Dear RN list,
Paul Swann sent us a very long and very informative posting on how what has
been happening in Yugoslavia fits in with the corporate globalization agenda.
I think it is escellent but it is too long to post in its entirety. So, as
before, those who would like the entire document can request it. For now,
here are excerpts.
all the best, Jan
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Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 10:13:54 +0000
To: •••@••.•••
From: Paul Swann <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass [1/2]
SEEING YUGOSLAVIA THROUGH A DARK GLASS:
Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization
by Diana Johnstone
Diana Johnstone was the European editor of In These Times from 1979 to
1990, and press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from
1990 to 1996. She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in
America's World (London/New York, Versa Schucken, 1984) and is currently
working on a book on the former Yugoslavia. This article is an expended
version of a talk given on May 25, 1998, at an international conference on
media held in Athens, Greece.
Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and alternative media
have made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology to impose certain
interpretations on international news. During the cold War, most world news
for American consumption had to be framed as part of the Soviet-U.S.
contest. Since then, a new ideological bias frames the news. The way the
violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been reported is the most stunning
example.
I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even though I
had a long-standing interest in and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I spent
time there as a student in 1953, living in a Belgrade dormitory and
learning the language. In 1984., in a piece for "In These Times", I warned
that extreme decentralization, conflicting economic interests between the
richer and poorer regions, austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and the
decline of universal ideals were threatening Yugoslavia with
"re-Balkanization" in the wake of Tito's death and desanctification. "Local
ethnic interests are reasserting themselves". I wrote, "The danger is that
these rival local interests may become involved in the rivalries of outside
powers. This is how the Balkans in the past were a powder keg of world
war." Writing this took no special clairvoyance. The danger of Yugoslavia's
disintegration was quite obvious to all serious observers well before
Slobodan Milosevic arrived on the scene.
As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to keep
up with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press officer for
the Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to investigate the
situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws in the way media and
politicians were reacting. I wrote an article warning against combatting
"nationalism" by taking sides for one nationalism against another, and
against judging a complex situation by analogy with totally different times
and places. "Every nationalism stimulates others". I noted, "Historical
analogies should be drawn with caution and never allowed to obscure the
facts." However, there was no stopping the tendency to judge the Balkans,
about which most people knew virtually nothing, by analogy with Hitler
Germany, about which people at least imagined they knew a lot, and which
enabled analysis to be rapidly abandoned in favour of moral certitude and
righteous indignation.
However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable time to
my own research, that I realized the extent of the deception-which is in
large part self-deception.
I mention a11 this to stress that I understand the immense difficulty of
gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The history
of the region and the interplay of internal political conflicts and
external influences would be hard to grasp even without propaganda
distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being confused. Moreover, by now,
many people have invested so much emotion in a one-sided view of the
situation that they are scarcely able to consider alternative
interpretations.
It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are
"alternative' that they are free from the dominant interpretation and the
dominant world view. In fact, in the case of the Yugoslav tragedy, the
irony is that "alternative" or "left' activists and writers have -
frequently taken the lead in likening the Serbs, the people who most wanted
to continue to live in multicultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in
calling for military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined
secessionist movements - all supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural
Bosnia", a country which, unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from
scratch by outsiders.
The Serbs and Yugoslavia
Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs were heavily
taxed and denied ownership of property of political power reserved for
Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Serb farmers led a
revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long struggle put an end to the
Ottoman Empire.
<snip>
Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens rights under the
Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and traders was
relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders throughout the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were extremely receptive to the progressive
ideals of the French Revolution. While all the other liberated Balkan
nations imported German princelings as their new kings, the Serbs promoted
their own pig farmers into a dynasty, one of whose members translated John
Stuart Mill's "On Liberty' into Serbian during his student days. Nowhere in
the Balkans did Western progressive ideas exercise such attraction as in
Serbia, no doubt due to the historic circumstances of the country's
emergence from four hundred years of subjugation.
<snip>
In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the
assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and crush
Serbia once and for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the world war it had
thus initiated, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite with Serbia
in a single kingdom. This decision enabled both Slovenia and Croatia to go
from the losing to the winning side in World War 1, thereby avoiding war
reparations and enlarging their territory, notably on the Adriatic coast,
and the expense of Italy. The joint Kingdom was renamed "Jugoslavia" in
1929. The conflicts between Croats and Serbs that plagued what is called
"the first Yugoslavia" were described by Rebecca West in her celebrated
book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941.
In April 1941, Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an accord
reached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. This led to
Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion, creation of an independent
fascist state of Croatia (including Bosnia Herzegovina), and attachment of
much of the Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of
Mussolini's Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide
against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies within the territory of their "Greater
Croatia", while the Germans raised 55 divisions among the Muslims of Bosnia
and Albania.
<snip>
After World War 11, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to build
"brotherhood and unity" on the myth that all the peoples had contributed
equally to liberation from fascism. Mihailovic [leader of the royalist
Serbian resistance (the first guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in
Europe)]was executed, and school children in post-war Yugoslavia learned
more about the "fascist" nature of his Serbian nationalist Chetniks than
they did about Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who had volunteered for the 55,
or even about the killing of Serbs in the Jasenovac death camp run by
Ustashe in Western Bosnia.
After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership
emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy of
"self-management', supposed to lead by fairly rapid stages to the
"withering away of the State'. "Tito repeatedly revised the Constitution to
strengthen local authorities, while retaining final decision-making power
for himself. When he died in 1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly
complicated system that could not work without his arbitration". Serbia in
particular was unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its
territory had been divided up, with two "autonomous provinces," Vojvodina
and Kosovo, able to veto measures taken by Serbia, while Serbia could not
intervene in their affairs.
In the 1980's, the rise in interest rates and unfavourable world trade
conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia (like many
"third world" countries) had been encouraged to run up thanks to its
standing in the West as a socialist country not belonging to the Soviet
bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar austerity measures, which could
only be taken by a central government. The leaders of the richer republics
-Slovenia and Croatia - did not want to pay for the poorer ones. Moreover,
in all former socialist countries, the big political question is
privatization of State and Social property, and local communist leaders in
Slovenia and Croatia could expect to get a greater share for themselves
within the context of division of Yugoslavia into separate little states.
<snip> Sure of the active sympathy of Germany, Austria, and the Vatican,
leaders in Slovenia and Croatia, prepared the fait accompli#2 of
unilateral, unnegotiated secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was
illegal, under Yugoslav and international law, and was certain to
precipitate civil war. The key role of German (and Vatican) support was to
provide rapid international recognition of the new independent republics,
in order to transform Yugoslavia into an "aggressor on its own territory".
Political Motives
The political motives that launched the antiSerb propaganda campaign are
obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in Yugoslavia
because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for the nationalist
leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own little statelets which,
thanks to early and strong German support, could "jump the queue" and get
into the richmen's European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia.
The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire to
oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to demonizing an
entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both ethnic separatism and
the new role of NATO as occupying power in the Balkans on behalf of a
theoretical "international community".
<snip>
The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a
virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the influential
conservative newspaper, the "Frankfurter Allgerneine Zeitung" (FAZ). In
almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg Reismuller justified the
freshly, and illegally, declared "independence" of Slovenia and Croatia by
describing "Yugo-Serbs" as essentially Oriental "militarist Bolsheviks" who
have "no place in the European Community". Nineteen months after German
reunification, and for the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, German
media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of
the pre-war propaganda against the Jews".
<snip>
Media Momentum
<snip>
The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the advantage of
being simple and available, and they provided an easy-to-use moral compass
by designating the bad guys.
<snip>
Down with the State
This ideology is the expression in moralistic terms of the dominant project
for reshaping the world since the United States emerged as sole superpower
after the defeat of communism and collapse of the Soviet Union. United
States foreign policy for over a century has been dictated by a single
overriding concern: to open world markets to American capital and American
enterprise. Today this project is triumphant as "economic globalization".
Throughout the world, government policies are judged, approved or condemned
decisively not by their populations but by "the markets" meaning the
financial markets. Foreign investors, not domestic voters, decide policy.
The International Monetary Fund and other such agencies are there to help
governments adjust their policies and their societies to market imperatives.
The shift of decision-making power away from elected governments, which is
an essential aspect of this particular "economic globalization", is being
accompanied by an ideological assault on the nation state as a political
community exercising sovereignty over a defined territory. For all its
shortcomings, the nation-state is still the political level most apt to
protect citizens' welfare and the environment from the destructive
expansion of global markets. Dismissing the nation-state as an anachronism,
or condemning it as a mere expression of "nationalist' exclusivism,
overlooks and undermines its long-standing legitimacy as the focal point of
democratic development, in which citizens can organize to define and defend
their interests.
The irony is that many well-intentioned idealists are unwittingly helping
to advance this project by eagerly promoting its moralistic cover a
theoretical global democracy that should replace attempts to strengthen
democracy at the supposedly obsolete nation-state level.
Within the United States, the link between antination-state ideology and
economic globalization is blurred by the double standard of U.S. leaders
who do not hesitate to invoke the supremacy of U.S. "national interest'
over the very international institutions they promote in order to advance
economic globalization. This makes it seem that such international
institutions are a serious obstacle to U.S. global power rather than its
expression. However, the United States has the overall military and
political power to design and control key international institutions (e.g.,
the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal
Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia), as well as to undermine those it dislikes
(UNESCO when it was attempting to promote liberation of media from
essentially American control) or to flout international law with impunity
(notably in its Central American "backyard"). Given the present
relationship of forces, weakening less powerful nation-states cannot
strengthen international democracy, but simply tighten the grip of
transnational capital and the criminal networks that flourish in an
environment of lawless acquisition.
There is no real contradiction between asserting the primacy of U.S.
interests and blasting the nation-state barriers that might allow some
organized defense of the interests of other peoples. But impressed by the
apparent contradiction, some American liberals are comforted in their
belief that nationalism is the number one enemy of mankind, whereas
anything that goes against it is progressive.
<snip>
The New World Order
In fact, the break-up of Yugoslavia has served to discredit and further
weaken the United Nations, while providing a new role for an expending
NATO. Rather than strengthening international order, it has helped shift
the balance of power within the international order toward the dominant
nation - states, the United States and Germany. If somebody had announced
in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down, now Germany can unite
and send military forces back into Yugoslavia - and what is more in order
to enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to those it
imposed when it occupied the country in 1941 - well, quite a number of
people might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened,
and many of the very people might who have been expected to object most
strongly to what amounts to the most significant act of historical
revisionism since World War 11 have provided the ideological cover and
excuse.
Perhaps dazed by the end of the Cold War, much of what remains of the left
in the early nineties abandoned its critical scrutiny of the geostrategic
Realpolitik underlying great power policies in general and U.S. policy in
particular and seemed to believe that the world henceforth was determined
by purely moral considerations.
This has much to do with the privatization of "the left" in the past twenty
years or so. The United States has led the way in this trend. Mass
movements aimed at overall political action have declined, while
single-issue movements have managed to continue. The single-issue movements
in turn engender nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) which, because of the
requirements of fund-raising, need to adapt their causes to the mood of the
times, in other words, to the dominant ideology to the media. Massive
fund-raising is easiest for victims, using appeals to sentiment rather than
to reason. Greenpeace has found that it can raise money more easily for
baby seals than for combatting the development of nuclear weapons. This
fact of life steers NGO activity in certain directions, away from political
analysis toward sentiment. On another level, the NGOs offer idealistic
internationalists a rare opportunity to intervene all around the world in
matters of human rights and human welfare.
And herein lies a new danger. Just as the "civilizing mission" of bringing
Christianity to the heathen provided a justifying pretext for imperialist
conquest of Asia and Africa in the past, today the protection of "human
rights" may be the cloak for a new type of imperialist military
intervention worldwide.
Certainly, human rights are an essential concern of the left. Moreover,
many individuals committed to worthy causes have turned to NGOs as the only
available alternative to the decline of mass movements - a decline over
which they have no control. Even a small NGO addressing a problem is no
doubt better than nothing at all. The point is that great vigilance is
needed, in this as in all other endeavours, to avoid letting good
intentions be manipulated to serve quite contrary purposes.
In a world now dedicated to brutal economic rivalry, where the rich get
richer and the poor get poorer, human rights abuses can only increase. From
this vast array of mans inhumanity to man, Western media and governments
are unquestionably more concerned about human rights abuses that obstruct
the penetration of transnational capitalism, to which they are organically,
linked, than about, say, the rights of Russian miners who have not been
paid for a year. Media and government selectivity not only encourages
humanitarian NGOS to follow their lead in focusing on certain countries and
certain types of abuses, the caseby-case approach also distracts from
active criticism of global economic structures that favour the basic human
rights abuse of a world split between staggering wealth and dire poverty.
Cuba is not the only country whose "human rights" may be the object of
extraordinary concern by governments trying to replace local rulers with
more compliant defenders of tran$national interests. Such a motivation can
by no means be ruled out in the case of the campaign against Serbia. In
such situations, humanitarian NGOs risk being cast in the role of the
missionaries of the past - sincere, devoted people who need to be
"protected", this time by NATO military forces. The Somali expedition
provided a rough rehearsal (truly scandalous if examined closely) for this
scenario. On a much larger scale, first Bosnia, then Kosovo, provide a vast
experimental terrain for cooperation between NGOs and NATO.
There is urgent need to take care to preserve genuine and legitimate
efforts on behalf of human rights from manipulation in the service of other
political ends. This is indeed a delicate challenge.
NGOs and NATO, hand In hand
In former Yugoslavia, and especially in BosniaHerzegovina, Western NGOs
have found a justifying role for themselves alongside NATO. They gain
funding and prestige from the situation. Local employees of Western NGOs
gain political and financial advantages over other local people, and
"democracy" is not the peoples choice but whatever meets with approval of
outside donors. This breeds arrogance. among the outside benefactors, and
cynicism among local people, who have the choice between opposing the
outsiders or seeking to manipulate them. It is an unhealthy situation, and
some of the most self-critical are aware of the dangers.
Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former Yugoslavia is
the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September 18, 1997,
that organization issued a long statement announcing in advance that the
Serbian elections to be held three days later 'Will be neither free nor
fair." This astonishing intervention was followed by a long list of
measures that Serbia and Yugoslavia must carry- out or else", and that the
international community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia.
These demands indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory
standards of "human rights" as applied to Serbia, although not, obviously,
to everybody else, since they included new media laws drafted "in full
consultation with the independent media in Yugoslavia" as well as
permission meanwhile to all "unlicensed but currently operating radio and
television stations to broadcast without interference"8.
Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to "deny Yugoslavia readmission
to the OSCE until there are concrete improvements in the country's human
rights record, including respect for freedom of the press, independence of
the judiciary, and minority rights, as well as cooperation with the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia".
As for the demand to "respect freedom of the press," one may wonder what
measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that press freedom already
exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that in many other countries not
being served with such an ultimatum. There exist in Serbia quite a range of
media devoted to attacking the government, not only in SerboCroatian, but
also in Albanian. As of one 1998, there were 2,319 print publications and
101 radio and television stations in Yugoslavia, over twice the number that
existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily newspapers. The
state-supported national dailies have a joint circulation of 180,000
compared to around 350,000 for seven leading opposition dailies".
Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less independent than in
Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and most certainly much more so. As for "minority
rights," it would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world where
they are better protected in both theory and practice than in Yugoslavia9.
For those who remember history the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki ultimatum
instantly brings to mind the ultimatum issued by Vienna to Belgrade after
the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 as a pretext for the Austrian invasion
which touched off World War 1. The Serbian government gave in to all but
one of the Habsburg demands, but was invaded anyway.
The hostility of this new Vienna power, the International Helsinki
Federation for Human Rights, toward Serbia, is evident in all its
statements, and in those of its executive director Aaron Rhodes. In a March
18, 1998, column for the International Herald Tribune, he wrote that
Albanians in Kosovo "have lived for years under conditions similar to those
suffered by Jews in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just before World War
II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free but politically
disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil liberties".
The comparison could hardly be more incendiary, but the specific facts to
back it up are absent. They are necessarily absent, since the accusation is
totally false. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have never been "politically
disenfranchised", and even Western diplomats have at times urged them to
use their right to vote in order to deprive Milosevic of his electoral
majority. But nationalist leaders have called for a boycott of Serbian
elections since 1981 - well before Milosevic came on the scene -and ethnic
Albanians who dare take part in legal political life are subject to
intimidation and even murder by nationalist Albanian gunmenio.
<snip>
Human Rights Watch, in contrast, by uncritically endorsing the most extreme
anti-Serb reports and ignoring Serbian sources, helps confirm ethnic
Albanians in their worst fantasies, while encouraging them to demand
international intervention on their behalf rather than seek compromise and
reconciliation with their Serbian neighbours. HRW therefore contributes,
deliberately or inadvertently, to a deepening cycle of violence that
eventually may justify, or require, outside intervention.
This is an approach which like its partner, economic globalization, breaks
down the defenses and authority of weaker States. It does not help to
enforce democratic institutions at the national level. The only democracy
it reorganizes is that of the "international community", which is summoned
to act according to the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This
"international community", the IC, is in reality no democracy. Its
decisions are formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC is not even a
"community"; the initials could more accurately stand for "imperialist
condominium", a joint exercise of domination by the former imperialist
powers, torn apart and weakened by two World Wars, now brought together
under U.S. domination with NATO as their military arm. Certainly there are
frictions between the members of this condominium, but so long as their
rivalries can be played out within the IC, the price will be paid by
smaller and weaker countries.
Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by Great
Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of
"non-governmental organizations" - often linked to powerful governments
whose competition with each other for financial support provides motivation
for exaggerating the abuses they specialize in denouncing.
Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to socialism
and international relations, economically and politically by far the most
liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has already been torn apart by
Western support to secessionist movements: What is left is being further
reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a continuation of the same process. The
emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little ethnic
democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by the IC
enforced by NATO. ("CovertAction Quarterly', Wachington D.C., Fall 1998.)
___________________________
<snip of most notes>
5 The role of the Washington public relations firm, Ruder Finn, is by now
well-known, but seems to have raised few doubts as to the accuracy of the
anti-Serb propaganda it successfully diffused.
6 No one denies that many rapes occurred during the civil war in Croatia
and Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that rape is a serious violation of human
rights. So is war, for that matter. From the start, however, inquiry into
rape in BosniaHerzegovina focused exclusively on accusations that Serbs
were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate strategy. The most
inflated figures, freely extricated by multiplying the number of known
cases by large factors, were readily accepted by the media and
international organizations. No interest was shown in detailed and
documented reports of rapes of Serbian women by Muslims or Croats.
The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the "London
Observer", described her own search in verification of the rape charges in
a letter to"The Daily Telegraph" (January 19, 1993). The British Foreign
Office conceded that the rape figures being handled about were really
uncorroborated and referred her to the Danish government, then chairing the
European Union. Copenhagen agreed that the reports were unsubstantiated,
but kept repeating them. Both said that the EU has taken up the "rape
atrocity" issue at Its December 1992 Edinburgh Summit exclusively on the
basis of a German initiative. In turn, Fran Wild, in charge of the Bosnian
Desk in the German Foreign Ministry, told Ms. Beloff that the material on
Serb rapes came partly from the Izetbegovic government and partly from the
Catholic charity Caritas in Croatia. No effort had been made to seek
corroboration from more impartial sources.
<snip>
9 Serbia is constitutionally defined as the nation of all its citizens, and
not "of the Serbs" (in contrast to constitutional provisions of Croatia and
Macedonia, for instance). In addition, the 1992 Constitution of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as well as the Serbian
Constitution guarantee extensive rights to national minorities, notably the
right to education in their own mother tongue, the right to information
media in their own language, and the right to use their own language in
proceedings before a tribunal of other authority. These rights are not
merely formal, but are effectively respected as is shown by, for instance,
the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian minority and the large
number of newspapers published by national minorities in Albanian,
Hungarian and other languages. Romani (Gypsies) are by all accounts better
treated in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the Balkans. Serbia has a large
Muslim population of varied nationalities, including refugees from Bosnia
and a native Serb population of converts to Islam in Southeastern Kosovo,
known as Goranci, whose religious rights are fully respected, and who have
no desire to leave Serbia.
<snip>
11 In March 1990, during a regular official vaccination program, rumours
were spread that Serb health workers had poisoned over 7,000 Albanian
children by injecting them with nerve gas. There was never any proof of
this, as no child was ever shown to suffer from anything more serious than
mass hysteria. This was the signal for a boycott of the Serbian public
health system. Ethnic Albanian doctors and other health workers left the
official institutions to set up a parallel system, so vastly inferior that
preventable childhood diseases reached epidemic proportions. In September
1996, WHO and UNICEF undertook to assist the main Kosovar parallel health
system, named "Mother Theresa" after the world's most famous ethnic
Albanian, a native of Macedonia, in vaccinating 300,000 children against
polio. The worldwide publicity campaign around this large-scale
immunization program failed to point out that the same service has long
been available to those children from the official health service of
Serbia, systematically boycotted by Albanian parents. Currently, the
parallel Kosovar system employs 239 general practitioners and 140
specialists, compared to around 2,000 physicians employed by the Serbian
public health system there. Serbs point out that many ethnic Albanians are
sensible enough to turn to the government health system when they are
seriously ill. According to official figures, 64% of the official Serb
system health workers and 80% of the patients in Kosovo are ethnic
Albanians.
It is characteristic of the current age of privatization that the
"international community' is ready to ignore a functional government
service and even contribute to a politically inspired effort to bypass and
ultimately destroy it. But then, Kosovo Albanian separatists aware of the
taste of the times, like to speak of Kosovo itself as a "nongovernmental
organization".
These facts are contained in the "Kosovo Spring" report of the
International Crisis Group.
