FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| VIEWPOINT The people of Kosovo are dying. Not slowly from cultural absorption, starvation or economic ruin. They are dying quickly, from bullets and mortar. On the paper-thin pretext of maintaining the geographic and political unity of Serbia, the "police" of President Slobodan Milosevic are contentedly perpetrating the third Balkan genocide. Officially, they are conducting a security operation against the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting to gain independence for the majority Albanian population. The struggle against the KLA, however, doesn't account for the scattering of civilian villages laid to waste with heavy weapons, or the rag-tag stream of refugees - civilians, many of them sick and aged - fleeing across difficult terrain into neighboring Albania. If NATO warplanes aren't already flying low over the clouded mountains of Southern Yugoslavia, they soon will be. This time the West, or more specifically the piteous cowards who inhabit the skin of European government, may not require live television coverage of 60 dead and dismembered children, women and men lying in the blood-soaked rubble of a bread queue to galvanize their resolve. Sadly, it need never have come to this if the West hadn't been shooting itself in the foot all along. Right now, the deadliest weapon in Slobodan Milosevic's army hasn't been his tanks, or mortar or rockets, but a small grey man in Brussels. The nameless, faceless bureaucrat at the European Commission who isn't signing the cheque to ANEM, Serbia's independent radio and television network. It would be the cruelest of ironies if the loudest and most persistent voice for peace and democracy in Serbia survived all of Milosevic's crude scheming attempts to crush them, only to go bankrupt waiting for the EU to deliver a measly couple hundred grand. (Remind me again what a cruise missile costs?) ANEM has been the largest and most irascible thorn in the Serbian dictator's side. With this gaping breach in his media hegemony, Milosevic has been unable to nurture the ethnic hatred necessary to co-opt his population to support another round of ethnic cleansing. More importantly, opposition politicians, democrats all, are beginning to make local electoral breakthroughs. For all their bombing and posturing and negotiating, the West has done everything in their power to ignore ANEM and the indigenous democratic movement in Serbia while searching the political wilderness for a solution to the Yugoslav "problem." They are crushing the seeds of a peaceful future under the boots of their own shortsightedness. It is easy to write off the Serbs as a bloodthirsty pack of war-hounds, best dealt with by bombs. But in reality the vast majority of the Serbian people want nothing more dearly than peace. It is their leaders who want war. And it is their leaders they cannot get rid of. Nothing will better guarantee a long and lasting peace than democracy in Serbia. Yet we make deal after deal with the Devil of Belgrade. You don't have to be a card-carrying conspiracy theorist to think that the democrats of Serbia are about to be sold out yet again to secure Serbia's cooperation in avoiding a full-blown Balkan war. A war Milosevic badly wants to avoid, because he cannot win. Instead, he may be content to solidify his own psychotocratic hold on power. Another false peace, sealed with our handshake. |
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