Who won the war in Yugoslavia? (not who is winning...note...)

The War Aims of the Allies were to protect the Kosovan Albanians.
The War Aims of Milosevic were to kick the Kosovan Albanians out.

What is the state of play after a month, or so, of  NATO "pressure" ?
You've all read your newspapers...
How many Kosovans are still left in Kosovo?
Very few... we are told...
So who has achieved their war aims ???


No matter what "exit strategy" NATO find to end the conflict in the Balkans it seems obvious that the Kosovans will end up as the Palestinians of the 21st Century.  Even if NATO and Russia do cook up some compromise to allow them to return, how many of them will actually want to risk it.  Or how many will be able to go home anyway?  What would they go home to?  A burned out farmhouse?  Rotting carcases of slaughtered cattle?  Crops deliberately destroyed?  Would you want to go back to that?

So Milosevic has won, whatever happens.  It is unlikely that the Albanian speaking Muslims will ever return to the Kosovar region in huge numbers.  Once the situation has cooled and Serbs start moving into the area, building settlements, or rebuilding towns in their own image, the multi-cultural, diversity of the area will already have been damaged beyond repair.  Those Kosovans who do go back will know that this time they will no longer be in the majority; now they will have to live in the area on someone else's terms.


The war has now cost so much money that I read in a local Catalan newpaper that it is approaching $100,000 a head for each Kosovan citizen.  If that is the case, it strikes me that NATO would have been better off really helping the Kosovan Albanians by doing a deal with them in which each individual Kosovan was offered $100,000 to "ethnically cleanse" themselves out of the area.  A hundred kilos is still a lot of "pasta" to people in Albania. (It's no chicken feed to me :-) Then the Albanian government would not have begrudgingly accepted taking on thousands of penniless refugees, to make the problems of Europe's poorest country even worse, but rather would have opened the border with smiling faces to these people who needed to spend their dollars on building up new lives for themselves in Albania.  How many would have gone?  If they could smell the wind from Belgrade, I reckon most of them would.

Of course the whole idea of so called "ethnic cleansing" is repulsive in the first place... but when a political reality has a sense of inevitability about it, wouldn't it be better to have a more humane alternative?  Not that I expect many arms manufacturers to agree with me on this one...

Sound too "idealistic"???  Can't see any tax payer accepting such an idea???

Huh!  Aren't tax payers going to foot the bill for the war and for the reconstruction effort involved in rebuiliding everything NATO have knocked down, when it's all over anyway?

What is it about us that we blithely accept enormous expenses on war, while complaining bitterly about every dollar spent on cheaper, more peaceful alternatives.

I bet that the British Government could have given each individual Falkland Islander $2,000,000 to set up home in a de-populated area of the Highlands of Scotland and still not have spent half what "Las Malvinas" have cost the British tax payer since 1983.

Recently a student of mine was criticizing the amount of money "wasted" on space exploration.  Another student politely pointed out that the entire budget spent on space in a year is equivalent to what the world spends on armaments every two weeks!

Will we never learn to control these "little boys with their deadly toys"???


NO RETURN TO THE COLD WAR!
(and definitely no HOT one!)

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