Re: Kosovo conflict
Just my 2 cents on the subject, I find it rather irrelevant to base our biases on religion. It is a well known fact that the Catholics and Orthodox Christians were at each others' throats only quite recently and treated the other side as an abomination. Most of the time Catholic countries like France allied with the Ottoman Empire rather than allying with Austria-Hungary as it was getting rather too powerful; or Britain, a country they had been fighting with for over hundreds of years. I don't think religion plays a part as religion itself; it is only used as a propaganda tool, and most of the time it works very well. It's true that some of the fighting that's going on and has gone on in the Balkans now and in the recent past was thanks to the Ottoman Empire's policy of "divide and rule" (which they no doubt borrowed from the English). Bosnia and Albania are two good examples of it. I guess they never actually bothered about what would happen if they were to leave these groups on their own. Well, now we know. The Balkans had been waiting to explode for a long time and they finally did -starting in the late 19th and early 20th century. Almost every nation has border problems with another nation. And I think it would be really naive to say that "Albanians are evil because they're Muslims and thus the puppets of Turkey", or the same thing for the Bosnians. It's true that the Bosnians did get aid from Turkey because a lot of Bosnians already live there and because some religious organizations saw this as a great opportunity to influence the nominally Muslim Bosnians. The Saudis helped for the exact same reasons. However, it's also a fact that the Serbs and Croats fought with each other too. Both Christians, and? What I'm trying to say is, it's an established fact that the Balkans is full of potential to blow up because of all the said (and unsaid) reasons and therefore it makes no sense to blame it on "evil Islam". I'm not a fan of Islam personally, but I detest the Christian fundies equally.
One would think people would have gotten over the whole "religion" issue by the 21st century...
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