Ethnic Passion: Democratic values not progressing everywhere And it may be that in some places, democracy isn’t appropriate
Every once in a while, some of our best thinkers seem to agree in a new synthesis of America’s role in the world. So I have sensed it recently, in the important ongoing debate about spreading American democracy throughout the world.First, last spring, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser under the Carter administration, reflected in a major speech: “What we see before us is not a New World Order but global turmoil and philosophical confusion. It is much…
Ethnic Passion: A Lebanon for Gorbachev
Ethnic struggle for custody of Nagorno- Karabakh
From the windows of her living room, Galya Israelyan can look down over the rooftops of this Armenian village, out to the green and gold mountains and the clearing where her husband, Ruben, was shot dead. He was 32, and the father of five, including a newborn daughter, when he became a casualty in the Soviet Union’s bloodiest and most intractable nationalist feud in years.Although the police say their investigation is unfinished, the victim’s brother identified the…
Ethnic Passion: NATIONALIST FIRES FLARE IN DEFIANCE OF SOVIET RULERS
Rallies in Slovenia. Marches in Serbia. Tension in Kosovo. Popular protests and popular fronts in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Flight from Romania’s Transylvania. Riots in Azerbaijan. The fires of nationalism are being rekindled this year in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans and east to the Caspian Sea. The sparks carry a defiant message for the Communist governments.”Simple,” says Milovan Djilas, the most prominent dissident in…
Ethnic Passion: Milosevic: Corrupt opportunist
Fall: The Serbian dictator gained power by fanning the flames of ethnic tensions and was a victim of the fire.
Nothing has ever been as it seemed in Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia.He was a dictator who allowed dissent, a war-maker who claimed to be a guarantor of peace, a burly man with gray hair who looked like a ward boss, dressed like a Midwestern businessman and behaved like a mobster robbing his state blind. Above all, the 59-year-old Milosevic, who viewed himself and his people as history’s winners, was a loser, a man who gambled and lost vast and valuable parts of…
Ethnic Passion: Croatia in, Serbia out
A DECADE ago, when Yugoslavia’s parts were destroying the whole, it was hard to say who was worse, Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman or Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.Both were autocrats. Both mimicked the late Marshal Tito. Both fomented ethnic passions on the narrowest definition of nationality as inherited religion. Tudjman was closer to being an honest Fascist who had once sacrificed his career for his exaggerated and hateful nationalism. Mr. Milosevic was more…