: I think the Serbs record is as bad as the Nazis and their current ethnic cleasing and scorched earth initiaatives demonstrate how they're happy to borrow directly from Hitlers political initatives.Any top-down society is open to exploitation by leaders with their own agendas; you know this as well as I. The Serbs are no worse than many other governments like Turkey or Iraq or Afghanistan or Algeria; if people look to a leader for guidance, and come to depend on that leader's diktat, then a leader who starts uttering genocidal diktat will cause genocide, since it is usually easier for Joe Public to go with the flow. What has do be done is to scrap the heirarchy, the looking-to-the-leader altogether.
: That's not to mention the fact that the rolled into the UN safe zone in Bosnia and massacred everyone there while the most powerful nations of the world jsut watched.
: It's because we cant stomach a fight, it's time we all said Fuck you you little facist shits and tore them to peaces. The serbian nation should cease to exist it should be split up and shared among the neighbouring naitons and if it takes the most authoritarian marshall law to enact this then fine, it's their sinning that's brought it on them.
*sigh*
I can't agree here, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, what is military action supposed to stop?
The "ethnic cleansing". But if NATO bomb, as they have now done, what more can the UN threaten? The Serb army and police force now have a carte blanche to do whatever they want, since a de facto state of war exists; and as such, the Albanians have gone from potential guerillas to outright targets.
How can this be stopped by bombing? The Serb army has a fairly large number of tanks and troops; air strikes cannot really do significant damage to this force, since it is dispersed thinly. In addition to which, bombing has a unifying effect on a country; there may have been internal uncertainty before, but now there will be far less.
So why not carry out airstrikes on the front line? - because NATO cannot afford to take too many casualties, and the regular Serb army has things like ZSU-23 AA tanks; direct attack on the forces causing genocide by an aerial force would result in the sort of losses the West cannot be seen to be sustaining.
So how do you stop the genocide? - by sending in ground troops. It's the only way to be certain that genocide is not occurring. However, NATO can field a maximum of 12,000 ground troops at the moment, and even if they build up their forces hugely, they are not going to match the Serb army's 100,000 troops; the Serb army is under orders to resist any NATO ground force with full fight.
NATO is basically incapable of protecting the Kosovans, as it was with the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995; the manpower isn't there for a ground fight, NATO doesn't have the stomach for a ground fight, yet aerial bombardment is ineffective and can only be carried out on secondary strategic targets.
The strikes are of dubious legality; they should have been approved by the UN before being carried out. Since they weren't, Russia and China have immediately declared themselves to be heavily opposed to the attacks.
The Russian opposition is critical; both Russia and Serbia follow the Orthodox Church, not the Catholic or Protestant ones. The Russians see the Serbs as little brothers of a kind; it's why the Russians have an advantage negotiating with them. As such, the NATO attacks on Serbia have infuriated Russia, which sees the US and NATO as assuming the right to take unilateral action regardless of the UN's decision; since Russia is also uneasy about the recent expansion of NATO, this blow to NATO/Russian relations could not have come at a worse time.
The majority of the Russian parliament is pressing for sanctions on arms sales to Serbia to be lifted immediately and for the Serbs to be supplied with the most modern arms that Russia can produce; in addition, Russia has moved short- and medium-range nuclear missiles back to the Byelorussian border and targeted them on the West again; Yeltsin has made it clear that he would take military action against the West if his conscience didn't stop him.
We can't defend the Albanians in Kosova with any real efficiency; both sides know that, our military action is bringing us into indirect conflict with Russia and NATO's action without the UN's blessing is damaging the UN's sovereignty. How is military action against Serbia a good thing?
Granted, genocide and murder aren't good, and they need to be stopped. But is it worth going to war over and will war ever provide the solution?
I don't think so.
Gideon.
