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Ivogram: The Question of Independence (2x) |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - <nettime-l-temp@material.net> is the temporary home of the nettime-l list while desk.nl rebuilds its list-serving machine. please continue to send messages to <nettime-l@desk.nl> and your commands to <majordomo@desk.nl>. nettime-l-temp should be active for approximately 2 weeks (11-28 Jun 99). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1................. The Question of Independence 2................. What after the independence? From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net> To: nettime-l@desk.nl Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1999 01:23:20 -0400 Subject: The Question of Independence The Question of Independence Today some two hundred years ago this country declared the independence. The country, from which the independence was declared, is today the main ally of this country. The two countries spoke (and still speak) the same language. Only Tony Blair came a long way from the (mad) king George. I don't see any reason why would KLA abandon its struggle for independence, given the support among people, the years of suffering of Kosova Albanians under Milosevic's troops and police, the recent destruction brought upon Albanians by the Serbian forces, etc. Since it would be a rather embarrassing precedent to openly support KLA's claim to independence in the light of the recent death penalty judgement against the Kurdish rebel leader in Turkey, Ocalan, the NATO West granted Serbia de iure rule over Kosova, while effectively removing any Serb means of exercising that rule from Kosova. In such a situation ìsomebodyî has to fill the vacuum, if, of course, we operate under the premise that barbarians are incapable of self-rule. This can either be NATO, or that can be KLA. KLA speaks the language, knows the customs. Yet at the same time among KLA there is a lot of people brought up and educated in the West, therefore more easily acceptable to the Westerners. As long as they are able to prevail in the KLA ranks and as long as they are conducting the KLA controlled civilian rule over Kosova the NATO West is not going to oppose them, limiting itself to the military presence like in Bosnia. So far the U.S. allies are grudgingly accepting that this is the easiest way to run the province. That basically pushes NATO primarily in the ironical role of protecting the Serbs, just as they barely concluded the air war against them. Is KLA going to continue to fight for independence and against whom, now? Will they ask for U.N. recognition and how would they react to the rejection? Are they going to accept Yugoslav Dinar as the money of Kosova - the last vestige of the Yugoslav control over Kosova, and the one that Yugoslavia unwaveringly insist upon? Kosova has no economy. It is fully dependent on foreign help. It was heavily dependent on the help from other republics in old Yugoslavia, too. Macedonia, a country where Albanians already are more than a 1/3 of population, is similarly poor. Worse, Albania itself is the most devastated Albanian land: a country that for 45 years kept one third of its own population in prison camps - whole families together, only to fall a victim to pyramid money schemes instead of democracy and free market economy. So, the angst among the part of American left of Albania under NATO becoming ìnew Philippinesî has no echo among Albanians: from their perspective Philippines may look just fine. In their quest for independence, American revolutionaries (or terrorist if you take the British perspective) readily took help from the King of France, who was even bigger asshole than King George at that time. Meanwhile Yugoslavia was brought back to Middle Ages not just technologically, but sociologically as well, and not only as a function of NATO bombardment - since the sociological retreat to the mythical past started much earlier. In seventies communist Yugoslavia under Tito had per capita income comparable to Italy, a NATO member. In cities the standard of living was on par with the West (that's how we got ëyuppies'). Yet in eighties Yugoslavia was left to choke in its own pubescent vomit by the adults of the world: Tito died, cold war collapsed, IMF and World Bank ceased support, Tito's successors got mired in a seemingly unsolvable squabble over the ever smaller pie, the rage was on the rise and the white foam drooled down from the jaws. In Serbia as in the other essentially feudal societies, representative democracy established after the declarative abandonment of communism, is just a facade, a rubber stamp of approval for the undisputed king. The rule of Milosevic is more similar to the rule of King George than to the rule of Tony Blair. As in the Elizabethan England the real political power in nowadays Serbia is impossible without armed backing. Djindjic and Draskovic have the clout of court-jesters. Only people that have their own forces like Vojislav Seselj (the ìDukeî of Zemun), Zeljko Arkan (Milosevic's ìLord Vaderî at large), Biljana Plavsic (her grace, the Grand- Duchess of Banja Luka), Milo Djukanovic (the Prince of MonteNegro) and the newly, by tanks of the returning troops, established Veljo Ilic, the Earl of Cacak. As in the real feudal society, none of those nobles full- heartedly supports the king, but they are all his vassals - even those who declared themselves his enemies, eventually eyeing the throne. Distinctively important is to notice that all of them have their own troops under arms loyal to them, which is the sole reason why they are taken seriously. Milosevic can royally crack on those who oppose him each one separately, or given his present weakness, he can appease them into compliance by giving them complete power over their domains. As we've learned from the court intrigues of the past - a timely foreign support to the right person, may overthrow the king. The lack of democratic traditions that the West attributes to Serbia extends on it neighbors as well. The fact is that Ottoman Empire, once (in 14th century) very advanced and powerful, became an economic dwarf, a backward feudal society with no industrial infrastructure, already weak but still cruel to his subjects - Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians and Turks themselves in the 18th and 19th century (despite all the unfounded ovations it received in one New York Times op-ed not so long ago). National liberation was never followed by the philosophical liberation. It is as if the Ottoman Empire survived without the Ottomans. That's why the West simply must put the Kurdish question now under the closer scrutiny. It is not even the question of fairness: it is the question of *really* helping that region deal with its own past, which seems, sadly, to be the most important ingredient of their political thought. Ivo p.s. Arkan is not only a war criminal: he was a criminal wanted for murder in Europe BEFORE the war started. Why didn't they arrest him earlier? ---------------------------------/////////-------------------------- From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net> To: nettime-l@desk.nl Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 01:02:25 -0400 What after the independence? Less than a hundred years after declaring independence the U.S. experienced one of the most brutal wars in history: The American Civil War. The first truly modern war - where the ability of the North to destroy the infrastructure, industry and supply routes to the South, while at the same time managing to keep its considerable procurement potential in New England virtually untouched, won the victory of the war, despite the variable luck and skill of the fighting armies on the battlefield. That war saw the first use of submarines (semi-submersibles with spar torpedoes), aerial reconnaissance (balloons), machine guns (at the very end of the war, though) and landmines. The Civil War was then followed by the mass removal of American Natives to the reservations in the most inhospitable parts of this country. In today's political parlance that would be called ìethnic cleansingî, or even worse: genocide and holocaust. But I want to make another point here: it took time for democracy to take roots in the U.S., so that today major disputes are solved politically and legally rather than militarily. However, even in 1960-s Kennedy administration had to send National Guard to the streets in the South to protect the Yankee law upholding the equality of all American citizens regardless of the color of their skin. I am making this point to cool off some Anglo-Saxon heads currently steaming about Balkan and general Slavic recalcitrance (e.g. stopping the Russian reinforcements from entering Kosova). Yugoslavia was an artificial creation. But which country wasn't? The assumption that circulates in the circles close to the government of Croatia, that Yugoslavia was an artificial creation, is based on the premise that only ethnically based states are naturally created. This of course would make at least some sense (it fails completely in the case of the U.S., for example) only if one treats the ethnicity as a constant, unmovable historic category. But Croats are made of Istrians, Dalmatians, Slavonians, etc. - as the titles of early Croatian kings confirm and as the history of Croatian language demonstrates. At one point those sub-entities begun declaring themselves as Croats, the same as Prussians and Bavarians became Germans and as English and Welsh became British, and as the Croats and Serbs might have become Yugoslavs if there was more time allowed. Yugoslavia was definitely a difficult attempt at country building. It was born out of idealism of the romantic young intellectuals from the North and out of opportunism of the calculated politicians from the up and coming wanna be regional power in the South. The cruel joke on Serbs, that hoped to play the role of the Piedmont of the Balkans, was that the North in Yugoslavia was far more developed. Nations that comprised Yugoslavia spent centuries of their histories on the margins of two opposed empires: Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman. But while Austro- Hungarian empire went through (although to a lesser extent) the general developments that happened in the West (renaissance, steam power, railroads, electricity, etc.) the Ottomans and their provinces lagged severely behind. Parts of Ottoman empire still lived in 16th century in 1918. Yugoslavia was a backward peasant kingdom that Serbs ruled with the gloves off for barely twenty years and just about as an agreement between to major bourgeoisie was to be reached, that perhaps would have opened the road to democratic development, the Second World War started with Italy and Germany, heavily playing on ethnic hatred between major Yugoslav ethnic groups, that was provoked through those twenty years of the unenlightened rule of the Serbian dynasty, forever destroying whatever might have had happened should that process was left alone. After the war, communists having no patience to wait for the agreement between Yugoslavs to re-emerge (or actually fearing such genuine grass- roots agreement would put them out of business), imposed in rush their rule of ìbrotherhood and unityî over the people who just as of yesterday were involved in the fratricidal war. That worked, but again it did not work out of free will, but out of fear, and fear is not a democracy builder. Forty years in communist Yugoslavia a new generation came of age - that did not have the prejudice of the past and that was ready to embrace Yugoslavia as their country, with their kids perhaps growing up as Yugoslavs. But the country collapsed before they had kids or before them kids learned how to read or write. When they did, they already lived in Bosnia, Croatia or Serbia (the latest schizophrenically kept still calling itself Yugoslavia). Yugoslavia was simply not given enough time to survive as a viable idea. This time the war did not come from the outside. It came from the inability of regional leaders to reach an agreement on how to make a transition from the cold war communist regime to a modern free market democracy. In a different world, where things that needed time were allowed to take that needed time and brew at their pace, as it was a few hundred years ago, before the graphic revolution and the pressing need to have a picture of something new happening at some corner of the world in our evening news every night, maybe the common ground would be reached after a while and Yugoslavia would survive by becoming a strong E.U.-worthy country. While I agree that the West played considerable role in the process of Yugoslavia's helter-skelter break-up - by withholding money from Yugoslavia and by promising help to each regional leader separately and on separate terms, the primary blame lies with those regional leaders who allowed to be schemed into sacrificing the well-being of their populace for satisfying their personal greed and vanity (furthermore - principally with the one who controlled the largest military might - Milosevic). Were England and France any stronger in 19th century they could have helped North and South annihilate each other and then send peacekeepers into their former colonies to ìprotectî them. To destroy Milosevic now, after he already did the bidding for those who wanted to see Yugoslavia dismembered and its pieces ìprotectedî by foreign troops, is an unusually cruel joke on all ex-pat ex-Yugoslavs. To let him stay in power is sadistic to the people left to him to play with them. That's perhaps why we are all so damn sarcastic. Ivo