[danamco]

Where are all the "Quagmire" articles? Oh, wait, the Dems got us into this one so people killing each other 5 years later is not a quagmire -- people killing each other 12 months later in Iraq is a quagmire.


Don't worry! Kerry Heinz will fix this problem!!

[Cronos]

The Balkans are a region of multiple ethnicities -- Slavic SErbs, croats, slovenes, Greeks, Macedonians and Illyrians (moern day Albanians). Trying to whitewash the problems as merely christian versus muslim is incorrect when you know that there are Muslim and Christian Albanians.

As early as the eighteenth century, a mystic Islamic sect, the Bektashi dervishes, spread into the empire's Albanian-populated lands. Probably founded in the late thirteenth century in Anatolia, Bektashism became the janissaries' official faith in the late sixteenth century. The Bektashi sect contains features of the Turks' pre-Islamic religion and emphasizes man as an individual. Women, unveiled, participate in Bektashi ceremonies on an equal basis, and the celebrants use wine despite the ban on alcohol in the Quran. The Bektashis became the largest religious group in southern Albania after the sultan disbanded the janissaries in 1826. Bektashi leaders played key roles in the Albanian nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century and were to a great degree responsible for the Albanians' traditional tolerance of religious differences.