| Archive for Our Scotland - www.our-scotland.org Scottish Politics Discussion Forum / Messageboard - Dedicated to online discussion about Scottish Politics and an Independent Scotland, as well as Scottish Society today. We also have a section dedicated to Banter, Sport and Recommended Sites. |
| Neil |
The accession of the openly genocidal Croatian Nazi regime will be unlikely to convert many people to believing the EU to be any sort of democracy.
However the basic problem is that the EU's bureaucracy costs this continent £405 billion a year, beyond any adminstrative costs & transfer payments & is responsible for the fact that theEU is in steep comparative economic decline. |
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| William_Cleland |
Are you OK in the head, Neil? The year is 2008 not 1941. | ||||||||
| Neil |
A thoughtful response William doubtless fully expressing your deep & intricate knowledge of the issues. | ||||||||
| agentmancuso |
Unlike your beloved Greater Serbia? |
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| Neil |
If you can say why it is wrong in principle that places with a majority of people considering themselves serbian or Yugoslav should have been allowed to stay in Yugoslavia/Serbia I would be interested to hear it.
Does the same rule apply to other nationalities? If Belguim gets divided would it not be better to divide it by some form of plebescite than by seeing which nationality can curry more favour with our genocidal leaders? |
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| agentmancuso |
Logically, it can neither be right or wrong 'in principle'. It can only be right or wrong in the context of a particular situation. In the context of Yugoslavia, if the Serbian dominated Federal structures had, for example, allowed Kosovo to become a fully constituent republic, and reacted with less hysteria to the popular demands for greater devolution to Croatia and Slovenia, then the question of being 'allowed to stay in Yugoslavia' would never have come up. Instead, hardline Serbian nationalists refused to give any ground and attempted to use the army to prevent the regional civilian authorities from going about their legitimate business, provoking a disastrous civil war with endless atrocities being committed by nationalists on all sides.
In the unlikely event that the federal Belgian authorities attempted to use military power to overturn the decision of any component regional parliaments then intervention from the EU/ individual European powers would seem very likely. It is demonstrably false to describe our leaders, or the Croatian government as genocidal. |
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| William_Cleland |
It wasn't the Croats who came up with the concept of the inviolability of Europe's post-WWII frontiers and who decided that international recognition should be extended on that basis to boundaries drawn up by dictatorial Communist regimes in the context of the federal constitutions of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The Croats reluctance to compromise is also understandable from a strategic standpoint as Croatia could have been effectively chopped up into three almost disconnected chunks of territory if the old pre-1881 Krajina had successfully reemerged. 
The agenda of the most extreme Serbian nationalists was to grab the eastern and southern Croat majority chunks of territory in Slavonia and Dalmatia as well as the traditionally Serbian majority Krajina areas and leave Croatia with not much more than a small rump state around Zagreb. The Krajina Serbs had a case but blew it big time tactically after the "Log Revolution" by being way too extreme because once the label of ethnic cleansers was successfully stuck on them (despite the fact both sides were at it) the West couldn't be seen to let them win regardless of the initial rights and wrongs of the situation. |
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| Neil |
agentmancuso said
Your potted history of the break up is wrong in almost all particulars. I don't blame you for that - this is the official story our media continuously pushed on us but it was a deliberate lie desingend to make the British people support genocide. Yugoslavia was not "Serbian dominated", the dissolution of the Kosovo government was because it was being run on racist grounds by the Albanians - something which even the New York Times admitted though obviously this was airbrushed from history[url] http://emperors-clothes.com/a/13.htm#7[/url] Croatia & Slovenia had enormous autonomy & were be no definition oppresed. Ethnic cleansing of Serbs from "Croatia" by its ex-Nazi leader was not part of the "legitimate business" of that entity. The first ethnic cleansing in that war being carried out by our Craotian Nazi allies. That the Croatian Nazis cleansed half a million people is a matter of record. That our government knew that the the Bosnian Nazi Molsme leader was committed to genocide & the KLA Nazis openly engaged in it when they started criminal wars to assist them is a matter of record. It is therefore demonstrably false to describe the leaders of Croatia, the EU, or indeed Britain as anything other than genocidal pro-Nazi war criminals. You are right William that the inviolability of European frontiers was accepted by all countries under the Helsinki Treaty under which we undertook to take no action against the "territorial integrity or unity" of other signatories such as Yugolsavia. Having obviously broken that treaty the claim that the newly claimed frontiers of Croatia were inviolable is clearly dishonest. Had the EU decided to support the break up of Yugolsavia along ethnic lines that would have ben merely the old fashioned imperialism of big states since time immemorial & if not right, at least not that bad. Instead they chose to establish artificial boun daries & cleanse the populations to fit - this is the imperialism of Hitler & an obscenity. William The Serbs were not extreme, the Log Revolution cutting down logs to block roads into Serb areas) was, by definition neither aggressive nor a matter of cleansing - quite the reverse. As you say the label of cleansers was "stuck on" the Serbs but as you clearly understand & the map shows they were not primarily or possibly at all guilty. It was never a matter of the Serbs "blowing it" by any action of thei. It stuck on them by a western media & politicians who were & are wholly corrupt racist scuim willing to tell absolutely any lie to us to support Nazi genocide. The facts prove that. |
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| William_Cleland |
This is what I had in mind by being way too extreme:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0iroka_Kula_massacre and yes I am well aware that the Croatian side did some very evil things as well:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospi%C4%87_massacre As for the Croatian government being genocidal now that the dust has settled I doubt Dado Pršo would have played for Croatia if that were the case given he is an ethnic Serb. |
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| Neil |
Having previously tried to edit a wikipedia article which was proven to be a word for word repeat of a Croatian government article & being prevented, I am unconvinced that wikipedia is a trustworthy source. This is not enhanced by the article saying the story is "according to Croatian sources". The number of atrocity stories the western media pushed which later turned out to be lies or at least lacking evidence is enormous. Look at all the stories of hundreds of thousands of women held in rape camps which turned out to be wholly lies. The number of times our media has apologised for pushing racist lies is, of course, zero.
However you make a fair point about Dado. Nonetheless a country which has profited from genocide & made no reparation is still genocidal in the same way that a burglar who does not return the stolen goods is still a burglar after he has left your house. |
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| agentmancuso |
Racial equality has nothing to do with it. Insofar as 'race' means anything at all, then Serbs and Croats are evidently of the same race.
I don't accept it. I think 'nationality' is a crock of s***e. Within the Yugoslav federal system, the constituent republics were legally entitled to request further devolution of powers. The Serb dominated federal authorities attempted to prevent this happening by physical force, which was completely illegitimate. Nationalist hysteria, as per usual, fueled disgusting atrocities on all sides.
Well you can believe this Living Marxism spawned nonsense if you like. But you'll only succeed in making anti-EU campaigners look completely bonkers. (If they don't already). |
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| William_Cleland |
Worth noting that the republics were actually entitled to secede unilaterally under Tito's 1974 constitution and that the second Yugoslavia in its final years was a very loose federation of 8 almost independent states (Kosovo and Vojvodina were almost on a par with the six republics) with only the armed forces and the Communist party left as strong shared institutions. There were no powers left to devolve in other words beyond going all the way. The end game for the Slovenes was always outright independence, followed as quickly as possible by EU entry and to suggest otherwise is misleading. They were fed up of providing subsidy payments to the poorer parts of Yugoslavia (primarily to Kosovo and Macedonia) that they were far removed from both geographically and culturally and understandably saw the EU as being a much better free market for their industries to participate in. The problem, thereafter, was that Milosevic's effective control of Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro's votes on the collective presidency based on a series of coup d'etats forced by street demonstrations left Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia outnumbered. The rush for the exit on their parts was understandable given the behaviour of the Milosevic regime in trying to ditch the 1974 constitution and recentralize control over Yugoslavia from Belgrade. The early international recognition of Croatia and Bosnia based on a set of highly questionable internal borders drawn up by a dictatorial regime was a complete disaster and helped to trigger the wars that followed as there was no foreign military intervention to help back it up on the ground. Prior to that point emerging states had to demonstrate effective control of their frontiers in order to be recognised. Both Croatia and Bosnia failed in that regard. Only Macedonia met the normal criteria and not coincidentally only in Macedonia did things proceed peacefully. The Western powers mistakenly believed that by offering recognition of future Serbian control over Kosovo (bear in mind the full implications of that for ethnic Albanians) and Vojvodina under the Carrington Plan that would have made all six republics independent, Milosevic would concede the Serb majority areas of Bosnia and Croatia. He didn't and the rest is history. |
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| Neil |
William you are wrong about their being a legal right of seccession in Yugoslavia's constitution. This is unlike the Constitutionn Stalin gave the USSR (where all sorts of rights were cynically guaranteed - I doubt Stalin ever expected it would be used). Moreover the Croatian constitution specificly gave the Serbs, as a constituent people of Croatia, a veto over any constitutional change. The Croatian Nazi declaration of independence was thus illegal under both international & Croatian law.
Miolsevic did not "ditch the constitution". He suspended Kosovo's government, for good reasons as shown in the NYT report - this was an internal matter of Serbia, not of the Yugoslav constitution.
Correct - under the Montevideo Agreement this has been the case under international law. If it were not so it would be possible for any nation to legally attack any other merely by "recognising" a friendly "government" which would invite them in. This is exactly what Teddy Rooseveldt did to grab the Panama Canal which is why this loophole was closed. The EU knew perfectly well that they were breaking international law & knew perfectly well, because every independent Balkan expert told them, that setting up Nazi ruled states claiming authority over areas predominantly occupied by what they & Hitler considered inferior races was likely to bring about genocide. Although the EU originaly voted against such dismemberment 12-1 they changed their minds a few days later after some arm twisting by Germany's pro-Nazi government & voted unanimously for what they knew would be genocide. We have unfortunately established a precedent which would, for example, allow the EU to "recognise" Orkney & Shetland as "indpendent" under EU control & grab the oil. I have said before that a division on ethnic grounds would have been relatively acceptable & & was clearly acceptable to the Serbs too. That was never what the western powers wanted. They wanted genocide. In fact Milosevic went further than that & was willing to concede Croatian control of Krajina & the Dayton Agreement in Bosnia if racial equality & autonomy within Serb areas could be ensured. It was the western powers which were opposed to these principles. Agentmancusco In comparison to William's informed & well argued piece your response consists entirley of saying no it isn't & an absolute refusal to discuss facts. The facts are as I have stated & that being the case it is indeed
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| William_Cleland |
Think you'll find that the key complication that led to claims of illegality from the Serbs was their view that in Bosnia's case all three constituent peoples were supposed to be on board before secession could happen. The Serbs obviously weren't. That may also have applied to Croatia as well as the Serbs had that sort of constitutional status pre-Tudjman, but wouldn't have been an issue with Slovenia. It should be noted that the Kosovo Albanians pushed very hard for the status of a republic post-1974 and pre-Milosevic precisely because they wanted the right to secede. http://emperors-clothes.com/a/13.htm The New York Times, April 27, 1981, Monday It is just as difficult to understand why ethnic Albanians so fiercely demanded the status of a republic, when under their present status as a Socialist Autonomous Province they have virtually all the rights of a republic, including their own administration, banking, courts, flag and language - everything except the right to secede. According to the 1974 Constitution, the federal state is made up of a community of ''voluntarily united nations,'' which presupposes that these nations or republics have the right to pull out of the federation. On the other hand, it is specified that any territory of a republic, that is, the autonomous provinces, may not be altered without the consent of that republic. The simple explanation for Yugoslavia's rejection of the ethnic Albanians' request for a republic is that the Republic of Serbia would not agree to the amputation of its southern province, which was the historical heartland of the ancient kingdom of Serbia. |
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| Neil |
We may all presuppose but if it isn't in the law it isn't law. The United States was also a union of voluntary states & they fought a war over just such a supposition. This is part of the reason - to go back to the original topic - that the question of whether the EU constitreaty is a constitution, thus sovereignty lying with it, or not is important. The only reason the Irish got a vote, despite promises from both labour & the Lib Dems, is that there was no need for a supposition that they had a right to one - it is in their constitution. Incidentally Bosnia's legal problem was greater than you think. Its constitution required a rotating presidency between the leaders of the 3 communities. At the time that we "recognised" the independence of the place under its ex-Nazi Moslem leader the legal president was Radovan Karadic, the Serb leader. |
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| agentmancuso |
Yes, accepted.
Why didn't he? Did he really believe it would be possible to hold them by force? Or did he just gamble that the West would protest but not intervene? |
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| agentmancuso |
Well, William knows a lot more about it than I do! In any case, I wasn't so much refusing to discuss the facts as pointing out, in my ever helpful way, that whereas people are likely to take your overtly partisan pro-Serbianism with a pinch of salt at the best of times, when it's accompanied by flatly ludicrous assertions that the EU is 'Nazi' then they'll dismiss your argument without further consideration. And quite right too. |
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| William_Cleland |
If Borisav Jović is to be believed based on what is said in "Death of Yugoslavia" they got intelligence info from the Russians that the West would not intervene. I suspect Milosević also was of the opinion that although the Knin Serbs were potentially expendable giving up on the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina would mean losing power as Bosnia was still close to 40% pro-Belgrade Serb in the early 90s (who were in the majority over most of its territory) and had been much closer to 50% in the not too distant past. To both Serbs and Croats, Bosnia and Herzegovina is just a geographical region like the Highlands in Scotland and they tend to find the notion that it is a nation in its own right to be absurd. |
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| William_Cleland |
We will have to agree to disagree on the EU and federations. I think Czechoslovakia is a prime example of the fact that federations can come apart again even after constitutions are put in place. There are quite a few others. The bit you are leaving out in the quoted text above is that Izetbegović used emergency wartime powers to prolong his presidency. Also think it is pushing it a bit to call him an ex-Nazi although he was undoubtedly seen that way by many Serbs. Pro-Axis would maybe be more accurate as he was never actually in the SS Handschar or anything like that only in a Bosnian Muslim grouping called the Mladi Muslimani, who were pursuing their own Islamist agenda that didn't necessarily coincide entirely with that of the Nazis:- http://www.ex-yupress.com/dani/dani9.html |
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| agentmancuso |
Makes sense, thanks.
Rumour has it that some people feel the same about Scotland as a whole 
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| Dave Coull |
William wrote "I think Czechoslovakia is a prime example of the fact that federations can come apart again even after constitutions are put in place". Also, remember it is just over a hundred years since the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway split up. During the Second World War, Norway was against the Nazis, while Sweden remained neutral, but at no time in the 100+ years since they split have they been in conflict with each other. Not even over Norway's oil........
Turning to a more negative example, I think Neil goes too far in implying that anybody who supported something different from Tito's Yugoslavia was/is a Nazi. What I do think is true is that a painfull process of adjustment to post-Tito reality was made immeasurably worse by some very ignorant meddling by Western powers. William wrote "To both Serbs and Croats, Bosnia and Herzegovina is just a geographical region like the Highlands in Scotland and they tend to find the notion that it is a nation in its own right to be absurd". Yes, and Croats and Serbs between them (although mutually antagonistic) make up a large majority of the population of Bosnia, so that means a majority of the population of Bosnia saw it simply as a region whose control was contested between Croatia and Serbia. William says of Izetbegović, president of Bosnia at the time of the Yugoslav break-up, that, although many Serbs saw him as an "ex-Nazi", that's pushing it a bit. "Pro-Axis would maybe be more accurate as he was never actually in the SS Handschar or anything like that only in a Bosnian Muslim grouping called the Mladi Muslimani, who were pursuing their own Islamist agenda that didn't necessarily coincide entirely with that of the Nazis". Exactly the same thing could be said about virtually ALL of the Nazi collaborators throughout Europe. For instance, in France, although the Vichy collaborationist regime was anti-Semitic etc, the very fact that they were French and not German meant that there were bound to be plenty of instances where their interests and those of the Nazis "didn't necessarily coincide entirely". However, collaborators having some "differences" from the Nazis didn't necessarily make them any better. In the case of the Croatian Ustashe, the SS actually tried to exercise a restraining influence on them. The German Nazis were all for rounding up Jews, and political opponents, but they couldn't see the sense in the Ustashe's desire for, and attempt at, the ethnic genocide of ALL Serbs. The Nazis thought that made no sense in strategic terms, it was a waste of resources and counter-productive. So they actually tried to restrain the Ustashe, though with limited success. At the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia, telling the Bosnian Serbs that they were expected to accept being part of a Bosnia which had a government supported by the Ustashe (which had never gone away, you know), and whose leader was "never actually in the SS Handschar", but only in an extreme Muslim grouping which had collaborated with the Nazis, was guaranteed to lead to a very nasty war indeed. Some of us saw this before it actually happened, and got no pleasure out of being proved right. |
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| William_Cleland |
Couple of inaccuracies in there, Dave, and I am in a pedantic mood so I will point them out.  The Bosnian Muslims by some estimates are now actually an outright majority at just over 50% (other estimates put them at 48%). There is still a remorseless demographic shift underway due to their much higher birth rate from the 60s to the 80s. When the war started they were low 40s%, however, and it is highly doubtful that the Bosnian state that gained international recognition in 1992 had majority support amongst the population upon its recognized territory so the point you made was basically valid. Most Croats only voted yes to independence as a way to exit Yugoslavia as quickly as possible not because they actually wanted to be ruled from Sarajevo rather than Zagreb in future. Second slight inaccuracy is that the Ustashe policy wasn't quite genocide of all Serbs in WWII but murder a third, convert a third expel a third. No question that they were thoroughly bad eggs, however, and not the type of people one would wish to play croquet with.
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| Dave Coull |
William wrote "To both Serbs and Croats, Bosnia and Herzegovina is just a geographical region like the Highlands in Scotland and they tend to find the notion that it is a nation in its own right to be absurd.".
Agentmancuso says "Rumour has it that some people feel the same about Scotland as a whole". However, whereas in the case of Bosnia those who took this view were actually the large majority, in the case of Scotland only an insignificant minority think the country is "just a geographical region like the Highlands". In the case of Bosnia, neither the main Croat political party nor the main Serb political party accepted Bosnia as a "nation". In the case of Scotland, NONE of the political parties regard it as "just a geographical region like the Highlands", ALL of the political parties officially accept that Scotland is a "nation". The ways that this "nationality" is expressed varies. For instance, under a Conservative government, the Stone of Destiny was returned to Scotland with great ceremony as a symbol of nationhood. Under a Labour government a Scottish Parliament was re-established. And the Liberal-Democrats have, for the most part, been strong on recognising Scottish nationality, with a few isolated dissidents from the official Lib-Dem line, such as yourself. But all political parties officially recognise that Scotland is a nation, and not merely a region, like the Highlands. And it's not just the political parties. Both opinion polls and any survey you care to undertake yourself will confirm that the great majority of the inhabitants of Scotland do not regard the country as merely "a geographical region, like the Highlands". The "Bosnia" which declared itself independent from Yugoslavia under a government led by a sectarian Muslim party whose leader had been a Nazi collaborator, and with the cynical short-term support of the ultra-Nazi Ustashe, claimed boundaries which were nothing but a line drawn on the map by the Communist Party dictator Tito for a region of his Yugoslavia, and which were in fact disputed by both Croatia and Serbia, with the support of large sections of the Bosnian population. The Scotland for which some of us support independence has ancient boundaries which are not in dispute, there is no part of Scotland which is claimed by any other nation, and there is no region of Scotland where any "ethnic minority" claims an opt-out. |
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| Neil |
Actually he did - the people who wouldn't concede the right to be run by Nazis committed to their genocide were the locals. Indeed they clearly would have been able to hold their homes by force had the west not intervened. In fact the Bosnian Serbs repeatedly demonstrated the ability to defeat Izetbegovic's Moslems & then, offered them cease fires which Izetbegovic's thugs assisted by our al Quaeda friend,s repeatedly broke after we had rearmeed them. Agent your second argument amounts to saying that facts are of no importance - anybody who ever supports a side you or the British government dislike is ipso facto wrong & shouldn't be listened to. If I am factually correct & the facts do not support what we were told about the Serbs, which you apparently cannot dispute, then that is bound to be, by comparison only, a pro-Serb position. If you were to say you believed the Jewish Holocaust was factually true would that make you pro-Jewish & thus not be listened to?
Without such clear proof Izetbegovic's "independence" remains entirely fraudulent & Karadic remained legally president. The organisation Izetbegovic was part of acted as recruiters & auxiliaries for the Handschar Division of the SS. His degree of renunciation of Nazism is shown by the fact that when he started the war he formed a "bodyguard" unit which he named the Habdschar Division (the SS originally started as a bodyguard unit for Hitler). His public commitment to genocide "their can be neither peace nor co-existence" with non-Molsems is impossible to dispute though the BBC found it easy to censor. If he wasn't a Nazi, because he wasn't actually a full member of possibly the nastiest unit of the Waffen SS, it is difficult to think of anybody who was - but then after the war everybody said they weren't personally Nazis they were only following orders. The diference between Czechoslovakia & Yugoslavia was that the former federation did break up on ethnic lines whereas NATO & the EU decided that the latter would be forced to break on imperial ones.
The fact is that that the leaders of the Croats, Bosnian Moslems & some of the KLA were Nazis if any significant number of people ever were & that they were all publicly committed to genocide. The EU, NATO, our government (all parties) & media were fully aware of that & went to war knowingly & deliberately to support genocide in the Nazi cause. That being the case they are, as a matter of law, almost without exception, wholly corrupt genocidal Nazi war criminals |
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| William_Cleland |
He rejected the Carrington Plan, Neil. Google it if you don't believe me. |
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| Neil |
He accepted Dayton & he tried to persuade the Krajina Serbs to acsept Croatian Nazi rule.
Everybody rejected the Carrington plan. Nor is it likely, seeing how things went, that the west ever seriously intended to enforce its alleged rules about minority rights since the very fact of declaring independence violated the constitutional rights of minoeirities in Croatia & Bosnia. I believe it was only a way to get the Nazi powers out from under their Helsinki Treaty guarantee of Yugoslav sovereignty by getting Yugoslavia to vest sovereignty in the constituents prior to any "hegotiation". |
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| William_Cleland |
You appear to be making things up as you go along now. 5 out of 6 republics initially accepted the Carrington Plan including Montenegro. Momir Bulatovic later did a U-turn under heavy pressure from Belgrade. If you don't believe me try watching these youtube clips:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa8ztIxfz-Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gqghsvYJu8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke84YiQFC8c |
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| Neil |
Hardly as I go along but I accept I overstated. However Slovenia & Croatia clearly signed it for PR purposes, very much in the same way the KLA had to be promised the Ramboullet "Agreement" was just for show before they would sign it. My criticism that it was clearly designed to get the west out from under their legal commitments is clearly valid. After Yugoslavia had signed it would have been found to be "unenforceable" & the west would have been able to walk away from their guarantee to protect Serbian minority rights saying that, since the constituents were sovereign nobody had any right to interfere.
http://www.britains-smallwars.com/Bosnia/Carrington.html |
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| agentmancuso |
 Don't get your tartan knickers in a twist Mr Coull, I was only kidding. But it's good to see your startlingly literal view of the world is still flourishing.
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| agentmancuso |
No it doesn't. It amounts - indeed consists in - saying that no matter how detailed the information you possess, the compulsion to present it in absurdly lurid colours will deter a neutral listener from taking you seriously.
It's not all that often that I agree with a position taken by the British government.
I'm not sure if these bits are aimed at me or not. They make little sense either way. |
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| Dave Coull |
Most people, of all sorts of different political views, accept that Ireland is a "nation". Most people, of all sorts of different political views, accept that Scotland is a "nation". But what about "Northern Ireland"? Some people can't even bring themselves to call it that, they call it "The Six Counties". But whatever we call it, the one thing that the most ardent of Irish republicans and the most dyed-in-the-wool of Unionists seem to agree on is, it isn't a nation, at most it is a Province.
William wrote regarding my recent post "Couple of inaccuracies in there, Dave". I don't think so. "slight inaccuracy is that the Ustashe policy wasn't quite genocide of all Serbs in WWII but murder a third, convert a third expel a third." Okay, so one third of Serbs were to be given the choice of changing their religion with a gun pointing at their heads. It's still pretty genocidal. And even if we accept this "slight inaccuracy", that's just one. You said "a couple". "The Bosnian Muslims by some estimates are now actually an outright majority at just over 50% (other estimates put them at 48%)." The significant word there is NOW. We weren't talking about "now". We were talking about when Yugoslavia broke up. At that time, although the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs wanted completely different things, what they were agreed on was that Bosnia wasn't really a "nation" in the sense that Croatia and Serbia were. Therefore I was correct to say that, at the time when it was presented to the world as a newly independent nation, the majority of inhabitants of Bosnia did not consider it a nation. Although the Muslims may be approaching a majority of Bosnians now, that is a very recent phenomenon. Before the First World War, the Serbs were a clear majority in Bosnia, and had been for many centuries. But the First World War started with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, by a Serbian Nationalist, in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. During WW1, the Austro-Hungarian Empire encouraged Croats to do a bit of ethnic cleansing of Serbs. The Ottoman Empire, on the same side in that war as Austria and Germany, encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to do likewise. As a result, the Serb population was considerably reduced. Ethnic cleansing of Serbs, conducted especially by the Croatian Ustashe, but also by Muslim Nazi-collaborationist organisations, happened again in the Second World War. That was what so reduced the Serb population of Bosnia. But it is still true that, at the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia, a majority of the population of Bosnia didn't regard the place as a "nation". So, at most, half an inaccuracy. Not "a couple". |
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| William_Cleland |
Replacing majority with plurality would be more accurate in a Serbian context. Majority would be best saved for a Christian vs Muslim headcount:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hist...ia_and_Herzegovina#Ottoman_Empire Sometimes wonder if far left types have a blind spot towards Serbian nationalism because they prefer to see the actions of Milosevic and co as defending the legacy of Titoism rather than as the initial rejection of Tito's Brotherhood and Unity policy due to a strong nationalist backlash throughout Serbian society over Kosovo's elevated status in the 1974 constitution. Beyond all that though the real tragedy is that the West egged the Bosnian Muslims on to do things they might otherwise have not dared to attempt to the extent that the Americans even encouraged Izetbegovic to reject this Carrington-Cutileiro peace plan a couple of months before the war kicked off in Bosnia after he had initially agreed to it along with the Bosnian Serb and Croat leaders:- 
Well over 100,000 fatalities later after three and a half years of civil war the SDA wound up settling for a significantly worse territorial internal division than that from a Bosnian Muslim standpoint (as the yellow line above shows) in the context of the loose Bosnian federal structure under the Dayton peace accord. |
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| Neil |
The official definition of genocide is pretty wide
Under that definition what the WW2 Croats attempted was not merely genocide but the total genocide of the entire population since murder, expulsion & forcible conversion count. Personally I am uncomfortable with classing ethnic cleansing as such, where it doesn't involve murder, though that is clearly designed to destroy, at least in part, an ethnic group in its homeland. Since the cleansing of 350,000 non-Albanians from Kosovo did involve thousands of murders, our & other western governments did clearly participate in genocide there as well as in Bosnia & Croatia. Agent may consider it immoderate to say this but I do not believe a fact can be immoderate - which I grant gets me into some trouble.
My suspicion is that "leftists" get a blind spot any time the media describe somebody as "another Hitler". Those in charge know this & use it every time they want to bomb somebody. Even the Bosnian Moslems leaders don't really accept Bosnia & Hercegovina as a nation. Izetbegovic was really committed to a worldwide Caliphate & initially resisted the use of the term "Bosniacs" to describe local Moslems until his western handlers explained how useful the term was for the media to portay his regime as legitimate & the local Serbs as invaders. The same sleight of word is used to portray Albanians as Kosovars & the original Kosovars as foreigners. Orwell, having spent the war working for the BBC, knew exactly how they worked then & now. |
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| William_Cleland |
I responded to:-
and made it clear from the outset that I was being pedantic. Think Dave was implying complete annihilation with the "ALL".
You are right with that last bit about Izetbegovic from what I understand. There had long been a campaign by secular Bosnian Muslim commies to use Bosniak, however, as being linked to a religion was a bit embarrassing in the Tito era and a lot of them wound up in the SDA so not sure on the accuracy of the western handler bit. Also maybe worth bearing in mind that the Bosnian Muslims often claim to be descended to a large extent from the Bogomils of medieval Bosnia (a gnostic sect that were regarded as heretics by both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy). Serbs and Croats dispute that as they like to see themselves as the true locals while the Bosnian Muslims are linked to a large extent to foreign invaders. |
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| Neil |
They probably partly are decended from the Bogomils though both enemies and friends call them Turks & partly from Serbian upper classes when laws were intorduced that Moslem converts would inherit family lands (The brits did the same in Ireland). However it is unlikely they were a majority even then & the only Bosnian nation there has ever been (with very different boundaries) was after the battle of Kosovo when Serbia was overrun by the Turks but a Christian "crusader" Bosnian state held out for a few generations. The existence of Bosnia & Hercegovina as a "nation" goes back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupying 2 provinces of the Turkish Empire before Serbia could move in. | ||||||||
| Dave Coull |
William wrote "Sometimes wonder if far left types have a blind spot towards Serbian nationalism because they prefer to see the actions of Milosevic and co as defending the legacy of Titoism rather than as the initial rejection of Tito's Brotherhood and Unity policy"
No blind spot in my case. From my perspective, Tito was a military dictator who loved fancy uniforms of a type more often seen on the leaders of Latin American juntas, a so-called "communist" who lived in a palace and had a yacht and his own private hunting estate, where he entertained foreign capitalists and even aristocracy lavishly. From my point of view, not a "legacy" particularly worth defending. "Brotherhood and Unity" might have carried a bit more conviction if Tito and his cronies hadn't been such hypocrites. "due to a strong nationalist backlash throughout Serbian society over Kosovo's elevated status in the 1974 constitution". Unfortunately, Kosovo becoming a distinct entity from Serbia as such was always going to cause problems, because the site of the Battle of Kosovo, where Tzar Lazar was defeated by the invading Turks, was regarded by many Serbs as being holy ground, and the very heartland of Serbia. I agree Milosovic played on this. But it was the sheer stupidity of politicians in Germany, Britain, the USA etc which turned this into a major tragedy. |
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| Neil |
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice"
Robert Heinlein However, at least in the cae of germany, malice certainly existed & their actions are difficult to fully explain in any other way See www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/carr/carr.html At the very best the actions of the others show them being uncaring enough not to think about what they were doing. The almost Stalinist unity of our media in censoring any mention of the Nazi antecedents of our friends & in pushing every propaganda lie no matter how improbable cannot adequately be explained by stupidity. If they were accidents or ignorance then, statistically they would have to be errors in every direction & as many papers would have been accusing the Slovenians of massacring the local Serb civilian population (they didn't) as accused the Serbs of running rape camps (they also didn't). Unity of purpose in lying proves deliberation. |
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| William_Cleland |
Think there was a cold war mentality at work. The Germans didn't want a potential Russian ally (i.e. a recentralized Yugoslavia) only a couple of hours tank trundle away from Munich along Austria's autobahns.
The media coverage of the breakup of Yugoslavia has definitely made me more skeptical of major western media outlets ever since. Part of the problem more than "Stalinist unity" and coordinated conspiracy may have been that television correspondents usually didn't speak Serbo-Croat meaning their access to info and images could be easily controlled by whoever was providing them with interpreters, security and press releases. Maybe the Slovenes, Croats and Bosnian Muslims simply did a much better job at that than the Serbs? In a Bosnian context, the TV crews really didn't get out of Sarajevo much for most of the conflict and therefore often missed out on scenes like this involving the Bosnian army on parade in Zenica where there was less incentive for the Bosnian Muslims to keep up the facade of multiculturalism in order to shape international opinion:- 
Those sorts of images only occasionally made it into the quality broadsheets and seldom appeared in the main television news bulletins that were primarily driving public opinion and the political discourse on the subject. |
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| Neil |
Nonetheless I don't think our media are stupid enough not to have noticed what side they were reporting from. Also we have the Trnopolje case where ITN "accidenttally" faked a concentration camp video by going inside an electricty transformer station & photographing people on the outside, through barbed wire to give the impression the refugees were being held prisoner. This happened after Penny Marshall & her team were instructed by ITN to "get pictures of a concentration camp or don't bother coming back". The judge in the subsequent LM libel case allowed questions like whether reporting this "error" was in the western interest" & told the jury that ther truth "doesn't matter" they should find for ITN. http://www.antiwar.com/orig/judgment2.html In some ways it would be worse if the media really had accidentaly faked their news. If it was deliberate then it is possible that they can be believed on other subjects in which there is less government interest. If ithey really did accidentally fake arguably the most important set of pictures ITN ever produced & haven't noticed it for 15 years, even after admitting it in court, then there are absolutely no circumstances in which any news story or picture can be assumed not to have been accidentaly faked. Assuming it was deliberate allows us to view the world as more sane - which does not of course prove it either way. 
PS The skinny guy they picked out was suffering from TB. |
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| William_Cleland |
The great unanswered question of that photograph was always why the Bosnian Serbs would be daft enough to let a western camera crew into a concentration camp in the first place. Their leadership must have been getting stuck into the rakija in a big way before a visit like that would be approved.  I don't question for a minute that horrendous crimes were being committed elsewhere at that point but yes that photograph always appeared to me to be at best an embellishment on the part of ITN.
Even at the time the whole genocide argument appeared somewhat bogus to me (i.e. as far as the implication that they were out to completely annihilate the Bosnian Muslims, Final Solution style rather than the far broader modern legal definition) because the Serbian actions in both Croatia and Bosnia were much more consistent with grab the main contiguous blue bits on the ethnic majority map (see below) plus a few strategic locations required to defend them and exchange minority populations with the other side:- 
Even when there was an obvious military advantage to pushing a bit further as in Croatia where they were initially close at three different points of "the banana" to completely controlling Croatian territory from frontier to frontier (or coastline) and hence severing supply lines they seemed to stop at the limits of what could reasonably be regarded as Serb soil on the basis of demography. Beyond that I lost count of the number of times I heard the words "the last Bosnian Muslims have been expelled from Banja Luka" in newscasts during the conflict. After looking into a bit I quickly began to find out that some Muslims who were regarded as politically non-threatening never were ethnically cleansed and some actually fought with or in the Bosnian Serb Army. The percentages in that regard were probably not completely out of whack with what was happening on the other side of the frontline where the Serbian minority was concerned even if there were shades of grey involved. |
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| Neil |
Indeed - it seems perfectly proper that the people in the blue bits should be free to choose to live in Yugoslavia/Serbia if they wished. The Bosnian Moslems in the green area of Bihac (where it juts into Croatia) rose in rebellion against the Moslem Nazis & most of all against the al Quaeda forces going in & press ganging recruits to the Moslem army. Under their leader Fikret Abdic they & I suspect a very large number of Moslems elsewhere, would have preferred to stay in Yugoslavia or even "Greater Serbia".
For doing this the ICTY allowed the Croatian Nazis to put him on "trial" giving an entirely new meaning to the phrase "Nazi war crimes trial". He is currently serving 20 years for being a Moslem who supported peace & unity & opposed al Quaeda when they were our friends. As the previously most popular leader, somebody also supported by Serbs & a successful business man promoting the free market he would be exactly what the western powers were looking for as a leader if making Bosnia a success, rather than an EU colony, had ever been desired. I also have some doubts whether the Dalmatians on the coast were that keen on being loyal Croats. The definition of a Croat is a a Serbo-Croat who is a Catholic but the Croats of Zagreb are historically Hungarian/Austrian cultured whereas the coastal people became Catholic under Venetian rule. The Dalmatians & Zagreb Croats are certainly much more different than the Serbs & Montenegrins. I suspect any country could be fractured by a foreign inteligence service pouring money & heavy weaponry to violent extremists. As a perhaps trivial, but distressingly similar example it seems most of the ordinary people of Yugoslavia seemed keener to vote for Serbia in Eurovision than Celtic fans are to support Rangers in Europe, which suggests that, even after the war the real divisions are not so deep. |
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| Holebender |
May I suggest that this thread be moved to the Global Politics section? | ||||||||
| William_Cleland |
I wouldn't express that theory to any Dalmatian or Herzegovinian Croat, Neil. Trust me on that one. Hajduk Split vs. Dinamo Zagreb and maybe more importantly Torcida vs. BBB is how that internal rivalry expresses itself.
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| azzuri |
Good shout - I've split the thread where appropriate, you can continue the Serbia/Yugoslavia discussion here... |
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| Neil |
A fair comparison William. I think few living in the west of Scotland would deny that the ethnic tension between Rangers & Celtic fans has caused deaths & could, if enough money were paid & weaponry supplied to some of the real psychos on either side it could be turned into a real war.
Yhe KLA certainly count as such (they probably killed as many Albanian "quislings" as they did Serbs) & I suggest people with Nazi histories & public commitment to genocide like Izetbegovic & Tudjman also count. |
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