[PEN-L:6837] Re: Gregor Gysi letter to Slobodan Milosevic

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

Louis,
    OK, so what's your solution?  Partition?
Domination and discrimination by minority
Serbs of majority Albanians?  Removal of
majority Albanians by minority Serbs by force?
     Or, my preferred approach, enforcement
of everybody's rights by an external group,
preferably, as Gysi urges, from the UN.  As
we know, who will constitute such a force and
its authority is a central issue of negotiation
right now between Chernomyrdin and Milosevic.
     BTW, I see that as being in the guise of a
local autonomy within the official sovereignty of
Yugoslavia.  It may end up the enforcement authority
will have to protect Serbs, as even with the situation
as it is currently on the ground with about half the
Albanians expelled (and unlikely to return), the Albanians
still have a definite majority in Kosovo-Metohija.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, May 14, 1999 1:32 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:6819] Gregor Gysi letter to Slobodan Milosevic


>Barkley wrote:
>>     I think that this is a very interesting letter.
>>Unfortunately we all must face another hard fact.
>>Part of the fact that Milosevic has won (nor more
>>"petulance," Louis, now I'll just call him a schmuck
>>and a mass murdererer (would the 200,000+ of the
>>Croatian-Bosnian war be alive if he had died of a
>>heart attack in 1986?)
>
>Barkley, you leave out enormous gaps in your account of the Balkan
>problems. Milosevic's attack on Kosovan autonomy did not come out of the
>blue. It was preceded by at least 7 years of mounting tensions in which
>Kosovars had made life miserable for the average Serb, to the point of
>driving many from the province.
>
>This is from a December 25, 1983 NY Times article by David Binder:
>
>====
>During 1982, the Serbian parliament, party councils and press were bursting
>with expressions of concern over the steady migration of Serbs out of the
>autonomous province of Kosovo, the southern plateau region abutting
>Albania. The pain was almost palpable as report followed report of the
>flight of thousands of families of Serbs and their mountain cousins, the
>Montenegrins, leaving more and more of the land in the hands of the
>burgeoning Albanian minority. The Serbs were keening, not only because
>Kosovo was the birthplace of the Serbian nation a thousand years earlier,
>but also because, across the Sava River, the rich Vojvodina flatlands
>appeared to be drifting away from the control of Belgrade as the large
>Hungarian minority and a disaffected population of Serbs asserted
>themselves politically. In the Belgrade cafes, Serbs began to speak
>sardonically of ''Narrow Serbia,'' - that is, Serbia without Kosovo and
>without the Vojvodina.
>
>At a soccer match in Belgrade this October, fans of the Pristina team from
>Kosovo started chanting ''E- Ho! E-Ho!,'' for Enver Hoxha. About the same
>time, a post office was bombed and an electric power plant, sabotaged.
>''Kosovo is finished as Serb territory, that's for certain,'' said Milutin
>Garasanin, a distinguished archeologist at Belgrade University.
>
>Such, it appears, is the outcome of the 1981 Pristina University riots in
>support of political independence that sparked an uprising by the Albanians
>all across Kosovo and in ethnic Albanian communities dotted around Serbia,
>Montenegro and Macedonia. Kosovo Serbs were warned by their ethnic Albanian
>neighbors to get out, and some were physically harmed. What had begun
>centuries ago as a gradual drift of Serbs northward out of Kosovo ended in
>a frightened exodus - authorities put the total at some 13,000 people in
>three years, although off the record, officials suggest the number is more
>like 70,000. Token efforts were made by Belgrade authorities to escort the
>fearful back to their homes, but few wanted to live in armed settlements in
>a hostile land.
>====
>
>As far as Croatia and Slovenia are concerned, they had opted for
>capitalism. In reality, Serbia was stuck in the middle. The prosperous
>republics were prepared to split, while the least prosperous province was
>to become even more aggressively anticommunist as the national treasury was
>diminished by the secession of Croatia and Slovenia. The Kosovars, who are
>largely peasant in social composition, adopted a form of nationalism that
>was in keeping with most of the anti-Soviet secessionist movements in the
>1940s and 50s. Like the Ukraine, the Albanian nationalists were militantly
>anticommunist. Although the KLA has a reputation for some kind of Maoism, I
>would suspect that the Khmer Rouge is closer to Maoism than these bandits.
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
>