Word: yugoslavia
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...such approaches are risky; whether they are worth taking depends on what the West deems its interest in the former Yugoslavia to be. In the realpolitik calculus of international affairs, Bosnia does not fit into any of the categories that demand intervention. No communist dominoes are at stake. Human-rights violations are gruesome but are not something for which any country wants to sacrifice its own soldiers. It is true that Bosnia- Herzegovina, Croatia and other former Yugoslav republics are now independent countries, but Europe and the U.S. tend to regard Serbian aggression against them as internal ethnic strife...
...mincing lawyer's brief, but split hairs have become the tightrope that cases for intervention must tread. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali lashed out two weeks ago at British critics for faulting his lack of deference to the Security Council's big powers. The West's sympathies for Yugoslavia, he suggested, had claimed priority over equally desperate crises in the Third World. Newspapers in London may have rebuked him, he cracked, "because...
...central role in electrifying outside opinion? Of course, they have. Where cameras go, so go the susceptibilities of people who live comfortable lives. But in a strange way -- sometimes flawed but often legitimate -- cameras and notebooks tend to converge on those crises that really do deserve greater attention. Yugoslavia figures as a kind of test case of what might happen throughout decommunized, unstable Central and Eastern Europe. Unrestrained ethnic rivalries in these lands threaten to turn the European Community on its ear, upsetting a prosperous balance gained only in the past couple of generations...
...these considerations would merely be speculative were it not for one final, compelling point: the outside world's Yugoslavia policies to date have abetted strife at least as much as they have contained it. Foreign leaders failed to warn Serbia off. Concentration on humanitarian efforts plays into the hands of Serbs who want to create as many refugees as possible -- and who perhaps mean to pursue the tactic to "cleanse" other Serb-minority territory closer to Hungary, Albania, Greece and Turkey. Faced with Western inaction, Turkey and Iran are watching the nearby anti-Muslim pogrom more and more anxiously...
...cosmopolitan and a graduate of universities in Cairo and Paris, the Egyptian, the first Arab and first African Secretary-General, sees himself as a champion of the Third World. He is demanding that the political chaos and famine in Somalia be given as much attention as the carnage in Yugoslavia, which he would put largely in the hands of the European Community. Some council members grumble that he is arrogant and inattentive and that he too often goes over their heads to directly contact foreign ministers and heads of state, many of whom are old friends. At the moment...