The First Casualties. posted by Richard Seymour

As I predicted , the media are busily larging up the entry of 750 troops into Kosovo, while resorting to the same empty banalities that have always helped to avoid explanation and blame when it suits them.

For Channel Five news today, "the troops cannot come soon enough".

For The Guardian , the most vigorously pro-war newspaper during the last Balkans war (so much so that even The Sun had to tell them to calm down), it is all because of "the deep and intense hatred between 2 million ethnic Albanians and fewer than 100,000 Serbs." They bemoan the absence of dialogue, intermarriage, and near-apartheid, South African-style. They do not mention that this is a direct legacy of the Nato intervention, which as a matter of historical record escalated a low-level civil war into ethnic cleansing and has now institutionalised nationalist sectarianism in Kosovo.

For The Independent , "Kosovo has been a model of nation-building", which we cannot allow to disintegrate. Astonishingly enough, it also outlines all of the ways in which that "model" has been an absolute catastrophic failure - there's a genius at work there.

Meanwhile, the truth emerges about the genesis of the riots. We were told that it was an inflamed response to the drowning of two Albanian boys. It now seems it was planned :

"What might have started off as an isolated burst of anger in Mitrovica over the still unexplained drowning of two Albanian children now appears to be something more planned. "We have had similar attacks to these in Kosovo before," said a UN spokesman, Derek Chappell. "But the fact that these attacks took place at the same time all over Kosovo does make me think they were orchestrated by the same extreme groups."

Lt-Colonel James Moran, a K-For spokesman, was more explicit. "There was a lot more organisation today than we saw yesterday," he said. "People had organised buses to take protesters to different areas. We turned several around." Whoever was behind that agenda has certainly succeeded in nullifying the UN's attempts to build bridges between Serbs and Albanians over the past four years."

Who would want to do a thing like that? Be upstanding, Kosovo Provisional Authority...


Side Note: I'd like to thank Marc Mulholland at the Daily Moider , for this extremely flattering plug:

"Lenin's Tomb is run by a member of the SWP, not normally much of a recommendation. But Lenin's is a vigorous, polemical and funny writer who churns out a great deal to provoke and entertain. He's one of those few who can make swearing funny."

So flattering that I felt obliged to repeat the whole thing here. Cheers!