This is a response to Nathan Newman's posting:
After having spent the last eight years researching, studying
and teaching in and about Yugoslavia and its constituent parts, I
find the kind of gut reaction of Nathan and others to the events in
Bosnia to be frustrating. I find it particularly frustrating to hear
the call for "pro-intervention" when it was German and US intervention
in organizing and promoting the breakup of Yugoslavia on ethnic
grounds that started the bloodshed in the first place, and it has
been US intervention recently that has discouraged peaceful settlement.
If Nathan or any others think that Bosnia can be put back together
under a Muslim dominated government, which appears to be the current
US goal, they have been smoking some of the most power halucigens
currently known. The fact is, once the US, Germany, the EC and the
UN encouraged and facilitated the breakup of Yugoslavia on ethnic
grounds *without any guarantees to the protection of minorities* the
fate of Bosnia was sealed. We all knew it, foreign journalists knew
it, and the German and American state departments knew it -- but
refused to accept it. They thought they could win one more victory
in the cold war by destroying the Serbs who had the temerity to vote
for the retention of a socialist (communist) government. The fact is,
the Milosevic government was a bulwark against the much more
nationalist partie, the truly fascist parties, or the right, in
particularly the Serbian Radical party of Sesel which has its own
militias fighting in Bosnia.
I could go on at length, and will if there is any demand from
the network. (As an economist, my supply responds to demand).
With sadness for the loss of a country I had come to love.
Paul Phillips,
Univerity of Manitoba,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
