-Caveat Lector- >>>Even some should know that eventually the cast comes off and strength is regained. Artificial supports and props can only last so long. A<>E<>R <<< From http://www.smh.com.au/news/0103/30/world/world12.html }}>Begin - WORLD Bosnian unity crumbles as Croat soldiers' mutiny spreads Belgrade: Hardline Croat separatists in Bosnia set up their own defence headquarters as a mutiny spread among Croat soldiers serving in the Muslim-Croat federation army. Reports from barracks across the federation in Bosnia on Wednesday suggested the majority of the 7,500 Croat soldiers in the 22,500 strong common army were joining the mutiny. On Monday, 1,900 Croat soldiers from the central town of Vitez had abandoned their posts. The mutiny follows the establishment of a Croat national congress three weeks ago, which has called on all Croats to leave their jobs in the federation army, police and other public offices. The aim of the congress is to establish a "third entity" or Croat statelet in Bosnia, leaving the Muslims stranded in a small enclave between Serbs and Croats. Officials representing the international community in Bosnia have described the events as the most serious threat to the unity of Bosnia since the 1995 Dayton accords which ended the war. "This is an extremely worrying development,"one Western diplomat in Sarajevo said. Under Dayton, Bosnia was divided into two halves, the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serbian Republic, each with considerable decision-making powers but the skeleton of a central state holding them together. Muslims and Croats began the war together in 1992, fighting the attempt by Serb extremists to destroy the newly recognised country. But following Serb successes, and assuming the partition of the country was inevitable, Croats turned on their Muslim allies in 1993. Following intense international pressure, an alliance between Muslims and Croats was eventually patched up in 1994, and the two armies finished the war together. But hardline Croats, especially in Herzegovina, have never abandoned their dream of forming their own separate state called Herzeg-Bosna. "Any attempt to establish parallel structures is illegal, and anti-Dayton," Chris Bird, the spokesman for the International High Representative in Sarajevo, said on Wednesday. "We call on all members of the federation army to remain loyal to their legally appointed commanders." But that appeal seemed to fall on deaf ears. Most Croat generals are said to have walked out with their men. The question is whether the Croat soldiers have left to set up a new army, with access to weapons, or whether they are simply going to "run around the woods in blue jeans", as a diplomatic source put it. The Guardian End<{{ And from http://www.consider.net/forum_new.php3?newTemplate=OpenObject&newTop=200103260001&new DisplayURN=200103260001 }}>Begin Leader Monday 26th March 2001 Once more, war threatens the Balkans and, once more, the "something must be done" brigade moves into battle formation. Lord Robertson, the secretary- general of Nato - the same George Robertson who, as British defence minister, so fervently prosecuted the Kosovo war two years ago - demands another 1,400 soldiers to add to the 42,000 already in the region. In the Washington Post, General Wesley K Clark, a former supreme allied commander in Europe, calls for "a prompt western response". Newsweek warns that "if Nato loses its will and pulls out, it could call into question the alliance's very legitimacy". Western legislatures and media outlets ring with calls for intervention: to protect Macedonia, to protect the Albanian minority in Macedonia, to protect Serbs in Kosovo, to protect moderate Kosovars. Who cares who is protecting whom against whom? We are talking feel-good factors here, and politicians and opinion-formers never feel so good as when they are meddling in other people's business under the umbrella of western civilisation or human rights or ethical foreign policy. What a delight, after all these years, to take up the white man's burden once more! Better still, we can do it from the comfort of our armchairs in London and Washington. We should be thankful, in this one instance, for a Republican in the White House, a supposedly "isolationist" president who probably couldn't find Kosovo on a map. We should be thankful, too, that, for the time being, the British Foreign Secretary, recognising that British forces are already overstretched, shows no inclination to respond to Lord Robertson's call and send further troops. Robin Cook, all the same, has been "on the telephone" to his counterparts in the US and other European countries. "Border patrols will be stepped up both on the ground and in the air," we are assured. A 20-strong British unit is to "advise" the Macedonian government. We have been here before, many times. "Advice" has a nasty habit of turning into deeper involvement once the television cameras have something more dramatic to film than a few bursts of gunsmoke on the hillsides. It is hard, indeed, to see how Nato can extricate itself from the Balkan imbroglio. The extent to which the Kosovo adventure has turned out as the critics predicted is enough to make one weep, laughter being inappropriate for so great a tragedy. Intervention was designed to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Albanians in Kosovo. As the BBC's foreign editor John Simpson argues on page 50: "It gave Slobodan Milosevic's thugs an excuse to murder even more ethnic Albanians." Now, Nato is saddled, for the indefinite future, with the government of Kosovo. Victims and oppressors have changed sides. Serbs have been largely cleansed from the province, and one of Nato's functions is to run a special train, guarded by troops and helicopter gunships, so that they can move between the few enclaves where they remain. The Kosovo Liberation Army, the heroic freedom fighters of 1999, now supposedly disarmed, reappears (under a new name but in the same uniform) in the hills of Macedonia and in the Presevo Valley of southern Serbia. Some of its members openly threaten that Montenegro will be next. Within Kosovo, moreover, its former operational zones have mutated into Mafia-style fiefdoms, grown plump on the money poured in by the Nato powers. Civic society and the rule of law have all but collapsed. Drugs and prostitution are the region's fastest-growing industries; Kosovo, indeed, has no other economy worth the name. This is not an accidental by- product of Nato's intervention two years ago; it is the inevitable result, and it was predicted at the time. Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia has been a disaster from start to finish. Its defenders may point to peace and stability in Bosnia, but it is nothing of the sort. Bosnia threatens to blow apart at any moment, with the Croat minority defecting to Croatia. The west's belief that it could bring stability to the Balkans has proved utterly unfounded: the chances of Greece and Turkey being drawn into the conflict are now greater than ever. Does this imply that the west should harden its heart to human suffering, that it should abandon its commitments to human rights? In one sense, yes, since the repeated lesson of the 1990s was that well-intentioned interventions in civil conflicts only prolong and even worsen them. But human rights are not infringed only in wars. The west can stop selling arms to repressive regimes because they happen to suit its strategic and economic interests. It can do far more to organise the world trade system to the advantage of poorer countries, mainly by ceasing to subsidise its own farmers. It can unite to restrict the exploitation of the developing world by multinational corporations. It can make cheaper drugs available to those who suffer Aids in Africa. It can be more generous in opening its borders to those, not least in the Balkans, who wish to better themselves economically, whether or not they are also fleeing persecution. But all this is more expensive and less dramatic than sending in a few units of troops or bombing Balkan capitals. A sick man in America Sometimes, Schadenfreude is simply irresistible. Most Britons under 55 have spent almost their entire adult lives being lectured about the superiority of Japan and the United States. These two countries, it must be said, could hardly have been more different. One was rigid and hierarchical, the other flexible and democratic to a fault; one educated its children in obedience, the other in self-expression; one was statist, the other a free-market haven. But both were said to be more efficient, dynamic, forward-looking than the sickly British, who needed constant attention from the IMF. Now, Japan, says its finance minister, is near to bankruptcy while the US, like Britain in the 1970s (under a Tory government, for those too young to remember), cannot even keep the lights on, with power cuts already disrupting California and expected soon to spread to New York and the Midwest. Thank goodness for foot-and-mouth and the railways. Otherwise, we might start to believe we have everything right. © The Author © New Statesman Ltd. 2000. All rights reserved. End<{{ T' A<>E<>R Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the "democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded subjects. [[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard, Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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