The letter by Bratimir Ilic, a member of the board of directors of the Serbian Club of St. Sava (Jan. 25), advances a most curious and tortured bit of reasoning. He argues that the initial act of “aggression” was committed by the Croats and Bosnians when they had the temerity to declare independence. And what about all of the other non-Serbs who sought independence-the Slovenians, Macedonians and the unsuccessful Albanians of Kosovo? Are they “aggressors” too?
By that definition, America was the aggressor against Britain when it declared independence; the Slovakians when they declared independence from the former Czechoslovakia; and the Baltic states, the Ukrainians and other former “provinces” of the Soviet Union aggressed against the Russians when they declared independence. By extension, every group that rebels against domination by another group is an “aggressor.”
An unspoken assumption of this “logic” seems to be that once a regime achieves domination of others, including those of the regime’s own ethnic stock, it has the right to maintain that control in any way it chooses. Had all groups been permitted meaningful participation in the governing process, there very likely would have been no need to seek independence.
The Belgrade regime resorted to force to continue the political dominance it has maintained for most of the 70 or so years the former Yugoslavia had been around. And it fired the first shots in this so-called “civil war”-a grotesque misnomer if there ever was one, since it represents a bloody and brutal attempt to maintain domination by force. Moreover, those shots were fired by Serbs against, not the Croats or the Bosnians, but the Slovenes. Doesn’t that, by Ilic’s definition, make the Slovenians the initial or “true” aggressors?
