support any atrocities, but I can say for
>sure that reports of albanian TV are ALWAYS false.
Simple isn't it? The lesson is to lie faster and more effectively.
He still has not come back with information on the murder of the prominent civil rights lawyer in Pristina.
And nor today on the reports of five prominent moderate Kosovans who have been executed. But that comes from NATO so that also must be a lie. Simple isn't it?
And the leftists who think they have a pet plucky little fighter against imperialism in racist Serbia, who rush to regurtitate this social fascism, do not know one of the first words of marxism: a nation which oppresses another cannot itself be free.
Chris Burford
London