Your point is well taken as is Yoshie's regarding jumbled and biased reporting of what is going on with the various refugees. We really don't know what is happening on the ground in Kosovo, but probably will some day, more or less.
I have no doubt that Milosevic and the Serbs do not trust NATO or the US and that the Brcko decision aggravated things. OTOH, I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that no decision had been made in the Dayton Accords regarding the ultimate disposition of Brcko. This was to be determined by later negotiations although the Serbs may have felt that certain promises had been made to them, or perhaps more specifically that how the decision was made was "insufficiently" or inappropriately negotiated (or not negotiated as the case may be).
Certainly the media reports in the US, for better or worse, accurately or inaccurately, have suggested that a major factor in the Brcko decision was the anger at Milosevic for his having violated the cease fire agreement that was made last fall for Kosovo. Would you argue that he did not violate that ceasefire agreement? That (reported) violation is supposedly one of the reasons for the surprising degree of support by so many normally pro-Serb NATO countries of the current NATO offensive. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: phillp2 at Ms.UManitoba.CA <phillp2 at Ms.UManitoba.CA> To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu <pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu> Date: Tuesday, March 30, 1999 4:30 PM Subject: [PEN-L:4665] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: War & 'Public Relations,' or, 'Kuwaiti Babi
Barkley,
I have deleted all the previous posts in this reply because they were getting impossibly long, but I did want to respond to one point. The Serbs, whatever their faults, have just reason to suspect that NATO will not live up to any agreement that Yugoslavia agreed to. The proof of that is the recent moves by NATO to remove the elected government of Serb Bosnia and to take away a key town from Serb control and give it effectively to the Muslim-Croat coalition. This is a clear violation of the Dayton agreement and is living proof that the US and NATO have no interest in saving the ethnic balance in Bosnia but only in destroying ethnic Serbia. This was just one more instance to prove that NATO and western powers can not be trusted, guaranteeing that the only recourse Serbia has to prevent its own genocide from the US, NATO, Croatia and Albania is to militarily defeat the invading forces. It is difficult to argue with their conclusion given the behaviour of NATO.
Paul
Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba