[PEN-L:5474] yes to Kosovo

[Bill Burgess <burgess@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis wrote:

>This analysis [snip] is utterly lacking in an analysis of Albanian
nationalism in the 1980s, which was racially and religiously exclusionist.

This is certainly what the bourgeoisie is saying, but is it true? Was and
is this true of the nationalist movement *as a whole*? I havn't seen any
convincing accounts of this (your previous reply to me didn't do it).

But I have seen descriptions of a popular mass movement organizing its own
social services and education after autonomy was reversed and Belgrade
clamped down on the region's administration and reduced regional
equalization funds. This seems to me a healthy development, better than
passively waiting for the 'Communists' to do it *for* you, an example of
the popular organizing other working people in Eastern European countries
may need to do as the wanna-be capitalists run the old system into the
ground.

I don't doubt that Kosova has it's own chauvinists who use nationalism the
way Milosovic and the Milosovics of Croatia and the other republics do. But
it seems to we also have been 'utterly lacking in an analysis' of, like,
why do the Serbs, long the dominant nationality in the old Yuglosavia, get
to 'trump' the national aspirations of the majority Albanian Kosovars, the
traditional 'poor cousins'? I don't want anything to do with Kosovars
calling for and urging NATO intervention, but this is different than taking
the moral and poltiical high ground on the principle of self-determination
of oppressed peoples. What would we say, for example, about a Kosovar
insurgency against a possible future alliance of Milosovic or someone like
him **WITH** NATO, or the US, or Germany, etc. individually? I don't think
that kind of alliance is excluded at all.

Bill Burgess