Just a quick response to Barkley and Sid. According to local news reports, the workers did not support some union leaders' calls to join the demonstrations, which doesn't surprise me very much. In the interviews with the workers, they were more concerned with work and wages (and a fear of losing their jobs) than they were with the political basis of the demonstrations. As to the dominant faction in the demonstrations, in all the pictures in the newspapers here, the dominate face on the signs the protesters are carrying is that of Vuk Draskovic, the Serbian ultranationalist leader. Some other were Serbian Orthodox Church posters. I did not mean to imply that the US was directly involved in the organization of the original demonstrations, though since they have occurred the US has obviously been backing the opposition with threats to the Milosevic government of economic sanctions etc. (Interestingly, when similar numbers of Canadian workers carried off demonstrations in Toronto and Hamilton protesting neo-liberal economic oppression on the poor and the public in Canada, the US pretended it didn't even notice. Shades of Milosevic). What I meant is that the US has been carrying on a campaign of destabilization agains Yugoslavia, past and present, for 6 or 7 years and will not giveup until it has a captive, rightwing government in place. Milosevic, whatever his faults, is not a US puppet. Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
