nettime: The Cobbler & The Devil

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Sender: iskoric@igc.org

A Faustian Agreement

While Veran Matic of Radio B92 was meeting with Al Gore in
Washington DC (for fifteen minutes, Gore promised support, and suit
and tie were *required* by the protocol, so Soros foundation bought one
for Veran's fifteen minutes of international fame), Milosevic was in Nis
talking to the students.  He shouted that a foreign hand would never rule
Serbia, and that Serbs will always be masters in their own house.  As if
they are now, as if it is not him who is their master.  Increasingly,
leaders of Zajedno, and entities like B92, are portrayed as exponents of
foreign powers in Serbia by the Milosevic-controlled media, which is
bound to produce a fall in their popularity.

At around the same time Tudjman convened a meeting of top HDZ-party
officials in which he stormed the opposition parties and Radio 101 for
their connection to mostly the same foreign powers.  Tudjman, lacking
Milosevic's charisma, could not go in front of the students and say that a
foreign hand would never rule Croatia, but his intentions were the same. 
At the helm of the world-wide conspiracy to topple him from power
Tudjman sees George Soros.  More interesting Tudjman takes under the
wing of his verbal protection leaders in Bosnia and Serbia as well: he
believes that Soros and western powers want to overthrow
democratically elected leaders in all three countries.

Obviously, Tudjman's understanding of the word "democracy" is very
limited, i.e. it is limited to him staying in power.  But Soros must feel
flattered: he succeeded to unite warring former Yugoslav leaders in an
unanimous front against him - he succeeded where both the U.N. and the
U.S. failed: to be almost universally hated by "all three parties" !  That
means that he must have been doing something right, hehehe.

Tudjman's apparent support for Milosevic in case of Serbian student
protests (on grounds that Serbian opposition is worse for Croatia...) 
lead some western observers to think that his cancer maybe already
metastasized to his brain.  I mean: wasn't Milosevic the war criminal
who started the war against Croatia, a universally bad guy who was
directly responsible for thousands of dead and mutilated bodies, millions
of destroyed homes and destruction of a lot of Croatian infrastructure
and cultural heritage?  Or, at least, that is what Tudjman's Croatia has
been saying to the World for past five or six years, while trying
desperately to solicit Western support for its cause.

Now, they all got it.  Nobody says that Western Powers do not have
their own hidden agendas for the Balkans region: they always did. 
Tudjman, Izetbegovic and Milosevic should have known that before they
dived into a war against each other, and before they signed over their
souls to the West to get the necessary support in order to facilitate their
war effort, which, and now that is obvious, was the sole means of
keeping them in power.  Let's be honest: Yugoslavia went from being at
almost the Western Europe levels of living standard in mid-70s to the
Third Worldish client country at the beginning of nineties, when it
imploded in the bloodiest conflict the Europe have seen since the World
War II.  The successor states, plagued by the war damage and internal
corruption, are not self-sufficient, i.e. they cannot survive without the
foreign help.  Which means that "foreign hand" already rules there - and
it rules after the invitation, or to be more precise - after years of
BEGGING, by the respective domestic leaders there (in Bosnia the rule
is just the most obvious).  But it was a good "foreign hand" so far,
because it kept those leaders firmly in place.  Now, when that "foreign
hand" decided to shake hands with opposition and talk to the little guys
who don't even own suits and ties, it became a bad, a very bad "foreign
hand".

Tudjman, Izetbegovic and Milosevic always wanted that their countries
are seen as victims (as victims of the other two, or as the victims of the
world conspiracy).  But what we are finally getting to is that their
countries are victims indeed, but victims of their corrupt and inept rule. 
They are hostages of their own policies.

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