RES: visit to kosova and Bosnia (fwd)

Alexandre Fenelon afenelon at zaz.com.br
Sat Jun 24 15:32:22 PDT 2000


When it came down to the operative possibilities, on the ground, given how the region had imploded over the 90's, I do think that this neo-colonial protectorate of the NGO's, the UN and NATO is less bad than what the regime in Belgrade had in store.

-Maybe you´re right. I´m no supporter o Milosevic´s regimen, but it seems -the terms of the Peace agreement in Rambouillet were such that they were -designed to be rejected by Yugoslavia to justify the bombings. Those -agreements included essentialy the military occupation of all Yugoslavia. -I really don´t know why the NATO did it, but it´s difficult to believe -in humanitarian war, unless NATO was thinking about bombing Turkey, which -has a record of national minirities repression far worse than Yugoslavia. -On the other hand, it seems KLA´s Kosovo is almost as fascist as Yugoslavia, -isn´t it?

Are these really progressive forces? Or, retrograde regimes, run by bureaucratic-military castes, that operate on repression and corruption?

-They are not progressive forces, but it is no reason to bomb them, destroying their -economic structure and causing massive human suffering. If it was NATO obligation -to bomb all the retrograde governments in the world, they should incrase their -budget by something like 10000%. An launch come bombs in Texas too....

For a corollary, I'm sure the East Timorese would agree, too. It was Western arms to Jakarta after 1975 that fueled the repression, once the referendum was called, and the results were not respected by the anti-independence paras, the Big Powers had a responsibility to prevent further bloodshed. Abstractions, divorced from the concrete realities, seem like attempts to shore up leftist cred.

Anyway, I've gone on much too long...

-It was Western countries that supported Suharto´s dictatorship while -it was commiting genocide. Now that Indonesia lost it strategic value -then the West decided to defend human rights there. No doubt, a humanitarian -intervention (unlike in Yugoslavia, due to the reasons mentioned above), like -the Vietnamese invasion of Camboja, but I would hardly say that the logic -of western intervention is essentially humanitarian....

Alexandre Fenelon



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