A Place to Stand

You were ahead of the curve this time - a couple of days ago, MSM opinion swang round to "Maybe the Georgians were asking for trouble".
 

Are you possibly just a bit muddled about 'the extermination of the 250,000 strong Krajina community in Croatia'? I think so.
 

Nope. Extremination of a community does not mean that they all died, though an awful lot did, but that the community isn't there any more & it isn't.

That it doesn't get mentioned doesn't mean it didn't happen.
 

I was there, following what happened from close by Craig, and I know what happened. But I also know what extermination means and implies - as in what happened to much of the Jewish population before and during WWII. And what happened in large sections of the Krajina - ugly and in part unforgivable though it was - was not extermination. In fact the vast majority of the Serbs displaced in Operation Storm left a day or so ahead of it, heading for Serbia on tractors and trailers loaded with their possessions. And in view of what they'd done to ethnic Croats in the Krajina over the previous 5 years or so (a small part of which I'd also seen), I can't blame them for not wanting to be there when the Croats arrived.
 

The comparison between Milosevic and Saakashvili is an apt one. The difference is that Kosovo did not have de facto independence prior to Serbian forces going in to battle KLA terrorists in the late 90s. If anything Saakashvili is more of a nationalist, but then as Strobe Talbott pointed out, the war against Serbia was more about demoralising Serbia for not complying with US requirements for reforms than it was about humananitarian intervention.
 

O'd be interested to know under what auspices you were there Nick.

Since the "charges" against the Krajina leaders were stuff like them having fired 1 rocket at Zagreb they certainly don't come close to matching what was done to them. It may be that the ICTY downplayed the charges against the Krajina leaders but that would be out of character. We also have impartial but concerned sources such as Simon Weisenthal confirming that the first ethnic cleansing in all the wars was when the Croats drove out 50,000 local Serbs so I would require some evidence that anytbhing done by local Serbs, at any time, matched what they were subjected to.

The fact is that, with NATO officers help & NATO aurpower that community was exterminated & that liiking at the demographics of the 600,000 Serbs & Yugoslavs missing from Croatia & the not more than 200,000 refugees in Serbia & Bosnia each, we participated in genocide.

I think it is perfectly reasonable for the Russians to believe that Georgia was doing the same & indeed that the US had assisted them.
 

Neil, here's a Times article that muddles all your favourite topics and gets every single one wrong.

Fisk that, once your blood pressure has returned to normal.
 

Sorry for the late reply to your question Craig. I wasn't in Croatia and the Krajina under any 'auspices'; I was there as a jobbing hack/snapper (and not very successfully as it happens). And incidentally, the 'one rocket' fired at Zagreb (there were several, actually, over a period of months, but they mostly weren't very accurate) came within 50 metres of 'exterminating' a friend of mine.
 

Sympathies. About 100,000 Serbs came an awful lot closer. If you were reporting accurately I can understand why you had little success in getting published.

Mark's link was to Gerald Baker - Telegraph http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4534358.ece?Submitted=true

I did add a comment & also mentioned it on Neil Clark's blog, thanks Mark.