Yugoslav parallels

Lots of parallels spring to mind thinking about Yugoslav history.

King Alexander instituted a royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia in 1929 that enjoyed the full support of Yugoslavia's ally France as did the Polish dictatorship (three joint dictators after Pilsudski died) and King Carol II's royal dictatorship in Romania. The Anglo-Americans similarly support autocratic regimes in the Persian Gulf today. The stuff about autocracies is all my eye.

Slobodan Milosevic, I was told while in Serbia, planned in 1999 on pushing the Albanians out of Kosovo and replacing them with Serbs forced out of Croatia as the result of the war in Croatia that he had initiated. This is different from the story we were told at the time, that he intended to slaughter Albanians, but he would have killed them had they stayed.

This put me in mind of the behaviour of Netanyahu in Gaza and the West Bank today.

How differently the Americans and Nato respond to Netanyahu.

Germany sponsored the UN General Assembly resolution designating July 11 the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. i was in Tuzla in Bosnia shortly after the war ended and remembering being in tears hearing an account of the massacre. I note that Germany is the ardent supporter of Netanyahu's actions in Gaza today. I also note that terrible though Srebrenica was there it followed Bosnian Muslim massacres of Serbs.

All the killing was a result of Milosovic using national feeling in place of Communism to consolidate his power. 

Netanyahu did something comparable. He deftly built up Hamas as a guarantee that there would never be a Palestinian state, a project of the Labor Party establishment that he had defeated. 

Hamas is his Frankenstein's monster as Osama bin Laden was the Americans' protégé in the war in Afghanistan that started in 1980 and helped bring down the USSR.

The Communist partisans killed thousands of ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina when they took the region, simply for the crime of being Hungarian, which reminds me of the killing of Poles and Jews in Ukraine by the supporters of Stepan Bandera. 

Bandera himself was in comfortable quarters in a German camp until shortly before the end of the German occupation of the Ukraine. He wanted to be a war criminal, I expect, but was unable to be one.