, 2000

Latest news from America's Progressive Community

• ROBERT HAYDEN, www.post-gazette.com/forum/19990328edhayden8.asp
  Director of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Hayden has been deeply involved in attempts to mediate the crisis in Kosovo, bringing together political leaders from all sides and regularly visiting the region. One of the Albanian party leaders he worked with was just reportedly executed by Serbian forces. "The Clinton administration began this bombing with no plan for what comes after," Hayden said Monday afternoon. "Everything that is happening was predictable and was in fact predicted -- the increased fighting, the humanitarian situation and the Serbs' rallying around Milosevic." Hayden, who is author of the forthcoming "Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts," said that "the extraordinary callousness of this administration in launching the first attack on a sovereign state in Europe since World War II and its attempt to ground this war in morality are sickening. Albania is being destabilized, Macedonia is being destabilized. When you say our credibility is at stake and so we have to bomb, you avoid the question as to whether we should have made such threats in the first place. The administration seems intent on making matters worse still, even as they espouse morality."

• BARBARA EHRENREICH, barbeh@aol.com
  Ehrenreich -- author of "Blood Rites," a widely praised book about origins of war -- said today that "so far the NATO bombing of Serbia has accomplished two things: One, it has led to stepped up ethnic cleansing by the Serb forces in Kosovo. Two, it has eliminated all opposition within Serbia and consolidated the power of Slobodan Milosevic. When are we going to learn that bombing only serves to rally the target population against the aggressors? Hitler's bombing of London didn't unseat Winston Churchill; the U.S.'s repeated bombings of Iraq in no way diminished Saddam Hussein's power; and the current bombing seems almost deliberately designed to strengthen the most genocidal forces in Serbia."

• ALISTAIR MILLAR, amillar@fourthfreedom.org, www.fourthfreedom.org
  Program director of the Fourth Freedom Forum, an independent research organization that works on international peace and security issues, Millar said: "The United States and its allies should work with Russia to propose an immediate cease-fire -- on the ground and in the air -- and a new diplomatic initiative.... The keys to a new diplomatic effort are greater Russian involvement and a persuasive package of inducements and sanctions. Russia has historic and strategic interests in the Balkans and could play a constructive role, as it did in Bosnia, in achieving a settlement. The proper body to manage a renewed diplomatic initiative is not NATO, which is operating in Yugoslavia beyond its jurisdiction, but the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE includes almost every country in Europe and was designed for precisely this kind of diplomatic bridge-building between parties in conflict."

  Also, see www.commondreams.org/kosovo/kosovo.htm

   

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