Rebuttal to Nathan

Dace edace at flinthills.com
Fri Mar 17 11:57:10 PST 2000



>>On Behalf Of hep ingham
>>
>> Milosevic stated that he would accept a peace keeping force
>> comprised of UN
>> troops and the Russian military. This was rejected outright by NATO (by
>> what right?).
>
>This is repeated endlessly with no proof. In fact, as this letter from
>Gregor Gysi of the German PDS notes from his conversations with Milosevic,
>UN troops were still being rejected after the war started as of April 14,
>1999.
>
That Milosevic rejected a UN force after the bombing tells us nothing of how he felt prior to the bombing. At that time, he appeared to be interested in finding a way out of the civil war with the Kosovar Albanians. A diplomatic solution might have worked. Milosevic did not want Kosovo Verification Monitors from OSCE to leave Kosovo. This suggests that he did not intend to engage in wholesale ethnic cleansing.

Here's the relevant excerpt from the Chomsky piece that Doug posted Tuesday:

***The Serb National Assembly Resolution, though reported at once on the

wire services, has remained a virtual secret. There has been little

indication even of its existence, let alone its contents. The

Resolution condemned the withdrawal of the OSCE monitors and called on

the United Nations and OSCE to facilitate a diplomatic settlement

through negotations "toward the reaching of a political agreement on a

wide-ranging autonomy for [Kosovo], with the securing of a full

equality of all citizens and ethnic communities and with respect for

the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia

and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [FRY]." It raised the

possibility of an "international presence" of a "size and character"

to be determined to carry out the "political accord on the self-rule

agreed and accepted by the representatives of all national communities

living in [Kosovo]." FRY agreement "to discuss the scope and character

of international presence in [Kosovo] to implement the agreement to be

accepted in Rambouillet" had been formally conveyed to the negotiators

on 23 February, and announced by the FRY at a press conference the

same day (4). Whether these proposals had any substance we cannot

know, since they were never considered, and remain unknown.***

Ted



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