Originally posted by Pellaken
Milocivic dident rig his elections, and 30% of the people voted for him. what if 51% had? would the US have stopped bombing?
This, like everything you've stated on the Yugoslav war, is complete kaka, Pellaken. Please don't ever expect to peddle this collaborationist apologist stuff without a lengthy reply.
1) Milosevic rigged virtually every one of his elections and his party apparatus controlled virtually all media in the country to help it along. God knows where you got the idea he didn't. The only thing that ever went wrong with his last election was that the army vote turned against him, and he hadn't planned how to rig that in advance. In the chaos, his vote rigging sytem broke down. And btw, the US would have stopped bombing when the Rump Yugoslavia stopped destabilizing the region by condoning atrocities against its own citizens. It started bombing because the last two times it had listened to arguments like yours, tens of thousands of people died and millions more were made homeless or refugees as a consequence.
2) There is no evidence that Izbegovic committed war crimes. There IS evidence that Bosnian federal troops committed war crimes on their own initiative, but somewhat more rarely then their Croat nationalist counterparts, and far, far more rarely than their Serbian nationalist counterparts. Bosnia's better record might have something to do with the fact that it was clearly the victim of aggression from two sides, and its federal army included large contingents of croats and serbs within it - which should tell you something about the character of the country you are so quick to slight.
And once again, those crimes were committed on a piecemeal basis, which is entirely different from the situation in Bosnian Serbia or the Rump Yugoslavia, where the leadership clearly encouraged, condoned and occasionally even ordered atrocities.
3) I am sick to my stomach at how the Canadian left has become so narrow-minded as to actually insist that just because the US was involved in a war, it was somehow "illegal." Frankly, I couldn't care less if it was illegal by the botched, inconsistently applied, undeveloped standards of international law. I care if the war was just or not, and given the comparative records of NATO states in the last few decades vs. Yugoslavia's, I was prepared to give NATO more than the benefit of the doubt that their motives were purely altruistic. But I'm prepared to offer you a deal, Pellaken - the moment that the Rump Yugoslavia ponies up and agrees to pay reparations to Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia for the use of JNA heavy weapons against the citizens of those three republics, then maybe I will accept the U.S. should chip in a dollar or two in reparations, ok?
It's amazing what Serbian/Social Democratic propaganda can accomplish in this country. Take my brother, who served as a peacekeeper in Croatia, for example. Read his service diary, and all he writes about day after day is UN operational decisions that kowtowed to the Serb nationalists in an effort to be "neutral."
Then, years later, helped in part by Gen. Lewis Mackenzie's kind paid work on behalf of Serbian lobby groups, his "recollection" was of a place where the Serbs were hard done by. Happily, the spectre of a war in Kosovo refreshed his memory.
And that's why the UN sucks. Because it is build on an idealogy that believes that there can be a "middle ground" in conflicts like the FOUR CONSECUTIVE WARS that Federal Yugoslavia initiated. It's an institution that believes that right and wrong can be decided by votes in a chamber where votes are monopolized in the hands of state governments controlled by the likes of Slobo Milosovic, Lukashenko or Saddam. It's an institution that priorizes soveriegnty above all else, and a part of a system of international law that gives greater sway to the rights of people like Mobutu, Mugabe and Marcos than it would to literally billions of stateless citizens.
R.III
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We are coming for you, Juicy-Fruit 
