Ethnic Passion: REBELLION IN THE SOVIET BLOC
COMMUNIST LEADERS PLAY RISKY GAME WITH NATIONALISM
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - Rallies in Slovenia. Marches in Serbia. Tension in Kosovo. Popular protests and popular fronts in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Flight from Romania's Transylvania. Riots in Azerbaijan.The fires of nationalism are being rekindled this year in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans and east to the Caspian Sea. The sparks carry a defiant message for the Communist governments.``Simple,'' says Milovan Djilas, the most...
Ethnic Passion: The Turmoil of a Family--and a Country--in Transition
FUNNY BOY: by Shyam Selvadurai; Morrow; $23, 310 pages
With odd quiet and intimacy, the Sri Lanka novelist Shyam Selvadurai depicts a family's agony on the fault line of a country cracking apart. And through the cycle of insurrection by the Tamil minority and repression by the Sinhalese majority, a child suffers his own insurrection: a gay identity that struggles to assert itself.The novel begins and ends with a battle. At the start, Arjie, the younger son of a prosperous Tamil family in Colombo, insists on playing dress-up bridal...
Ethnic Passion: THE WORLD IS NOT INEVITABLY HEADED TOWARD DEMOCRACY
Every once in a while, some of our best thinkers seem to agree in a new synthesis of America's role in the world. So I have sensed it recently, in the important ongoing debate about spreading American democracy throughout the world.First, last spring, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser under the Carter administration, reflected in a major speech: "What we see before us is not a New World Order but global turmoil and philosophical confusion. It is...
Ethnic Passion: Red for cred,
Real Life Fashion
I used to think of red as my Christmas colour and consider it too upbeat for grey, drizzly January and February. That was until I decided that the early part of the year was miserable enough without dressing in drab colours, too. It seems that much of the fashion industry agrees with me this year.January's Vogue leapt off the newsstand with its red cover, and with glossies and colour supplements enlivened by fashion spreads blending hues from fire-engine red to fuchsia pink, is...
Ethnic Passion: TWO KEYS TO BALKAN PEACE
The Clinton administration has a plausible plan to end the Yugoslav crisis. It rests on Krajina in the northern part of the Balkan region and Kosovo in the southern. Success would terminate the war in the north and deter war in the south In the north, the dispute between Serbs and Croats for a suitable place in the post-Yugoslavia sun is central. But the Serb-Croat-Muslim struggle in Bosnia, while it is conspicuous and terrible, is politically secondary and is in any event under active and so...