Hi LEGO,

Of course, Tito wasn't Serb but Slovenian-Croat, born on the border of the two. The brother of my grandmother's Hungarian Jewish partner fought with Tito's guerrillas/partisans in Bosnia.

Even though the Serbs are/were in the minority, Tito knew that, as the largest ethnic group, they would still dominate in a federal republic of a united Yugoslavia. After his death in 1979, the Serbs took the path of chauvinism, especially in relation to much smaller populations such as Kosovars, and more ethnically diverse republics such as Bosnia.

I don't think that Serbs were anti-Muslim for any particular progressive reasons, more for quite reactionary reasons of Orthodox Christian domination, if possible, over all of Yugoslavia and the crushing, squeezing out, of small groups. Hence the banning of Albanian-speaking Kosovar staff members from the University of Pristina and the purging of Kosovars from the public services, and eventually - does anybody remember now ? - driving the Kosovar population over the mountains, during winter, into Macedonia and Albania. Pure fascism. Good on NATO and the Yanks for bombing the daylights out of the Serbs.

As far as I can tell, the current independent Kosovar government isn't particularly Islamist, any more than, say, the Indonesian government. But I'll check it out :)

Cheers,

Joe

Loudmouth,

Wars in East Timor and the former Yugoslavia generally weren't seen as a left v right issue, so it's not so surprising that support for action from the left went unnoticed.

I'm not surprised you didn't know about democratic Islamists, as these things generally end up in catastrophe. When Islamists won Algerian elections in the 1990s the result was not accepted and a civil war erupted. Eventually rival violent Islamist factions, spurred on by the government, annihilated each other, but many civilians had also been killed.

More recently Islamist governments in Palestine and Egypt have been elected democratically but then overthrown.

I'm sure I don't really need to tell you that everything ISIS has done is antidemocratic. But when America was trying to set up democracy in Iraq, their claim that they wouldn't let the Islamists win is one of the things that discredited them.

BTW the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia were ethnic not religious. Though Serbs are mostly Orthodox Christians, there are also Serbian Muslims who fought on the Serbian side.

Aidan,

You mean the Sanjak 'Turks' ? They may not have had much choice, as a small minority within Serbia-Montenegro.

As for your claim: " .... when America was trying to set up democracy in Iraq, their claim that they wouldn't let the Islamists win is one of the things that discredited them .... "

overlooks the simple fact that the Sunnis, the backbone of the Islamists, are in the minority, 30 % or so: democracy in Iraq was bound to mean Shi'a dominance, for the first time in Iraq for perhaps a thousand years. Saddam protected and boosted the Sunnis.

Of course, the Americans overlooked the fact of inevitable Shi'a dominance in a barely-democratic state with no previous history of democracy.

The US: fools rush in .....

Cheers,

Joe