>I've read similar kinds of views competing with cynicism by conflict
analysists from day to another, about everything that NATO and USA
have screwd up. BUT ISN'T THERE ANYONE CONSIDERING HOW CAN WE STOP
GENOCIDE WICH HAS STARTED IN KOSOVA?<
yes. as an immediate solution: open the borders and allow anyone who wants to leave Kosovo and Serbia free passage to australia, the US and the rest of Europe. as a longer term solution, we work to replace a racialised struggle with a class struggle, both there and globally, but first perhaps here.
that this choice cannot be proxied by supporting the KLA, Belgrade or NATO should by now be obvious.
and, I'm particularly interested in the ways in which some greet the gigantic stream of refugees with a spin that cannot in all honesty be called anything less than mischievous.
Yoshie wrote:
>'refugees' from NATO bombs and the KLA.<
and quoted an article which in part said:
>>However, not everyone reaching Macedonia had encountered a genocidal
Serb. Many had been scared from their homes not by Milosevic's
marauding troops, but by the threat of NATO attacks. Others, like the
well dressed Albanians, had motives that were hard to fathom through
the centuries-old fog of Balkan intrigue and deceit.<<
I agree that there are most definitely a range of reasons as to why Kosovans are on the move now. there are three elements which stand out: soldiers and police have been going from door to door demanding that anyone who wants to be Albanian should 'go to Albania; there have been wholesale arrests and killings; the bombings of Kosovo have been intensified which does not make it safe for anyone to stay; and there have been people who have taken off to join the KLA, I would add, who previously have not done so. and, even if stories of murder are exaggerated, the example of srebenica should not make us reach so easily for this repetition of cold war denial.
what is offensive is that this is not the gist of the post. the article is more concerned to detach any concern we might have for the refugees through the use of scare quotes (as if they are not really refugees), to render their 'motives' for leaving inscrutable (which as anyone knows is a racist ploy), and to make another play on that cliche of 'Balkan intrigue and deceit', which again, is nothing less than racism.
tom wrote:
>>Another thing I've noticed is the "Albanian" refugees riding their
farm equipment in flight from the fighting. Long lines of tractors
etc. Have any of you city boys priced farm equipment lately?
Those poor oppressed "Albanians" are fleeing in style! Name a
luxury car you would like to own.<<
here, not only are they really not Albanian, but they aren't poor and oppressed since they move in style! forty people to a tractor must mean that you can switch off any sympathy, let alone empathy. would you take the same position on the ethnic Chinese fleeing indonesia now; or wealthy Jews fleeing Germany in the 1930s? they are not refugees because they are not poor?
in any case, I would think that those Kosovans on the move now are about as remote economically speaking from the Chinese in indonesia as
you can imagine. but this *should* be irrelevant to the ways you approach the whole issue of refugees. the single point that is important is that they no longer feel safe in their homes. the reasons for this are myriad and complex, but searching around for a hook to hang one's refusal to feel any empathy at all is, I think, a bracing oneself for the standard US/European/Australian nationalism: 'you pretend to be a refugee in order to make a pitch for inclusion into the realm of my humanist sympathies; but I know that you are not really worthy of such an inclusion'.
no doubt the refugees are now the focus for demands for and opposition
to the use of ground troops. but this, once again, does not make them any less real. and, instead of opting for the chance to show that the left is capable of distancing itself from the terrain of geopolitical and nationalist ambitions through demanding an opening of
the borders (our borders in particular), it seems that some people prefer to settle for a racism that emanates from that terrain and does not break with it.
so: for me, there is no possibility of inserting my identifications within the terms of the geopolitical machinery -- supporting or not various national claims, national borders, international agreements, European economic strategies, etc. which means that any talk, implicit or otherwise, which stakes out a position within this conflict in those terms (as in supporting Belgrade, or supporting the KLA, implicitly or otherwise) is bound to find itself repeating the racism therein. a racism, which far from being a mere adjunct, is increasingly transplanting, if not already overtaken, class politics.
angela