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Saaksshvili is a regular in the WSJ Op-Ed pages, calling for NATO membership and calling Europeans wimps and cowards for not standing up to bully Russia while provoking it in every possible way - your standard neocon.
He's been playing martyr to distract from his domestic failures, and he's been trying really hard to drag the West in his petty conflicts with Russia.
Russia has a history of palying hardball in the region, so deep wariness is justified, but he's gone far beyond that.
And I worry about his seeming ability to paint himself as the poor oppressed democrat fighting the big bad bully.
I'd also point out that the West, in pushing Kosovo to declare independence, largely caused this crisis because the situation of South Ossetia and other similar territories in Georgia is very much similar to that of Kosovo. Discourse about the territorial sovereignty of Georgia rings hollow when we ignored it for Serbia (despite Russia's repeated warnings).
We've been playing with fire - again - and have been encouraging a neocon to go provoke the Russians and to drag Europe (via NATO) into the conflict. Swell.
Someone called me:
Of course you blame Georgia... ...because you represent the holdovers from the discredited parts of the European Left that tried to justify any Soviet atrocity because it stood up to those evil Americans. Russia just invaded an ally and escalated the internal conflict. The reprehensibility of this does not change just because Bush is in the White House.
...because you represent the holdovers from the discredited parts of the European Left that tried to justify any Soviet atrocity because it stood up to those evil Americans.
Russia just invaded an ally and escalated the internal conflict. The reprehensibility of this does not change just because Bush is in the White House.
(on dKos...) In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
<bangs head off desk>
Another issue - what makes you think that the West 'pushed' Kosovo to declare independence? More like the other way around.
Also note that in both cases parts of both Ossetia and Abkazia are controlled by Georgia. In case of Ossetia villages with majority Georgian population are controlled by Georgia. Today's attack was against 2/3 of Ossetian territory that is controlled by Ossetian authorities.
Today in Tskhinvali, South Ossetia estimates 1500 are dead:
* 318,000 Serbs (64%), * 161,000 Albanians (32%), * 10,000 Roma (Gypsies) and Circassians * 2,000 Turks --------- An Austrian statistics[17] published in 1899 estimated:
* 182,650 Albanians (47.88%) * 166,700 Serbs (43.7%) -------- British journalist H. Brailsford estimated in 1906[18] that two-thirds of the population of Kosovo was Albanian and one-third Serbian. -------- Talking about ethnic cleansing.... Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind...Albert Einstein
Just from the numbers, I would guess at two possibilities, oppression of Serbs in Prizren or better opportunities for Serbs (but not Albanians) elsewhere.
This being the 19th century, opportunities could be migration to America (a very large proportion of the Swedish population at that time emigrated and generally that happened cluster by cluster). Or it could have been possibilities of employment in new industrial sectors in other regions or countries.
(Btw, if you use Firefox, I really recomend TribExt, it makes it really simple to cut and paste while keeping formats and links.) Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
There are all kinds of pressures...our history is rich (unfortunately). http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-14804.html
Historically, the first cause of this scattering was the severe oppression of Serbs under Ottoman occupation, which led to migration to the unoccupied territory to the west. After World War II, Yugoslavia's first communist government tried to define the country's postwar federal units to limit the Serbian domination believed largely responsible for the political turmoil of the interwar period. This meant reducing Serbia proper to achieve political recognition of Macedonian and Montenegrin ethnic individuality and the mixed populations of Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Hercegovina (see Formation of the South Slav State , ch. 1).
Between 1948 and 1990, the Serbian share of Kosovo's population dropped from 23.6 percent to less than 10 percent, while the ethnic Albanian share increased in proportion because of a high birth rate and immigration from Albania. The demographic change was also the result of political and economic conditions; the postwar Serbian exodus from Kosovo accelerated in 1966 after ethnic Albanian communist leaders gained control of the province, and Kosovo remained the most poverty-stricken region of Yugoslavia in spite of huge government investments (see Kosovo , ch. 4; Regional Disparities , ch. 3). After reasserting political control over Kosovo in 1989, the Serbian government announced an ambitious program to resettle Serbs in Kosovo, but the plan attracted scant interest among Serbian émigrés from the region.
Sometimes I think I'm really being over sensitive about anti-Russian bias in America, etc. Then I read things like this.
Tzar wannabe Putin... Once KGB - ALWAYS KGB! Beware the despots and oligarchs...
This is how world wars begin...georgia cant stand against russia all by itself but the question is, will someone (Like the USA or NATO) Step in to defend them.
Fortunately, a number of later commenters were of the opinion that maybe we're in enough wars as it is and should stay out of this. "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
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