> Martin wrote:

>They can.  I suppose they are.  I think they have been killing since
>before the bombing started, and I think it will be shown that the
>killing increased when the human rights observers left.
>

They left when NATO threatened bombs.

>> (2)NATO did anticipate the flood of refugees and did not send
>> supplies(until recently).  The point was to "radicalize" the
>> populace so they will refuse nothing less but independence for
>> Kosovo.
>
>I think some or many Kosovars had already decided to accept nothing
>less than independence.  The present action might increase that
>number.  That doesn't mean it was the intended purpose of the action.
>

I think it was intended by the KLA

>> (3)The agreement Milosevic wouldn't sign is because it would give
>> Kosovo "de facto independence now, with guaranteed de jure
>> independence in three years".
>
>I understood he wouldn't sign because there would be NATO troops in
>Kosovo.  But, he got his independence form the former Yugoslavia.  Why
>should he have the power to prevent Kosovo from taking the same
>decision?
>

Independence through voting or terrorist actions?  The KLA want the latter
while everyone else did it through the former.

>> What would you have done if you were on the Serb delegation?
>
>I would have agreed to it.  I would have agreed because it would have
>eliminated problems for my own region.  I would have agreed because a
>federation of the all the states made from regions of the former
>Yugoslavia would always be a possibility in the future, and it would
>make good sense in the present to let all the separate regions lift
>themselves up by their own bootstraps and concentrate on getting
>themselves integrated into the European economy, and *then* talk about
>forming a federation of those states.

Are you joking here?  "up by their own bootstraps"?

Yes, like every developing country, it is more important to "integrate" with
powerful economies then worry about the well being of the populace.

>When trying to build something like a federation, it makes sense to
>build from the bottom up, rather than by imposing it from the top
>down.  Ignoring the American Indians, which we had no trouble doing
>for hundreds of years, the United States was built by letting states
>join the union.  Granted, there would be fireworks if California tried
>to leave now, but the states joined the union because it made sense to
>join the union.  States are joining the European Union because it
>makes sense to join the union.  Norway has refused to join the EU, so
>far, because in Norway's case it also makes sense not to join the
>union.

Many states were "liberated" from Mexico.

Norway has done much better without joining the EU then if they did.

>If I had been running the UN, when Yugoslovia began breaking apart, I

The UN had nothing to do with the break up of Yugoslavia.  One most look to
economic power centres to lay blame.......

This is from International Action Centre.  Its founder is Ramsey Clark, a
former US Attorney General.  

THE BOSNIAN TRAGEDY by Sara Flounders

Origins of the breakup — a U.S. law

A year before the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
on Nov. 5, 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the 1991 Foreign Operations
Appropriations Law 101-513. This bill was a signed death warrant. One
provision in particular was so lethal that even a CIA report described three
weeks later in the Nov. 27, 1990, New York Times predicted it would lead to
a bloody civil war. 

A section of Law 101-513 suddenly and without previous warning cut off all
aid, trade, credits and loans from the U.S. to Yugoslavia within six months.
It also ordered separate elections in each of the six republics that make up
Yugoslavia, requiring State Department approval of election procedures and
results before aid to the separate republics would be resumed. The
legislation further required U.S. personnel in all international financial
institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to
enforce this cut-off policy for all credits and loans. 

There was one final provision. Only forces that the U.S. State Department
defined as "democratic forces" would receive funding. This meant an influx
of funds to small right-wing nationalist parties in a financially strangled
region suddenly thrown into crisis by the overall funding cut-off.

The impact was, as expected, devastating.

This law threw the Yugoslav federal government into crisis. It was unable to
pay the enormous interest on its foreign debt or even to arrange the
purchase of raw materials for industry. Credit collapsed and recriminations
broke out on all sides. 

At the time there was no civil war. No republic had seceded.

The U.S. was not engaged in a public dispute with Yugoslavia.

The region was not even in the news. World attention was focused on the
international coalition the Bush administration was assembling to destroy
Iraq—a war that reshaped the Middle East at a cost of half a million Iraqi
lives.

What was behind the sweeping legislation directed at Yugoslavia, especially
when U.S. policy makers themselves predicted that the sudden unraveling of
the region would lead to civil war? 

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. big business was embarking on an
aggressive march to reshape all of Europe. Nonaligned Yugoslavia was no
longer needed as a buffer state between NATOand the Warsaw Pact. A strong,
united Europe was hardly desirable. Washington policy makers considered both
to be relics of the Cold War. 

Control of the purse strings

This one piece of legislation—Law 101-513—demonstrates the U.S. government's
enormous power. It was one part of annual legislation that defines in detail
policies to be pursued in every region of the globe. The Foreign Operations
Act implements U.S. corporate control through major funding to international
financial institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, Asian
Development Fund, the African Development Fund, and through direct
assistance to individual countries.

The deadly restrictions on Yugoslavia took a mere 23 lines. Compare this to
the more than nine pages that detail sanctions to be imposed on Iraq. As of
January 1995, the U.S.-UN sanctions on Iraq had killed more than half a
million children. This projection is from Thomas Ekfal, the United Nations
Children's Fund representative in Baghdad. (New York Newsday, Dec. 19, 1994)

In all the expressions of concern and sympathy for refugees and displaced
people in countries all over the globe, but especially in the former
Yugoslavia, no U.S. official ever mentions the terrible suffering caused by
U.S. economic strangulation.



Read tons more at www.iacenter.org/bosnia/tragedy.htm

Milutin

--
Wit tha five centuries of penitentiary
So let tha guilty hang
In tha Year of tha Boomerang