Paul, Two points: 1) Apparently there is very hard evidence that for large numbers of those in the refugee camps there was a standard sequence of events: a) village or town shelled, b) door to door visits by Serbian troops or police or masked paramilitaries ordering the people to leave within five minutes or be killed (with those refusing having grenades tossed into their homes), c) males of certain ages being separated off, in some cases it is known that some or all of them were killed, in most it is unknown what happened to them and hopefully most of them will show up one or another, so to speak, d) the remaining people being told what route to leave by and where to go, e) in many cases there homes were destroyed after they left, f) in many cases their personal papers were destroyed and they were robbed, g) a lot of other unpleasant personal stuff has been done to them before they got out finally. 2) Your argument, repeated in this posting, that it is reasonable for defensive purposes for the Serbians to wish to create a cordon sanitaire near the borders of Albania and Macedonia is very reasonable. This is all the more so as we see increasing evidence of a "stealth" effort to escalate towards a ground troop invasion from one of those countries (although Macedonia has declared that it will allow no such thing). This is a very serious and scary move. However, this argument does not explain two things: a) why have people been expelled from areas quite far from the borders, e.g. from Pristina? b) why were they not moved in and away from the border rather than totally expelled from the country? You have made some very useful and important points that I have not seen repeated much in these discussions (Lou, you should put these in your forthcoming history!). One is that the Rugova regime did not respond to the moderate Milan Panic regime's openings in the early 90s. Their failure to do so certainly encouraged the return of the hardliners (no names today) in Belgrade, just as the policies of those hardliners encouraged the irredentism of the Albanian political leaders. The other is the failure of NATO to stop the shipment of arms across the Albanian border more recently. Of course Albania is not a NATO member and until recently did not have much in the way of NATO troops. But the failure to make such an effort and the siding up with the "politically incoherent" (not to mention corrupt and generally nasty) UCK/KLA at Rambouillet is something that cannot be defended and certainly contributed severely to the current awful (and getting worse) situation. Aside to Lou: Actually the timing of things that I have been recounting here has been from my memory. I followed these events closely as they happened and remember full well when Vukovar was attacked and when the Croats counterattacked later and drove the Serbs out of Krajina and (eastern) Slavonia. It was this ground assault that led a certain leader to cut deals at Dayton, deals that for all their problems are still mostly holding. It is rather amazing that this war has not spilled over into Bosnia- Herzegovina, not yet anyway. To anyone who wants to justify the Serb assaults in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosmet: What if in the early 90s the leader of Russia had decided to a) bomb Lithuania for seceding from the USSR, b) arm and support Russian guerrillas in the Crimea to separate from Ukraine and to force all non-Russians to leave, c) do the same in northern Kazakhstan, and d) deal with the Chechens by invading and expelling most of the population forcibly? Would the appropriate response be to talk about how all of this was justified by US plots against the USSR, fascist links in the past by some Baltic and Ukrainian separatists, and the sexism, clannishness, and high birth rates occurring among the Muslim Kazakhs and Chechens? Barkley Rosser
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