Yes perhaps that accounts for the spate of reports today, which will no doubt have to be corroborated. Namely that there has been unrest in 3 towns in Serbia about the war, and that in one a mayor has been lynched. Further that a general in Kosovo has agreed to let 500 troops return home.
Bear in mind in all the stories of atrocities what it must be like for decent Yugoslav soldiers caught up in this. If there is truth for example in the story of systematic rapes at a military training base in Kosovo, do not imagine it is just for the purpose of crushing the will of the subject population (as it has been throughout the millenia of human conflict). It is also to make all the soldiers complicit in the crimes against humanity. They have been under peer pressure, as well as lust, to join in, be macho and have a good time.
As General Mladic, the Serb general in Bosnia said, rape is good for soldiers' morale.
Some however will have been repelled. Some will have committed suicide. And if 500 have been released peacefully, another 500 may well have been shot for treachery.
But the body bag politics cannot prevail in Serbia because of Mirjana's censorship in defence of socialism. So we do not know.
In the long run however, Tito and the partisans built the Yugoslavian army on principles of democratic and internationalist defence.
It is true that technologically it has been a fearsome match for NATO. They still do not dare to send in Apache's. But the weakness is that perhaps more than other armies it depends on the conviction of the soldiers.
Whatever blitzkrieg gains the paramilitary fascists may have won in emptying Kosovo of its civilian population, in the months and years to come that will alienate the mass of the soldiers who will be revolted by this attack on ordinary fellow citizens. Just imagine the effect on ordinary soldiers morale if just one story is true that they are being asked to exhume the mass graves in order to try to conceal the genocide more effecitively.
The ordinary soldiers will yearn to be home at least to try to protect their own. They will vote with their feet against the crime against humanity. They have little more conviction to fight to own Kosovo than English workers wish to fight to own Scotland.
That is their true internationalism. They are the seeds of a new anti-fascist community of Balkan peoples.
So despite the censorship and the fascism it would appear that the anti-war movement is growing stronger in the former Yugoslavia than in the west, and perhaps it is partly because of the point that Doug makes about conscript armies. Maybe this is Tito's last legacy to the people of Yugoslavia that Milosevic has finally not been able to usurp.
Chris Burford
London