Re: Motivational question

Author: Mark Maher
Email: "Mark Maher" <markamaher@worldnet.att.net >
Date: 1999/05/26
Forums: alt.fan.mira-furlan
Message-ID: <7ihibo$sq$1@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net>

Thomas A. Bravard wrote in message <374c0dc6.938847@news.direct.ca>...
>Dear Moyra,
>
>Thank you for your kind comments, I followed your references and did a >little search on "Infoseek". The lay has depth and is still in agony
>over the situation in the place where she grew up. I can only hope
>that the current activities in Kosovo have not broken her heart. As
>an ex-military person I can only shake my head and wonder if the
>political gain is worth the loss in human life.
>

As a follow-up to Moyra's response, I would like to add the following. The question that you asked has been answered many times by Mira herself and her answer has always been emphatically, "Yugoslavian." In her heart and her mind she is from a people whose homeland, a united Yugoslavia where all people coexisted in peace, no longer exists. It was a country that she fought her own desperate personal battle to save and it was a fight that she was to lose. She lost all that she was and all that she had save her husband in that fight. That she has been forced to bear witness as the fighting has continued over the years can only have aggravated the pain in her heart.

From what I've read of the history of the region, it is one of the most active geopolitical fault lines in the world. Why the Slovenes, Croatians and Serbians (and those who currently constitute the Muslim population) settled there between 1600 and 1400 years ago is unknown. What is known is that all attempts to drive them out since have failed. It is as if when they arrived, they said "no more running - this is where we are going to make our stand."

For millennia, all of the people of this region have been the pawns forced to fight, often against each other, in the ongoing struggles between rival regional powers. Western Roman Catholic versus Eastern Othodox Catholic, Holy Roman Empire versus Byzantium, Ottomans versus Hungary and Austria, Russians versus the Turks. Central Powers versus the The Triple Entente. The Facists and Nazis versus the world. Everything stays the same, only the names change. There is no political gain ever permanently won here. This last decade has been just one more round in this recurring cycle of insanity and genocidal enthic hatred. In World War II, it is estimated that 1.7 million Yugoslavians were killed. Of that total, over one million died at the hands of *other* Yugoslavians.

So, if there is no political gain, the questions become:

1. What gains for humanity can be made by opposing the Serbian government in their attempts to remove the Albanians from Kosovo?

2. What cost is NATO willing to pay to succeed in reversing events and restoring Kosovo (if at all possible) to what it was before?

3. What are the Serbians and others willing to do to continue to drive the enthic Albanians from Kosovo or at least preserve events as they are now?

4. At the end of the day, can there ever be a true lasting peace in the Balkans?

I don't know the answers. I don't think anybody really does. And that's the greatest tragedy of the whole story.

__!_!__ Gizmo