>>where did you get the information that walker
>>pressured the committee to blame Belgrade?
>from Lexis-Nexis
which means very little. where did lexis-nexis get it from? and, what would this indicate other than that the US has been very keen to generate a neat story about Belgrade? something that is fairly obvious, but doesn't automatically lead to the call that 'the albanians' are evil.
>Okay, try this for size:
>
>"Before long the instigators of the complaints were joined by hundreds of
>other youths, who then spilled on to the streets immediately surrounding
>the university There they were met by a hasti1y formed cordon of security
>police who were able to disperse the crowds. But this was only a temporary
>pause, because even more students came back onto the streets of Pristina on
>26 March. This time, Serb and Montenegrin citizens were beaten, their homes
>and businesses burned, and their shops looted. Kosovo's Serb Population
>were now seriously alarmed. During the night of 15 March 1981, a mysterious
>fire destroyed much of the old guesthouse wing of the Pec Patriarchate,
>including the monk's living quarters, together with a quantity of books..."
>
>(Miranda Vickers, "Between Serb and Albanian")
I see 'students' here, not 'albanians'. what were the complaints that triggered the violence? this would be important to mention, no? otherwise, your narrative about the conflict between 'ethnicities' (or 'races') becomes itself a perpetrator of the ethnicisation of that conflict that has been so invaluable to the political careers of Milosevich and the KLA, the reduction to it of a seemingly ineffable 'ethnic difference', whose solution tends invariably to look like apartheid, 1990s-style. if this is what Vickers' support for kosovar nationalism consists of (that these 'two peoples' cannot live together becuase they are too different) then that hardly seems an approach worth repeating either.
i say however 'your narrative', because there seems little in this fragment to indicate that blame should be apportioned to 'ethnic albanians'.
and yes, the fire is mysterious. but the word 'mysterious' here, and especially the use you make of it in such a fragment, turns it into its opposite, doesn't it? wink wink, nudge nudge..
>Kosovo received
>proportionately more investment and social spending than any Yugoslav
>republic when the nationalist movement took root.
a) so what; b) amounts of social spending can be related to the degrees of poverty there relative to other regions. in the absence of specifying this, it means nothing; c) since when would a marxist begrudge the relatively higher levels of social spending and investment in any region. isn't the issue to increase social spending all round, not play off one region (and ethnicity!) against another as you are doing. milosevich's repeal of the autonomy of Kosovo was precisely an attempt to enable the inflicting of IMF conditions there. that there was a strength of resistance to this, which you wish to reduce to nationalism, and thereby disavow the class struggle in favour of an implicitly racist narrative.
>They simply wanted to
>separate from people who did not look like them, speak the same language
>and follow the same religion. Just like during WWII, when Mussolini backed
>them.
so, we're back to Mussolini huh? please drop the 'they', it is not only inaccurate historically, it's offensive. there were many political parties in Kosovo prior to the repeal of autonomy. the repeal of autonomy, and the subsequent manipulations and bombings by NATO, have ensured that increasingly there is only one party: the nationalists. this is a creature of recent events, not the revelation of a cultural predisposition of 'the albanians'.
and, i guess you're not going to remove the German refugee tribunal as an authoritative source, huh?
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au