Crucial questions concerning Kosovo and Yugoslavia

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From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 18:31:59 +0300 (EET DST)
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Subject: Crucial questions concerning Kosovo and Yugoslavia

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>

Original sender: Krzysztof Kwasniewski <[email protected]>

Crucial questions concerning Kosovo and Yugoslavia


Some crucial questions concerning Kosovo and Yugoslavian conflict
 
Let's begin by the most controversial person of Slobodan Milosevic. He
is, nevertheless, a freely elected president of a sovereign country.
Doesn't he deserve even an impartial trial like every human being?
(not such hidden trial like general Noriega's of Panama, however he
showed his respect, surrendering himself to the American justice!)
Doesn't Milosevic, president of Serbia, a heroic ally in the World War
II, deserve even such trial, like nazi chiefs in Nurnberg, or
(perhaps!) Pinochet? People say, that American courts do not admit
accusations based on "hearsay" and guarantee even to the worst
criminals the right of defense and public hearing of their aguments
without e.g. destroying their messages (with their radio and TV
stations).
 
But let's presume, that Milosevic is even guilty. What NATO and USA do
is, however, a simple act of commonly condemned collective
responsability with involving lives and goods of innocent Serbian and
Albanian people. Does killing Albanian children, even well proved amd
even by regular troops, legitimate killing Serbian children? Why
"soft" bombs werte not used instead of, or before using the killing
and destroying ones? (In my country, as in Yugoslavia, nazis murdered
50 innocent people in revenge to a single shot to their soldiers.)
Isn't it also an act of bullying political decisions, which in other
(even justifiable) cases is called so often an act of terrorism?
 
Let's presume farther, that there is even a need to prevent or
"punish" Yugoslavia (Karl Kraus has written, that some people like to
be "Richter und Henker"); Under what conditions such an actis not an
usurpation? What objective criteria are to be used, then, in choosing
among those, who did or do murder people and/or violate Human Rights,
often of both parts of a conflict, in Rwanda, Burundi, Turkey, North
Ireland, Basque Country, Russia, China, Palestine etc.? Who and by
whom can be entitled to such a choose? And if the murdered people are
not members of a national minority, e.g. like (till now) in
Afghanistan, already after the evacuation of Russian troops? Why
unhappy population of Somalia was so hostile to the American
liberators? Why the world mass media give almost no news about the
advantages and experiences of the new, appropriate order in Granada,
Haiti or Nicaragua?
 
At last I am anxious, whether the Action in Yugoslavia was not choosen
as a "first serios warning" to the European Union in general. Will
every European country face, in a near future, only the choice between
American or German hegemony? What sovereignty was restored then in
1989 to the East-Central European countries? Does somebody concider
the possibility of other solution, e.g. rebuilding of European-Asian
bonds? Would it be an element of American dream of future more, than a
serious consideration of Russia's and China's full participation in
the world equilibrium, like till now in the UNO?
 
Without clear responses to the above questions every discussion about
Kosovo and Yugoslavia seems to me "partial, incompetent, irrelevant
and immaterial". And I should like to remember once more the prophetic
German book: Klaus BITTERMAN, Serbien muss sterben. Wahrheit und Luge
im jugoslavischen Burgerkrieg.
 
Krzysztof KWASNIEWSKI
professor of sociology,
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, POLAND
former editor of "Sprawy Narodowosciowe" ("Issues of Nationality")

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