G'day Barkley, You're asking Yoshie, but the soccer hasn't started yet, so I'll fly a kite. > As a question to you, Yoshie, would you characterize >what the Serbs are doing now to the Albanians in Kosmet >as "self-defense"? In what way does this "resist" the >imperialist bombing by NATO/US? I guess it doesn't matter a lot what you call the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of people at gun-point (with a few thousand deaths thrown in), but I think this can be construed as self-defence. Counter insurgency in guerilla war - you dunno who the guerillas are, you know they gotta get fed by somebody, you dunno who they are either, but you know they'd all be Albanian Kosovars. So you do what we did in Vietnam. My Lais make a strangely compelling sense in such scenarios, no? Whilst there was a rag-tag KLA of a few hundred fighters, and an elected moderate in the chair (Rugova), counter-insurgency was probably a combination of salutary warnings, the odd settling of scores, and mebbe a 'surgical strike' or two on known guerilla-support hamlets. With all-out war (apre NATO bombing) came a more daring and better-armed KLA, doing mischief right into Pristina - and the end of Rugova's relevance. The 2000 dead of 1998 would no longer suffice ... Howzatsound? Still a bloody outrage, of course - but of the sort we were directly engaged in only thirty years back. Cheers, Rob.
