GERMAN POLITICIAN & INTELLIGENCE OVERSEER, ANDREAS VON BULOW-1ST TO QUESTION 9.11 STORY - GOOGLE VIDEO
Date: Sunday, 29 October 2006, 7:30 a.m.
Here is an interview with Andreas von Bulow who was in the German goverment for many years with some kind of intelligence job.
He was one of the first major world figures who came out and said that the official story of 911 was a "false flag" story and that the 19 hijackers were "patsies."
He speaks in English answering questions from an offscreen person.
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia, Oct. 29 — Estimates by an independent election monitoring group showed Sunday that a vote on Serbia’s new constitution was too close to call.
Official results were not expected until Monday. The monitoring group said its survey showed that 52 percent of voters had approved the document, with a margin of error of two percentage points, making the estimated victory margin statistically insignificant. The proposed constitution needed support from more than 50 percent of voters to pass.
The Center for Free Elections and Democracy, the monitoring group, came up with its figure by interviewing officials at 600 of the country’s 2,000 polling places to learn their vote tallies and by extrapolating from them.
The group also watched voting at those and other polling places to check for irregularities. The Belgrade-based group, which has monitored 10 Serbian elections since 2004, has called those elections correctly.
One of the most discussed provisions of the 206-article constitution declared that the province of Kosovo is an “integral part of Serbia.” The declaration was symbolic, because the fate of the province lies with the United Nations Security Council, which is likely to vote to enable Kosovo’s independence.
Critics of the constitution have said the document would not move the country far enough toward full democracy.
The proposed constitution was drafted and supported by nationalists and pro-democracy reformers in Parliament. Many reformers supported the document despite its flaws because they wanted to make clear to Serbs that they were doing everything they could to hold on to the province.
Reformers feared that the United Nations vote would create a backlash that could lead to gains for the Serbian Radical Party, the leading nationalist party. They also agreed to rush through the drafting of the constitution so it could be in place before the United Nations vote.
Despite the high-profile provision on Kosovo, the document did not seem to excite the populace. Voting was so slow over the weekend that it appeared the constitution might not get the needed votes, which would be a significant embarrassment for the government.
Voting surged late Sunday after an intensive get-out-the-vote campaign in the afternoon. Senior politicians as well as members of the Serbian Orthodox Church issued statements urging people to vote.
“Citizens, get out and circle ‘yes’ for Serbia, ‘yes’ for a better life for every citizen,” President Boris Tadic was quoted as saying by the state-run Tanjug news agency.
Between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., when the polls closed, an estimated 20 percent of Serbia’s electorate went to the polls. Officials of the monitoring group said they recorded an increase in reports of electoral irregularities during that time. The group did not consider the irregularities significant enough to compromise the vote.
The overall turnout was 53.5 percent, according to the group’s survey.
Kosovo is regarded by many Serbs as being central to their national identity. It has been administered by the United Nations since June 1999, when NATO-led troops took control of the province after 78 days of bombing. NATO wrested Kosovo from the hands of Yugoslav security forces accused of committing widespread atrocities against the majority Albanian population.
Kosovo’s future is the subject of United Nations-led negotiations between the Serbian government and ethnic Albanians in the province. The ethnic Albanians want independence, while the Serbian government and the province’s small Serbian community demand that Kosovo remain part of Serbia.
Few Western diplomats say the groups will be able to reach agreement, leaving the decision to the United Nations Security Council, which is expected to impose a settlement in the next several months to enable Kosovo to claim independence.
While much of the constitution’s contents had been heavily criticized by rights groups as contradictory in parts and giving too much power to Parliament, there was little public debate about its contents. The charter would replace one drafted by the authoritarian government of Slobodan Milosevic in 1990.
Serbia’s government worked hard to help ensure the adoption of the new charter. A government-financed publicity campaign urged people to vote “yes,” and voting was held over two days in an attempt to draw Serbia’s election-weary voters to the polls.
Kosovo’s estimated 1.3 million ethnic Albanians were also excluded from the election. Including the Albanians would have increased the number of voters and made it difficult to secure approval of more than 50 percent of the electorate.
“The government gambled,” said Bratislav Grubacic, a leading political analyst and editor of the VIP news agency in Belgrade. “They hoped by putting Kosovo in the constitution, they would manage to draw out the Serbian electorate.”
Serbs endorsement of a constitution reaffirming sovereignty over Kosovo casts a further shadow over the "final status" of the contested territory. Peter Lippman, recently in Pristina, maps one of Europe's most intractable disputes. ------------------------------------------
Some places in the world have their own characteristic sound. The predominant noise of the cities of Kosovo is that of the electrical generator. Seven years after liberation from Slobodan Milosevic's iron rule, Kosovo's energy supply system remains at a poor developing-country level. There are daily blackouts. Kosovo's Albanian majority has tired of promises, and has been disappointed by local and international haplessness in fixing this problem. This is a more immediate factor in ordinary people's lives than the abstract question of independence, and it is only one of the more salient examples of the hardship of living in a wrecked, post-war society.
But this is the Kosovo Catch-22: there seems little chance of progress in guaranteeing basic services until the "final status" of the turbulent former province of Serbia is resolved, yet that resolution is hostage to profound disagreement between the Belgrade government and the authorities in Kosovo's capital, Pristina.
It took seven years since the ending of the Nato-led war of March-June 1999 - since when Kosovo has been governed under the auspices of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (Unmik) - for the international community to facilitate the negotiations that are to lead to "final status" for Kosovo.
The talks in Vienna, which bring together representatives of the Albanian population of the province with both the government of Serbia and Kosovo Serbs, have been guided by a six-member Contact Group (comprising representatives from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia). In six months, they have produced no progress. Now, in the referendum of 28-29 October 2006, the Serbs have endorsed a new constitution which restates Belgrade's claim over Kosovo. The Albanians of Kosovo (around 95% of the total population) reject this and see an independent state as their future. The result is deadlock.
Peter Lippman is a writer and human-rights activist from the United States who has worked extensively in Bosnia and much of ex-Yugoslvia since the early 1980s
The current situation in Kosovo is stable if fragile. But the slow process of negotiations in Vienna, now combined with Serbia's referendum vote, reinforces a situation of much worry, tension, and periodic unrest.
During a recent visit to Kosovo, I witnessed significant changes in the atmosphere compared to earlier visits. The euphoria of Kosovo's Albanian population after the 1999 war has long given way to concerns over survival in a moribund economy. Commercial activity appears to be blooming, with new shops brightening the formerly dull environment of Pristina. But in an economy devoid of industrial production, this activity is superficial.
Meanwhile, periodic incidents of violence are increasing, reflecting the heightening anxiety accompanying tense negotiations. In August a 16-year-old Albanian threw a bomb into a café in the Serb-held portion of the divided northern town of Mitrovica, injuring nine people. And in recent months car-bombings and other low-grade violence, targeting both Albanians and Serbs, have increased.
These tensions notwithstanding, it has seemed for a long time certain that the tortuous discussions over Kosovo would, by sometime in 2007, result in its independence. Kosovo is still formally a part of Serbia. But international officials recognise the fact that no Albanian is willing to return to a situation of Serbian domination, and have been arguing - all but explicitly - the case for independence.
There are problems both of practice and principle before this scenario becomes feasible: guarantees of firm protection of the Serb population (who, along with other minorities, were mistreated and in many cases expelled by some Albanians in 1999) would have to be secured and accepted; a solution to the Serb-dominated enclave around Mitrovica must be found; the Albanians would have to be confident that the form of "independence" agreed does not compromise their sovereignty; and the government of Serbia would need to be persuaded to surrender a territory it (and many Serbs) regard as a historic, even spiritual part of the homeland.
The legacy of war
Memories of horrible events on both sides of the conflict inform the plans and desires of the participants in the current process. My Albanian friend Xhafer recalls what happened when the Serbs came to his town to expel his community:
"At the beginning, they started torching a few houses on the periphery of our neighborhood, to terrorise us. They didn't plan to destroy everything, as they wanted to use our houses for their refugees from Croatia. Some of us collected in one house. We had a plan to hide in a chicken coop if the soldiers came. But then my mother insisted we move; maybe she had a premonition. So we left a couple of hours before the soldiers came, and when they did, they took twelve men away. Some of those people, including friends of mine, are still missing, and others were found dead. It is hard for me to accept that we escaped death by two hours."
In June 1999 the Serb forces withdrew and hundreds of thousands of Albanians, having been expelled to neighbouring countries, came back en masse to their destroyed villages and looted homes. The traumatic events of a war that for them had lasted a year left Albanians with little sympathy when some of their number, in the absence of any rule of law, began attacking Serbs and Roma; this resulted in the flight of between 100,000 and 200,000 Serbs, along with the majority of the Roma population.
In the ensuing years an ill-prepared Unmik gradually worked to restore order in what had become its protectorate. Demobilised Albanian guerrillas transformed themselves into politicians, but found only a few local Serbs with whom to collaborate in creating an orderly society. Serb fear was manipulated by the Belgrade government in order to prevent the cementing of Albanian sovereignty in the province. Serbia worked to discourage even a semblance of multi-ethnic democracy, agitating for the return of Kosovo to Serbian control or, at the very least, a partition of the province.
In its governance, Unmik painstakingly nurtured a movement towards cooperation among Kosovo's ethnicities. International officials presided over the repair of thousands of houses and reconstruction of infrastructure, as Albanians waited for an economic recovery that never arrived. But local Serbs campaigned for autonomy and freedom of movement, often obstructing the movement of everyone else in the province by blockading main roads near their enclaves. A particular sore point for the Albanians was the ongoing obstruction of their return to homes in the northern part of the divided city of Mitrovica, controlled by the Serbs. Attempts by Albanians to visit their houses in that area were met with violent attacks by Serbs, but there were periodic flare-ups of violence against the Serbs as well.
The Vienna impasse
The international community, anxious to proceed towards final status, approved the opening of negotiations at the beginning of 2006. Final status issues include protection of minorities; autonomy for Serb communities; protection of religious sites; decentralisation; and a special relationship between Kosovo Serb communities and the government of Serbia. Each of these points is a matter of fierce contention between the negotiating parties.
A major influence in the negotiations is the stance of the Belgrade government. Serbian representatives at Vienna have striven to retain the greatest possible authority in the province. Their hardened position is that, while Kosovo may have extensive autonomy, it must remain under the sovereignty of Serbia as its traditional purview and the "cradle of Serbian civilisation". Against this stance, Albanian negotiators take independence as their starting-point, and insist that only lesser issues are negotiable.
Meanwhile, international officials have repeatedly insisted on three conditions: the establishment of a unified, multiethnic Kosovo with no partition; no boundary changes; and no return to pre-1999 political arrangements.
These conditions require little interpretation to understand that independence is foreseen. But even if this assumed to be a "public secret", the definition of Kosovo's independence is now under great scrutiny. One of the thorniest issues is the allocation of local power. Belgrade is pressing for the establishment of new Serb-dominated municipalities. There are currently five Serb municipalities, but Serb representatives are demanding as many as ten more. Belgrade is also pressing for the power to support the governments of these municipalities financially, the establishment of a Serbian-language-based school curriculum, and special authorities for Serbs in the courts and police forces. Albanian negotiators see these and similar demands as amounting to the establishment of extraterritorial powers for Belgrade.
It has become obvious that the two sides will not be able to reach a compromise through the Vienna process. This has led UN special envoy and mediator for the final-status process, Martti Ahtisaari, to warn that ultimately the international community may decide the fate of Kosovo on its own. In September, the Contact Group authorised Ahtisaari to propose a solution for Kosovo's final status and achieve a settlement by the end of 2006.
Belgrade's blind alley
Serbs living in Serbia are not preoccupied with Kosovo in their daily lives. But while Kosovo's independence has appeared foreordained, there is no politician in Belgrade who is willing to acknowledge this and make the best of it. President Boris Tadic and prime minister Vojislav Kostunica have repeatedly proclaimed Kosovo's permanent status as a province of Serbia.
Recent polls have shown that the extremist opposition Serbian Radical Party would again hold the largest number of seats in elections scheduled for 2007. (The leader of the Radicals, Vojislav Seselj, currently sits in a prison at The Hague awaiting trial for participation in war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.) The Radicals are already the largest single party in parliament, but Kostunica and Tadic were able to form a majority coalition from more "moderate" (though still hardened nationalist) parties, including Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist Party.
The threat of being replaced by the Radicals is a prominent factor in Belgrade's current rigid stance. In September the Serbian parliament, preparing for the drafting of the new constitution, proposed a passage that would declare Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia for all time. The Radicals then raised the stakes with the government by declaring that this was a good idea - but that the government must prepare to back up its words with force.
Tomislav Nikolic, head of the Radicals, called on Serbia's leaders to prepare the country's army for a war, saying: "I want to know what our armed forces will do. If we don't have enough motivation and weapons, then don't tell us that Kosovo is part of Serbia."
Nikolic knows very well that Serbia cannot both wage war in Kosovo and make any progress in its bid to join the European Union. The time for military solutions in the region has, in any case, passed. But he also knows that his calculating pronouncements keep the heat on Tadic and Kostunica, and add to his own popularity. These political factors put the Belgrade government in a bind where Kosovo is concerned.
The Tadic-Kostunica coalition, in response to the threat from more extreme nationalist forces, pressed ahead with the new constitution at the end of September. With no politician in Serbia's parliament willing to oppose the retention of Kosovo, the constitution was adopted unanimously by all representatives present. This paved the way for the national referendum on 28-29 October.
Throughout the referendum campaign, criticism of the constitution (and its adoption process) has been voiced, on a number of grounds: that it curtails civil liberties, especially in the court system; that it was drafted hastily and without public discussion; and that Albanians in Kosovo would be largely excluded from the vote (even if they wished to participate).
In the event, the criticisms had little effect - except, perhaps, on the abstention rate. In a weak turnout of 53.5% of the electorate, 96% voted in favour of giving the government the simple majority it needed to pass the draft, which is thus now in force.
The new constitution, with its emphasis on Serbia's ownership of Kosovo, has been described as a signal that Serbia will not surrender the province without great resistance. But the internal politics of Serbia, especially the survival of the current government, remain the key factor.
The next political event in Serbia, as fraught with tension as the constitution's adoption, will be elections for a new government. Tadic and Kostunica desperately want these elections to take place before the international community bequeaths independence upon Kosovo, as any government going into new elections soon after such a development would do so in a fatally weakened condition. There has been talk recently of the Contact Group delaying a final-status decision until elections can be held (which would - theoretically - return the present coalition to power); but this conflicts with Ahtisaari's mandate (and determination) to resolve the question by the end of 2006.
Albanian options
Meanwhile, some Kosovar Albanians are opposed to the negotiations altogether. They find expression in the grassroots organisation Vetevendosje (Self-Determination). Its leader, the prominent young activist Albin Kurti, describes the concession by Albanian negotiators of additional Serb-controlled municipalities as a move that will allow a the creation of a contiguous Serb-controlled territory. Explaining that this territory could then secede and be annexed to Serbia, he calls this development the "Bosnianisation of Kosovo."
Vetevendosje has held several demonstrations to press its demand for an end to the negotiations, even blocking the entrances to Unmik's headquarters and seeing dozens of its supporters arrested. The group has characterised Unmik's presence as supporting the "recolonisation" of Kosovo. It calls for the establishment of a strict time-limit for Kosovo's independence, without further negotiations. Kurti states that decentralisation of Kosovo could be acceptable in some form - but only after independence.
Vetevendosje is often characterised as "extreme" by other Albanians; many complain that it would best devote its energies to opposing corruption or criticising haphazard corruption schemes involving rigged contracts. But some of its campaigns - such as the boycott of Serbian imports to Kosovo - have won greater support. The territory imports 95% of its consumer goods, a significant portion from Serbia. Even construction supplies, used to repair the thousands of houses destroyed by Serb forces, have been trucked in from Serbia. This, and the fact that the traditional agricultural economy of Kosovo is withering, makes the boycott movement popular.
A time to act
There are some good leaders in Kosovo who call for tolerance and reconciliation, and offer specific ideas about protection of minorities. But these honest people do not have much influence.
In any event, the possibility of arriving at a practical resolution to the problems mentioned above - especially in present international circumstances - is far beyond the capacity of any public figures among the Serbs and Albanians of the province.
For all its hardships, Kosovo is not poor, especially in human resources. A timely resolution of Kosovo's final status, attended by a continued security presence provided by international forces, could encourage investment and revive the optimism of all its inhabitants. If Kosovo continues to live in limbo, more and more people are likely to agree with the acquaintance who told me: "There are no prospects here, and young people desire to leave in any way they can, legally or illegally."
It is clear that the international community must soon navigate a path towards a clear and peaceful resolution. That will demand courage and energy. It is also the only way. The cost of inaction could be great
Belgrade is one of the oldest cities in Europe, and it has been both victim and victimizer throughout its long and often brutal history.
Many travelers still remember how, during the Cold War, this capital of the former Yugoslavia was one of the more prosperous and liberal places behind the Iron Curtain, whose inhabitants liked to boast that their passport garnered respect in both the Eastern and Western blocs. But then came the death of longtime leader Josip Broz Tito, the fall of communism, the rise of the super-nationalist Slobodan Milosevic and, during the 1990s, the all-out calamity of the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Now relegated to the capital of Serbia rather than the sprawling nation of Yugoslavia that once encompassed a large area of the Balkans, Belgrade is still "in recovery." But as someone who traveled through the country in 1991, and watched events there first-hand in 1996 and 1997 -- and who has subsequently met many artists who fled their home and settled in Chicago -- I can vouch for the toughness and resilience of the Belgradians, and for their innate theatricality. (During the student uprisings over stolen local elections in late 1996, many in the city opened their windows as the state-run nightly TV news was broadcast, banging loudly on pots and pans in an attempt to drown out the lies.) True, the city might still be a spot favored primarily by the Lonely Planet crowd that prides itself on offbeat destinations. But one thing is certain; it is never boring.
Though much of the city has a grimy Soviet-era quality, with ugly post-World War II buildings in the vast areas of the city that were heavily bombed (first by the Germans, then by the Allies), just enough of the majesty of earlier centuries exists in the center to lend some charm. You can find it on Prince Michael Street (the elegant pedestrian mall where even in the darkest times the women looked chic and shoe stores were up-to-the-minute); near the National Theatre; around the handsome Parliament building; at the history-layered Belgrade Fortress. Downtown's Republic Square holds memories of turbulent recent times. And the nearby Hotel Moskva, with its Old World tea room -- where I often went to escape the riot police and chaos of the streets -- will always be a personal favorite.
Tatjana Radisic, one of many Belgrade-trained theater artists who have forged careers in Chicago during the past decade or so, is an exceptionally talented costume designer who has worked at the Goodman, Steppenwolf and Redmoon theaters. Her designs can now be seen at Northlight Theatre (where the all-American "Inherit the Wind" is playing), and will soon be on view at Victory Gardens Theatre (where the musical fairy tale, "The Snow Queen," will debut).
She is now in Belgrade; I asked her to e-mail me impressions to update my own.
Radisic wrote that the fall colors are beautiful but "underneath this romantic image it seems to me that the country is boiling."
On the other hand, cultural life is alive and well, with the 22nd Belgrade International Jazz Festival, the 46th International Book Fair, the 40th International Theater Festival and the Sixth Biennial of Stage Design (where Radisic's U.S. work was nominated for an award), have all taken place in recent months. The old theaters are still working -- and still receive government funding -- though fewer and fewer young people go.
Meanwhile, Prince Michael Street remains "a great catwalk," writes Radisic. "It's full of kids, street singers and musicians, and, as always beautiful young people. The dominant street fashion is tight jeans and small, tight winter jackets. They all look very fashionable, but somehow uniform. It's the new generation, born in the 1980s and '90s -- growing up during the wars, sanctions, hyperinflation, black market, protests."
This generation did not travel abroad and has a Hollywood-distorted image of wealth and fame, said Radisic.
"It's all part of the Turbo-Folk culture that developed during Milosevic's time -- a mixture of money, sex, fast cars, tough guys, arms and bimbos."
BRUSSELS – European officials are worried that a U.N. mediator will avoid outlining a clear final status for Kosovo, risking a unilateral declaration of independence that may cause a diplomatic crisis and split the European Union.
Officials familiar with Finnish mediator Martti Ahtisaari's thinking say he is set to stop short of proposing independence for the breakaway Serbian province in deference to fierce hostility from Belgrade and strong Russian opposition.
'The dangerous situation is if there is no clear recommendation as to the final status,' one senior EU official said. 'There is a very significant risk of that.'
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, in charge of the European integration of the Western Balkans, has been urging Ahtisaari to ensure clarity in his proposals for an agreed settlement, due to be issued sometime in November.
Many European officials are urging the mediator to delay his push for a deal until after early Serbian elections possible in December, following a weekend referendum that approved a new constitution declaring Kosovo an integral part of Serbia.
But the United States and Britain are pressing for a final status agreement this year, arguing that delay risks provoking violence among Kosovo's overwhelmingly Albanian population.
Kosovo has been under United Nations protection in a state of legal limbo since 1999, when NATO waged an air campaign to drive out Serbian forces and stop ethnic cleansing.
Its prime minister, Agim Ceku, insists independence by the end of this year is the only acceptable outcome for Kosovo's 2 million people, some 90 percent of whom are ethnic Albanians.
'Nothing less than independence will be acceptable,' the former general told Reuters in an interview this month.
'MESSY SCENARIO'
While Washington and London argue that Kosovo's situation is unique, Russia sees it as a precedent for changing international borders without the consent of the country concerned.
If Kosovo can have independence against Belgrade's wishes, then breakaway regions of Moldova or Georgia backed by Moscow should enjoy the same right, Russian officials contend.
The EU official said Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president and veteran negotiator often tipped for the Nobel peace prize, felt it was not his duty to make 'a judgment of Solomon'.
He planned to set out legal arrangements on governance, decentralisation and minority rights but leave the ultimate final status decision to the U.N. Security Council.
The Kosovo daily Express, quoting two diplomats it said had seen Ahtisaari's draft, said the plan would not include the word 'independence' but recommend Kosovo be given 'treaty-making powers' and the right to join international organisations.
A senior European diplomat in the Kosovo capital Pristina said the report 'seems to tie in very much with what we know.
'He doesn't mention independence but Ahtisaari is describing the criteria which characterise an independent country,' he said.
An EU official in Brussels said that could trigger a 'messy scenario' in which the Security Council would be deadlocked and the Kosovo government, perhaps with the green light from Washington, would declare independence.
If that happened, there would be an intense diplomatic battle over recognition, with the United States likely to lead a drive for recognition against Russian resistance.
The EU risked a split between 'Orthodox and Habsburg' member states closer to Serbia and others such as Britain that might recognise Kosovo individually, he said.
DELAY OR HASTEN?
An EU diplomat in Brussels said a discussion of Kosovo among ambassadors of the 25-nation bloc last week was based on the assumption that Ahtisaari would delay.
'Now it looks as if the whole schedule has been delayed. Ahtisaari will want to see Serbian elections before presenting his report. People recognise it is a very complicated process,' the diplomat said.
But Macedonian Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki said after talks with EU officials last Friday that a delay in Kosovo's final status could affect his own country next door.
'The situation in our country is stable, however we are aware that certain risks exist on Kosovo,' he said. 'You need only three people, one landmine, one flag and a press communique to have an incident.
'Therefore we think a decision concerning the final status of Kosovo should be taken earlier ... The endless prolongation of the status quo is not creating a bigger space for some ideal solution. There will be no ideal solution,' he said.
It was always best to take difficult decisions in the Balkans in winter, he said, before the snows melt and fighters can take to the mountains.
(Additional reporting by Mark John in Brussels and Matt Robinson in Pristina)
Kosovo Serbs see constitution referendum crucial for their future in the province
Kosovo Serbs see constitution referendum crucial for their future in the province
Kosovo Serbs see constitution referendum crucial for their future in the province
The Associated Press
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2006
OSOJANE, Serbia In the tiny western village of Osojane in the breakaway province of Kosovo, Vlastimir Vukovic shared his home-made plum brandy with a fellow Serb. The bottle he kept it in had a label written in Albanian, as is virtually everything else surrounding the remote Serb enclave — from the road signs to the graffiti on the walls.
On Saturday, the Serbs plan to walk past NATO peacekeepers' tanks guarding the village and into the local school to cast ballots in a referendum on a new constitution that declares Kosovo an integral part of Serbia.
Vukovic says the vote is crucial if there is to be a future for the Serbs in Kosovo, where the majority ethnic Albanians are seeking independence.
"There is no life for Serbs here, unless Kosovo is part of Serbia," said Vukovic, 68.
Some 100,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo, most of them in isolated enclaves under the protection of the peacekeepers.
Although diplomats insist the referendum has no bearing on U.N.-led negotiations on the political future of Kosovo, the vote reflects the deep divisions between the province's communities.
The province, now administered by the United Nations, has struggled to recover from a 1998-99 war that left some 10,000 dead and pitted Serbs and ethnic Albanians against one another.
A key article in the new constitution reasserts the breakaway province — which the Serbs consider its cultural heartland — is a part of Serbia. Western diplomats say the province is likely to gain some form of independence.
"I will never live in an independent Kosovo," Vukovic said. "The constitution treats Kosovo as Serbia and that means Belgrade will protects us," he said.
He passed a glass of brandy to Jagos Djuric, sitting next to him. The two are among some 30 Serbs who returned to live in Osojane after initially fleeing in the aftermath of the conflict, when ethnic Albanians sought revenge for the actions of Serb forces.
Djuric, 52, said living conditions were difficult, jobs were scarce and there was no safety — issues he believes only Serbia can alleviate if it retains control of the province.
Ethnic Albanians insist Serbia has lost the right to govern the province after the death and destruction it brought.
"It cannot bring them any good," said Ylber Hysa, an ethnic Albanian legislator involved in talks with Serbia. "In Kosovo the vote is more an act of internal politics and a provocation rather than a true attempt to retain Kosovo within Serbia."
Analysts contend that the vote will just harden the stands of the opposing communities.
"The referendum will make it difficult for Belgrade to recognize any change in Kosovo's status," said Daniel Serwer, an expert on peace and security operations at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
"This is what Kostunica wants: Belgrade locked into a position of seeking recovery of territory. This could be a source of instability for many years to come," he said.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Bureau of International Information Programs USINFO Webchat Transcript
“Ask the Ambassador” with Ambassador to the Republic of Serbia Michael C. Polt
Guest: Michael C. Polt Date: October 27, 2006 Time: 9:00am EDT (1300 GMT)
WEBCHAT MODERATOR: Join Ambassador Michael C. Polt at 1300 GMT (1500 CET) on October 27 to discuss global issues of concern to Serbs and Americans.
WEBCHAT MODERATOR: We'll be getting started very shortly. Thanks for coming today.
QUESTION [vpekic]: Dear Mr. Ambassador,
1. What have been your personal emotions/views regarding the Montenegrin independence process and the re-birth of this new nation in Europe after 88 years during your mandate in Belgrade?
2. What has surprised you most about Serbia and does it still surprise you?
ANSWER [Ambassador Michael Polt]
1. The most important element of the Montenegrin referendum was the free, democratic, and peaceful expression of the will of the people. Montenegrin independence is the only such peaceful result as a consequence of the break-up of Yugoslavia.
2. The resilience of the Serbian people and the worldliness and intelligence of the Serbian young people despite their relative isolation.
Q [Tony]: Where does Serbia need the most work? What kind of investment is the USA providing them?
A: In your economy, of course, to create more and better jobs for all. We are investing in virtually all sectors of your economy, from manufacturing to services. But you also need a new approach to the future. You can honor the past, but make for a better future.
Q [Tony]: When would you guess that Serbia would get into EU? NATO?
A: As soon as you are ready. Your future development is in your hands, not outsiders, as so many seem to believe. Of course, both NATO and the EU have membership criteria. I know you can meet all of them if you choose to.
Q [Guest]: Do you think it's still possible to reach Kosovo future status agreement by the end of this year?
A: Yes. Neither Serbians nor Albanians nor any other group, in any part of Serbia, including Kosovo, are helped by any further delay. Once a resolution is reached, all of the people of this country and this region can get on with building a brighter future.
Q [Guest]: Postovani Mr. Michael C.Polt,
Ja sam decko sa Kosova i Metohije, iz grada Prizrena i zelim znati da li postoji sansa da se vratim na Kosovo...
A: I really believe there is and my country is doing all it can to help create the right conditions for all who wish to live and work in any part of Kosovo can do so. In the end result, much will depend on the good will of all who live there. These people of good will do exist.
Q [Guest]: Postovani gospodine Polt,
Da li ce Amerika moci nesto da nauci iz situacije na Balkanu i u Srbiji, ili cemo uvek mi dobijati lekcije od Zapada?
A: Americans are always learning and we know that we don't have all the answers. All we can do is try and do our best. It is not our intention or in our interest to lecture. But at the same time, we are not willing to accept things that are not right, just because some argue that it has always been that way. The world -- our world -- can be a better place.
Q [Guest]: Dear Mr. Michael C. Polt, Is Manhattan the best and the prettiest city in the world?
Sincerely, Draga Duric
A: The people of Manhattan think so. They may be right. But then I like Tennessee...
Q [Guest]: Dear Michael C. Polt. Will the US Embassy start to give easier visas to students that were already accepted in some high school, college or university?
Sincerely, Anjelka Blagojevic
A: We want as many students from Serbia as possible to come and study in the U.S. I can promise you that we will work with all prospective students to make our visa process as easy as possible. I can also promise that we will always treat you with the utmost courtesy and respect when you come to our Embassy.
Q [Book Fair]:
INSPARED BY THE TODAY'S VERY HIGH TEMPERATURE FOR THE END OF OCTOBER, I WOULD LIKE TO ASK MR. AMBASSADOR IF USA GOVERMENT IS GOING TO SIGN FOR THE KIOTO PROTOCOL, AND TO FOLLOW THE EXAMPLE OF CALIFORNIA. THANK YOU. NIKOLA NIKACEVIC, UNIVERSITY OF BELGRADE
A: The United States of America shares the concerns of our globe on all issues, including on global warming. We have proposed many ways to deal with the potential threats of global warming and will work hard with all other nations interested in the most effective way to deal with this issue.
Q [Guest]: How does the independence of Montenegro affect the possibility of independence for Kosovo?
A: Kosovo is an issue on to itself. Under a United Nations mandate, the international community is dedicated to finding a solution to the real life concerns of the people of Kosovo. We are counting on support for that in Belgrade as well as in Pristina.
Q [Guest]: Dear Mr. Michael C. Polt,
My daughter has pictures of US presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
My question is, is there any way possible to get picture of George W. Bush? Can Mr. Bush put his signature on a picture, because those presidents put his autograph on their pictures?
Thank you,
Dragan Lazovic
P.S. If you are able to send the picture please send it on: [Personal information has been removed to protect individual’s privacy.]
A: I will be glad to send your daughter a picture of the President. Look for it in the mail soon.
Q [Guest]: What is the best book you have ever read?
A: It is too hard for me to choose among all the books I have read to say which is the best. I can tell you that one of the ones I read some years ago that impressed me deeply was "The Hope" by Herman Wouk, a novel about the struggle of the first decades of the State of Israel.
Q [dvj]: Dear Sir, David Vujanovic here from AFP...
Do you think the proposed new Serbian constitution would be a positive step for the country, or do you think that it could complicate issues in the region?
Thanks
A: The real answer to that can really only be given by the Serbian citizens. If passed, it will be their constitution. A document that is viewed by Serbia as a way to identify itself as a democratic, open-minded, confident, forward looking and diverse country would be a good thing.
WEBCHAT MODERATOR: We would like to thank Ambassador Polt for all of his time today as well as all of the wonderful participants in Serbia.
You will be able to find the transcript of this chat later today at our Webchat Station http://usinfo.state.gov/usinfo/Products/Webchats.html.
Published: October 27 2006 18:44 | Last updated: October 27 2006 18:44
The US has sent a special envoy to Kosovo and Serbia to press both sides to keep the peace as the international community prepares to decide the status of the United Nations-run province.
Diplomats and politicians on all sides expect a messy and inconclusive outcome, and fear further ethnic violence in Kosovo with peacekeepers from Nato caught in the middle.
Few believe that Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president acting as UN mediator, can broker a compromise. This weekend Serbian voters are likely to approve by referendum a new constitution reaffirming Kosovo as part of Serbia, while the province’s ethnic Albanian majority overwhelmingly aspires to, and expects, full independence.
The fate of Kosovo – run by the UN and protected by Nato since the 1999 air campaign stopped ethnic cleansing by Serbia – is also hostage to the deteriorating state of relations between the US and Russia. These are complicated by rising tensions in the southern Caucasus and competing interests over Iran and energy resources.
As Russia reasserts itself on the world stage, the US and Europe are wondering what price President Vladimir Putin will exact at the UN Security Council in exchange for consenting to Kosovo’s independence, or whether he will simply block the process completely.
Mr Putin warns that independence for Kosovo would set a precedent for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Russian-backed, separatist enclaves in Georgia. The US insists Kosovo is a “unique” case, thereby also seeking to assuage Chinese concerns over Taiwan and Tibet.
Diplomats expect Mr Ahtisaari will recommend a form of “managed” or “conditional” independence that falls short of full sovereignty, keeping Kosovo under international protection and guidance, possibly for three years.
Should Russia deprive Kosovo of the UN’s blessing for a path to independence, then the Kosovo Albanian government under Agim Ceku, prime minister, may be encouraged by the US to consider making a unilateral declaration of independence.
This heightens the risk that the Serb minority in Kosovo, mostly concentrated in Nato-protected enclaves, would follow suit and declare their own independence or allegiance to Belgrade.
Frank Wisner, the special US envoy, is expected to urge Belgrade to prevent any such breakaway move. Diplomats say his mission is to tell Kosovo and Serbia that they must accept Mr Ahtisaari’s “compromise imposed solution”.
Dimitri Simes, head of the Nixon Center think-tank which has close contact with Moscow, says Russia’s position on Kosovo is hardening but it may not have decided how it will vote at the UN.
“That depends on the overall status of the US-Russia relationship, the results of World Trade Organisation negotiations and the forthcoming meetings in November between Presidents Bush and Putin, first in Moscow and then in Hanoi,” he said.
But he warned that it might be difficult for Mr Putin to back down over Kosovo.
“The Russian leadership, including President Putin personally, is making it increasingly clear to the Bush administration that Georgia is becoming a defining issue in the US-Russia relationship the way Iran and North Korea are on the American side.”
Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation security think-tank, said Mr Putin had “let the genie out of the bottle with nationalism” and warned of the dangers posed by a Russia seeking to regain its Soviet-era domination of the Caucasus and its strategic oil and gas pipelines.
Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, kept making concessions only for Russia to keep “upping the ante”, Mr Howard said.
It was possible the Bush administration would seek to delay Kosovo’s bid for independence and Georgia’s bid for Nato membership to keep Russia on board over Iran and North Korea, he added.
Speaking of the deadlock facing Mr Ahtisaari, one Kosovo Albanian politician commented: “We are waiting for the real talks to begin – between the US and Russia.”
Serbia’s new soon-to-be-adopted constitution remains fixated on Kosovo “as an integral part” of its territory, showing high political tension and a deep public malaise in the country, say experts.
The international community’s goal of finalizing an independence timetable for Kosovo ahead of Serbia’s parliamentary elections in December could backfire by tempting hardline nationalist leaders in Belgrade to stoke up ethnic tensions in the ever-volatile Balkan region, according to security analysts and European Union (EU) officials.
“Serbia is in no position to make war, but it could stir up trouble across the region if it wants to — in the Republic of Srpska [the ethnic Serbian component of the tri-state Bosnia-Herzegovina federation], in Kosovo and in Macedonia and Montenegro,” Judy Batt, research fellow on Balkan issues at the EU Institute of Security Studies, Paris, told an Oct. 18 conference here on Serbia’s democratic future.
Milan Pajevic agreed. His reformist liberal party, G17 Plus, is a junior member of Serbia’s coalition government and is threatening to withdraw from it over constitutional issues.
“There has been no clear and resolute break with our past. Some of the biggest profiteers and rabble rousers from the [Slobodan] Milosevic era have been absorbed into our current economic and political structures,” said Pajevic, referring to the late Serbian strongman who was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes during the 1991-1995 Balkan conflicts.
Serbia will hold a popular referendum Oct. 28-29 on the new constitution and its controversial reference to Kosovo. As for Serbia’s dialogue with Kosovo leaders in U.N.-sponsored negotiations to orchestrate the province’s independence, Belgrade has refused to yield an inch of ground. “Those talks have gone nowhere since they were launched in February,” Batt said.
The question now remains whether the Kosovo issue will play into Serbia’s parliamentary election in December, for which an exact date is still unknown.
Despite the international community’s mounting frustration with Belgrade’s intransigence, Batt advised against any premature move by the six-nation Contact Group. The group — comprising Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States — is responsible for organizing Kosovo’s political detachment from Serbia.
“The Contact Group wants to end these talks by the end of this year, with recommendations delivered to the U.N.,” said Batt. “This would fall right in the middle of Serbia’s election. I don’t think that would be a good thing. It would be better to delay the release of those recommendations [until after the election].”
Pajevic warned that “what we now have [in the attitude of Serbia’s leadership toward Kosovo] is a direct result of Milosevic’s deranged politics of the 1990s.”
“It will be very bad if that leadership exploits [the loss of] Kosovo to distort our relationship with the European Union.”
Whether Serbia uses its December election to rise above its past is, indeed, an open question. The country’s prospects for closer ties to the European Union have been frozen by the latter since May, due to Belgrade’s failure to deliver the last of its war criminals to the ICTY, such as the notorious former warlord Ratko Mladic.
“The status quo of Kosovo is intolerable for everyone — including Serbia — but we want the Serbian people to look to their European future rather than dwelling on their past,” said Heather Grabbe, an adviser to Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner for enlargement policy. “But this means dealing with the ICTY and [the forthcoming loss of] Kosovo.”
All three speakers said defense reform would help Serbia achieve the democratic legitimacy and transparency it lacks today.
“Serbia does not have a proper rule of law or democratic control of its military. Why is it Belgrade cannot achieve full cooperation with the ICTY? Because it is linked to these two very real problems,” said Grabbe.
NATO could have had a role there but, like the EU, it excluded Serbia from joining its Partnership for Peace (PfP) program until the country resolves its ICTY problems. In Pajevic’s view, that was a mistake.
“It would be much better to have Serbia as a PfP member. Then it could work hand-in-hand with NATO allies to shape Serbia’s military forces and use them to find Mladic and other war criminals,” he said.
Batt seconded that view, arguing that Serbia’s PfP eligibility “should not have been linked to the ICTY—precisely because PfP addresses security and defense reform issues.”
Serbia and the Referendum on the new Constitution - Public opinion polling
Serbia and the Referendum on the new Constitution - Public opinion polling
Serbia and the Referendum on the new Constitution - Public opinion polling
The referendum on the adoption of the new Serbian constitution will be held on 28 and 29 October 2006. There are in total 6,639,385 voters who will have the right to vote at the referendum.
The wording of the new constitution which was approved by the Serbian National Assembly on 30 September 2006 differs in many aspects from the Milošević's 1990 constitution which is presently still in force.
The current constitution was adopted in the former Yugoslavia (SFRY) when Serbia was one of its federal units, while the draft new constitution points to the need to define formally and legally the statehood of the Republic of Serbia and to finally deal away with the remnants of Milošević's regime.
For quite some time this was generally understood as the main reason for the political consensus regarding the adoption of the new constitution. However, the referendum campaign is marked by the pre-election race for winning political points in view of the parliamentary and presidential elections which are to follow soon should the new constitution be adopted. For a positive result of the referendum 50% plus one vote of the total voting body is required.
When a few months ago the State Union Serbia and Montenegro was "buried", Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and his DSS (Democratic Party of Serbia) had to find a way out of the crisis into which they fell after they advocated the common state union with Montenegro. Koštunica's government was facing a collapse especially after the G17 plus ministers threatened to leave the government by 1 October unless the talks with the EU continue until 1 October.
Since constitution is Koštunica's "boy's dream" as the boss of the governing coalition he managed quite quickly to achieve a consensus which he wanted to capitalise on and present to the voters as his own political success. The opposition parties were ready to co-operate solely for own party interest in the early parliamentary elections.
However, the marginal, non-parliamentary parties – LDP (Liberal Democratic Party), LSDV (League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina), GSS (Civil Alliance of Serbia) and SDU (Social Democratic Union) – are openly calling for a boycott of the referendum under the slogan "YES to citizen constitution, No to party constitution".
There are some justified reasons for opposing the new constitution, for example the absence of a public debate on the draft constitution which is the usual practice in the west European states, since the aim of the public debate is, among other, to define the problematic issues and find ideas on how to correct or amend them.
The IFIMES International Institute is of the opinion that minor political parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties in Serbia will not be able to influence the results of the referendum since the present Serbian authorities have already prepared the scenario according to which the referendum will be pronounced as successful regardless of what will the citizens are going to express or the opposition of minor political parties.
To get some perspective on Iraq and Afghanistan, let's revisit the previous decade's big nation-building project. Eleven years after U.S.-led forces went into Bosnia and seven after Kosovo, the Balkans remain prone to violence and riven by sectarian tensions. The scale of the difficulties wasn't appreciated at the start. Yet the alternative to the uneasy peace there today was -- and remains -- misery and instability on Europe's southeastern flank.
Tough decisions now loom for the Balkans, testing nerves and American leadership. By year's end, Kosovo is to move toward "final status," which to everyone but Serbia and Russia means independence. This will take finesse, so as not to push Serbia into the wilderness or rattle the weak multi-ethnic constructs in Bosnia and Macedonia. The U.S. and Europeans are also sure to come into conflict with Russia over Kosovo.
This tussle is Slobodan Milosevic's last gift to the world. In suing for peace with NATO in 1999, the late strongman made sure Kosovo stayed Serbia's on paper, and the U.S. and the Europeans let him get away with it. Though NATO troops and a U.N. government set up camp, and Belgrade no longer held sway, Serbians could indulge the fantasy that Kosovo wasn't gone for good.
The problem has festered for seven years. A U.N. negotiator, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, tried and failed to negotiate a solution. Milosevic's democratically elected successors aren't willing to take the blame for the loss of Kosovo, and Kosovar Albanian expectations were raised so high about sovereignty that their leaders had nothing left to negotiate. Mr. Ahtisaari called off the talks, and went to work on a plan for the Security Council.
The open secret is that the Finn will propose independence, but the timing and details are contentious. Both are worth sweating over. In an unstated quid pro quo, the internationals will hold off on Kosovo until Serbia holds parliamentary elections and gets a government with a four-year mandate, presumably enough time for voters to forget the loss.
But the Serbs must first call the poll, probably slated for early December, after this weekend's referendum on a new constitution, which was drawn up when Montenegro left their rump union earlier this year. (Shrinking is a Serbian speciality.) Though the constitution reasserts the claim to Kosovo, that clause is hardly legitimate, not least since the Kosovar Albanians didn't have a say in its drafting or ratification.
Any delay beyond early December risks the renewal of ethnic violence last seen in the spring of 2004, when the Kosovar Albanians rioted. In a telephone interview this week, U.S. envoy for Kosovo, Frank Wisner, told us by phone from Pristina that America remains committed to bringing the issue before the Security Council by the end of December.
Our sources tell us that the Ahtisaari plan takes inspiration from the sovereignty with strings attached granted Germany in 1949. Kosovo may not get a U.N. seat or a standing army for a while. It won't be called "conditional independence," but it'll be conditioned. Though Belgrade wants to carve away the Serb-dominated regions of northern Kosovo, partition is not on the table. It is, however, the reality on the ground and minority Serbs, the victims of ethnic cleansing since 1999, deserve reassurances about security. As do Serbs in Serbia proper about their religious sites in Kosovo.
Structured this way, with doors kept open to the EU and NATO on the ground, an independent Kosovo could thrive as other small, new European countries have. The wild card is Russia. Vladimir Putin recently tied the fate of Kosovo to unresolved territorial disputes in his own backyard. If Kosovo wins independence, he asked, why not the Russian-run breakaway regions of Georgia -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia? (By this reasoning, Russian Chechnya should also be a candidate for a U.N. seat but by now we shouldn't expect this Kremlin regime to be rational.)
So add Kosovo to Iran, Sudan, the Caucasus and other flashpoints where Mr. Putin works overtime to sabotage American policy. Russia may find an ally in China, nervous about "precedents" for Tibet and Taiwan. With Europe preferring to react than act in the Balkans, as in general on foreign affairs, Washington will be charged with pushing any resolution through the Security Council.
Of all the arguments thrown in the way of Kosovo independence, the territorial-integrity one holds up least well. Kosovo is a unique case -- a U.N.-run region that once belonged to a now defunct state, Yugoslavia. Serbia has little legal, much less moral, claim on Kosovo. Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaigns struck the final nails in that coffin. The "threat" to Bosnia and Macedonia is another canard. Both countries have legitimate constitutions that prohibit secession.
As ever, Balkan politics are a mess, and loud nationalists grab a lot of the attention. In the West's 12 years in the region, lots of money went to waste, empowering extremists and fostering corruption. Mass murderers like Radovan Karadzic are on the lam. NATO will need to stay on in Kosovo for many years, and the U.S. and Europe will have to remain engaged in other ways. But who can reasonably claim it's not worth it?
No two conflict zones are the same. By quirk of timing, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan are all now at turning points. If the world has learned anything in the past decade plus, it's that trying to rebuild war-torn nations takes great amounts of perseverance, hard work -- and most of all time. In 1995, Bill Clinton promised to bring the GIs home from Bosnia within 12 months. The last U.S. troops left earlier this year.
Update on "Non-Islamic" Kosovo by Julia Gorin [pundit/comedian] 10/26/06
GORIN
A conspicuous Reuters headline in Tuesday's Washington Post: "Kosovo Islamic leaders join call for independence." This wouldn't have anything to do with helping form the eventual caliphate, would it?
Noooooooooo, according to the article, which desperately fishes out distinctions between Muslims and Kosovo Muslims. Note the language used: "In a rare foray into politics, Islamic leaders in Kosovo on Monday added their voice to the Albanian majority's call for independence from Serbia."
Contributor Julia Gorin
Pundit, comedian and opinionist Julia Gorin is proprietor of www.JuliaGorin.com and is a contributing editor to www.JewishWorldReview.com..[go to Gorin index]
Nor is the following strident tone opposing any partition of the land or compromise with the Serbian infidel characteristic of Muslims either: "Marking the Eid al-Fitr feast in the capital, Pristina, the head of the Kosovo Islamic community, Mufti Naim Ternava, said independence for the breakaway Serbian province was the only acceptable outcome to talks expected to end within months."
Just in case we're wearing our thinking caps, the writer reemphasizes that "Islamic leaders have little influence in Kosovo and rarely venture into politics, contrary to Serbia's warnings that an independent Kosovo would become a hotbed of extremism in Europe."
Lest we start putting two and two together, the writer wants us to fear Christianity instead: "The Kosovo Albanians' secularism contrasts with the increasingly vocal role played by the Orthodox Church in Serbia's politics and society since the country emerged from 50 years of Socialist rule in the 1990s."
Then: "Most of Kosovo's two million ethnic Albanians are nominally Muslim, but they are proud of the territory's secular tradition. This year's Ramadan passed with little trace of piety."
As I noted Monday, it was a very busy Ramadan in Kosovo. Even if it's not up to snuff compared to the rest of the Islamic world, it was a more pious Ramadan than ever before. And next year it will be more so. And the year after that, more so. Just as this year it was more so than the previous year.
Don't believe me? Here's a weekend article from the online Turkish paper Zaman: "Turkish Troops, Kosovans Hand in Hand":
The Turkish battalion in Kosovo, operating under command of the NATO- led international Kosovo peace force, continues to help Kosovans in many ways. Turkish troops are admired by Kosovans for their help in areas such as health, food distribution and education and they also built and restored many facilities.
They restored the Kirik Mosque, built by the Ottomans when they conquered Kosovo, and built a park around it. Turkish troops also fixed cemeteries and built village roads. …They have built three mosques and three parks across Kosovo so far and organized annual circumcision feasts for needy and homeless children. During Ramadan, Turkish troops delivered dinner to Kosovans and provide stationery goods to students every year through liaison offices.
One wonders what the Turkish NATO troops are doing for the Auschwitz that the handful of Serb-populated enclaves of Kosovo have become.
Now, can you spot a tacit admission contained in the language of this sentence: "Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombs drove out Serb forces accused of ethnic cleansing and atrocities against Albanians in a two-year war with guerrillas."
Drum roll, please. The shift in language to the disclaimer accused of marks the first time in seven years that a mainstream report from the region is backtracking on what had previously been represented to us as a given — that NATO bombs put a halt to actual ethnic cleansing and genocide by Serbs, period — no "accused of." Then again, Reuters is a British news service, and theyknow better about what did and didn't happen in the Balkans.
As well, Balkan-update dispatches used to start, more or less, like this: "Lifting themselves up from under the the ash heap of communism, the very secular and very peaceful, not-very-Muslim Albanians are rediscovering their roots and religion and have built a mosque to honor their peaceful religion…" Now, as we can see, these articles are starting with: "In a rare foray into politics, Islamic leaders in Kosovo…" Next they'll read, "In a rare foray into suicide bombings, the Islamists of Kosovo…" CRO
SCHRÖDER ON KOSOVO "The Goal Was Exclusively Humanitarian"
SCHRÖDER ON KOSOVO "The Goal Was Exclusively Humanitarian"
SCHRÖDER ON KOSOVO
"The Goal Was Exclusively Humanitarian"
Schröder was only in government a few short months when the conflict in Kosovo hit the headlines. And it almost tore his government apart. The result was Germany's first post-war military engagement.
Gerhard Schröder was elected as German chancellor on October 27, 1998 -- and almost immediately he was faced with a foreign policy conundrum that threatened to tear apart his fledgling coalition.
Kosovo was burning. Serbs had entered the largely ethnic-Albanian province and were pursuing a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Having failed bitterly to stop the fighting during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the international community was eager to avoid a repeat. NATO was prepared to stop Serbia by force if necessary.
Germany, though, was only just making its first tentative steps onto the world stage. A hospital here, a humanitarian mission there -- that was when it came to German military presence abroad.
"It was fully clear to me," Schröder writes in his newly published memoirs, "that for many in the (Social Democratic) party -- and in society in general -- the idea that German soldiers, in this case fighter pilots, would intervene once again in a region that had suffered so much under German occupation during World War II was unbearable."
Nevertheless, Schröder writes, "I was convinced of the need for an active German contribution."
His foreign minister, Green Party head Joschka Fischer, didn't need much convincing. Even as his party had prided itself as being devoted to pacifism and peace, Fischer felt that German involvement was necessary, even if it was going to be a difficult pill for his party to swallow. Still, the two agreed it was a necessary step to take.
"Now, on the cusp of the 21st century," Schröder writes, "the real challenge seemed to me not just to douse the most recent fire in the Balkans, but to bring peace to the region.... The goal was exclusively humanitarian."
But the German public wasn't the only hurdle on the road to an involvement in Kosovo. Russia too, which traditionally throws its weight behind Serbia, had to be convinced to refrain from getting involved. Schröder is clear about who was responsible for this foreign policy coup:
"Moscow had for some time given the impression that it stood on the side of Belgrade out of a kind of pan-Slavic sentiment -- an alliance that the Serbian President Milosevic could use as a trump card. It was to the great credit of the German foreign ministry that it finally persuaded a hesitant Russia that it was in its own interest to withdraw its support for Belgrade."
The bombing campaign against the Serbs lasted from March until June of 1999, a relentless operation that took a special interest in the Serbian capital Belgrade. But not all went as planned. On May 7, a NATO bomb struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists. The United States insisted the bombing had been a mistake -- the result of using outdated maps to plan the sortie. The Chinese, for their part, were outraged and convinced the bombing had been deliberate. Schröder had already been scheduled to make his first official visit to Beijing that month. He decided to go ahead with the trip.
"The visit was important to me; for me it was about apologizing to the Chinese government for the incident, openly, publicly, and as a representative of the alliance. Only in this way could China save face. And my impression of the meeting with the Chinese leadership was: My apology did not fail. There was a lot of coverage in the country's media about it. China maintained its neutral position in the Balkan conflict."
Finally, with the US and Britain publicly considering sending in ground troops, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic finally realized that the game was up and agreed to a UN peace-keeping force in Kosovo. But even as world attention quickly turned elsewhere, the repercussions were large for Europe and for Germany.
The Kosovo engagement, "taught Europe the lesson that without the help of the United States, it was not in a position to solve these kinds of conflicts," Schröder writes.
It was a conclusion that the US came to as well. Schröder writes that the US made certain that its European allies were left with little doubt as to who was left as the world's only superpower after the end of the Cold War. "It sometimes didn't come across as very diplomatic," he demurs.
For Germany, though, the Kosovo War marked the acceptance of Germany's full participation in world affairs. In the early 1990s there had been some international concern about a newly reunited Germany and discomfort about the idea of German soldiers being deployed even on peace-keeping missions.
"Only a few thoughtful observers were able to rightly appreciate the transformation of German's self-perception following two world wars. Regarding the participation of German soldiers in military operations abroad, there was the internal view and the external view, which didn't match."
Paradoxically, though, it was a governing coalition of Schröder's center-left Social Democrats -- also known as "the reds" -- and the environmental, pacifist Greens which led Germany into its new era of international military engagement.
"Perhaps it was a trick of history that of all things a Red-Green coalition had to take over political power in order for Germany to live up to its responsibilities."
Experts at Washington Forum Warn of Difficulties in Determining Kosovo's Future
Experts at Washington Forum Warn of Difficulties in Determining Kosovo's Future
VOA News
Experts at Washington Forum Warn of Difficulties in Determining Kosovo's Future
By Barry Wood
Washington Tuesday, 24 October 2006
Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center Friday brought together a panel of experts to analyze the Kosovo status negotiations that may conclude in the next few weeks or months. There is no expectation that Kosovo's Albanians and Serbia will agree on Kosovo's future.
All of the six presenters suggested difficulties in the months ahead. After seven years of being a ward of the international community, moves are underway to determine the status of the still nominally Serbian province whose population is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.
Serbia rejects independence while the Albanians refuse any other option. Kosovo is ruled by the United Nations and security is the responsibility of NATO led peacekeepers.
Veton Surroi, a member of Kosovo's negotiating team, warned of the danger of an ambiguous outcome-partial independence, in which Kosovo would remain a weak and ill-defined territory. Kosovo, he said, must become a fully independent sovereign nation. "It is for a practical reason. Only sovereign states assume responsibilities. And this needs to be a sovereign state that assumes responsibility for everything, for its security, etcetera, etcetera," he said.
Steven Meyer, a professor at the U.S. government's National Defense University, outlined the dangers that might result from independence. "Kosovo is a small, crime-infested very poor (state) with high unemployment that has always been integrated into a much larger, broader regional market," he said.
There was concern about the plight of the minority Serbs who fear the Albanians and whose communities require protection from the NATO-led force. Vladimir Matic of Clemson University said it would be a disaster if these 100,000 Serbs are forced out. Ross Johnson of the Hoover Institution said that is a real possibility as 70 percent of Kosovo Serbs say they won't live in an independent Kosovo.
"Because what is being said over and over again is that Serbs can not survive in an independent Kosovo. Well, if you believe that, and if it looks like Kosovo will become independent, then you draw the consequence and if you have the resources you leave," he said.
NATO in 1999 undertook a three-month long bombing campaign against the Serbs accused of ethnic cleansing in their fight against secessionist Kosovo Albanian rebels. This past February the United Nations launched status negotiations between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians. With those talks deadlocked, the UN chief negotiator has been authorized to present his own status proposal, which may be unveiled shortly.
On Saturday and Sunday, the citizens of Serbia are expected to vote in a plebiscite on the new constitution. In a rare display of political unity, the draft constitution was supported in the parliament by both the government and the opposition parties. However, remnants of the former DOS regime and the "non-governmental" organizations that support them have launched a campaign against the document; these Jacobins are assailing the constitution as "undemocratic," and particularly object to its preamble, which defines occupied Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia.
This, rather than any other feature in the constitution, is the real point of contention between those who seek its passage, and those in Serbia – and elsewhere – who would like to see it fail. Inclusion of Kosovo in the new Serbian constitution complicates the efforts to force Belgrade into giving up the territory NATO occupied in 1999 on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists.
What Bothers the New York Times
The New York Times, a stalwart supporter of NATO's 1999 war and a pillar of Empire's Official Truth, launched a sloppy attack on the new Serbian constitution on Monday, calling the document "faulty."
Despite mentioning "critics" of the constitution at least five times in the article, the Times' Nicholas Wood comes up with only two: Omer Hadzimerovic, a regional judge, and Goran Jesic, mayor of a small town near Belgrade. There is not a single mention of the constitution's loudest critics: DOS leftovers, such as Cedomir Jovanovic, Zarko Korac, Vladan Batic, Nenad Canak, and their micro-parties; or the Western-backed "human rights" groups and quasi-NGOs that endorse their political agendas.
It's impossible to verify some of the claims the unnamed "critics" are making. The text of the proposed constitution is publicly available (found here, in Serbian, as a .pdf file), but the document itself has 206 articles (!) in nine sections. For the sake of comparison, the United States Constitution has seven articles and 27 amendments. Much of the language in the proposed Serbian constitution is vague, subject to external definition (what are "European values," anyway?), and rather than providing a cornerstone for future legislation actually depends on it to be functional. In short, it's a constitution of a decidedly modern, social-democratic welfare state, whose guiding spirit was not God, John Locke, or even Serbian tradition, but the bloated bureaucracy of the EU.
None of these bother the New York Times much, though. This part does:
"Whereas the province of Kosovo and Metohija is an integral part of Serbian territory, with essential autonomy within the sovereign state of Serbia, and that this position of the Province of Kosovo and Metohija obligates the government to protect and represent the national interests of Serbia in Kosovo and Metohija, in all its internal and external political affairs…."
Given that the adoption of the constitution would cause new elections in Serbia and make the surrender of Kosovo an act of treason, the Times' claim that the constitution "will not have any effect on Kosovo's future" is not a statement of fact, but rather wishful thinking posing as such.
"My Albanian Friends"
The tough talk about the constitution's irrelevance and independence's inevitability seems calculated to soothe the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, who are growing increasingly frustrated that their main political objective has not been achieved for over seven years, despite overwhelming Imperial support. In the past, they've taken that frustration out on the few Serbs who survived their ethnic cleansing in 1999. Now that most Serbs inconveniently live in barbed-wire enclosures guarded by NATO troops, they are targeting the UN and even NATO occupiers directly.
AFP reported last Friday that "a U.S. soldier from the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo (KFOR) was assaulted and injured by three civilians" at a gas station in Urosevac. As befits every other act of violence in Kosovo over the course of NATO occupation, the perpetrators were not identified. But as the mainstream media so helpfully reminds us daily, "ethnic Albanians are the overwhelming majority in the province."
Perhaps this is what motivated Frank Wisner, U.S. envoy to the Kosovo talks, to appeal to "my Kosovar Albanian friends" (AFP ) not to attack the Serbs during the referendum this weekend. Speaking during his visit to Pristina on Wednesday, Wisner assured the Albanians that "few of us have any doubts what final status means," and that:
"What happens to you is a Kosovar matter and an international matter. It's not a matter of Serbian sovereignty, which changed when the UN agreed on [Security Council Resolution] 1244."
And yet the Resolution that Wisner mentions says this:
"Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act and annex 2…." (emphasis added)
The FRY was succeeded by the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, of which Serbia was the sole successor when Montenegro seceded this spring. So yes, Mr. Wisner, this rather is a matter of Serbian sovereignty.
The Curious Incident of Mufti Naim
Perhaps the most bizarre instance of misdirection, however, has to be a Reuters report by Fatos Bytyci from this Monday. Mr. Bytyci and his editors thought it newsworthy that Mufti Naim Ternava, top Muslim cleric in Kosovo, told the believers at the ceremony celebrating the end of Ramadan, that "independence … was the only acceptable outcome" of the status talks. According to Reuters, this represented a "rare foray into politics" by the Islamic clergy in Kosovo.
Had Bytyci and Reuters stopped there, it would have been an interesting news item: even the Muslim religious leaders, normally politically inactive, endorse independence. Fair enough. But the story also included the following passages:
"The Kosovo Albanians' secularism contrasts with the increasingly vocal role played by the Orthodox Church in Serbia's politics and society.…
"Nationalists in the Church and political elite in Belgrade have tried to play up the Islamic angle to block Kosovo's bid for independence, warning of al-Qaeda infiltration and Muslim radicalization in Europe."
Are Bytyci and Reuters trying to say that religious extremism was not a factor in the destruction and desecration of over 100 churches and monasteries during the occupation? Or that in the "secular" occupied Kosovo, hundreds of new mosques have not been built, and that fewer "secular" Albanians wear Wahhabi beards and headscarves, rather than more? Yet somehow, it's the Serbs who are to blame for somehow taking their besieged religious heritage seriously.
Besides, if Islam matters so little in Kosovo Albanian society and politics… why is the statement of Mufti Naim so newsworthy, then? Just like the Empire, Reuters wants to have it both ways.
Self-Deception
After years of being used to groveling sycophants in Belgrade, the Empire is finding out that its planned imposition of Kosovo's separation is getting more difficult by the day. The pesky Serbs, who were supposed to follow orders and wallow in manufactured guilt over fabricated atrocities, have refused to play their part in the show. Unable to deal with Belgrade's newfound "intransigence," the Empire is putting out incoherent ramblings, from the New York Times' attack on the new constitution to Frank Wisner's misinterpretations of UNSCR 1244, in an effort to persuade both itself and the Albanians that the plan is on track, and "everything will be just fine."
BELGRADE, Serbia, Oct. 22 Serbias leaders, normally riven by deep political rivalries, have shown a surprising degree of unity this month.
The countrys ultranationalists and its reformers, who are more democratically minded, have joined together to support a recently drafted constitution that will be voted on in a referendum on Oct. 27 and 28.
The problem, according to critics, is that the draft constitution is deeply flawed and was drawn up more to prove politicians bona fides on Kosovo than to set the country on the course to true democracy.
One of the most high-profile provisions of the draft says Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia.
The draft constitution will not have any effect on Kosovos future, since the United Nations Security Council is expected to vote within the next several months on whether Kosovo can break away from Serbia. But the countrys leaders see the provision as a way of assuring Serbians that they are doing everything they can to hold on to the province.
Many reformers in the legislature went along with the draft although they dislike some of its undemocratic features because they wanted to show support for keeping Kosovo. They fear that the United Nations vote will create a backlash that could lead to gains for the Serbian Radical Party, the leading nationalist party. They also agreed to rush through the drafting of the constitution so that it could be in place before the United Nations vote.
This is the most important piece of paper that has been decided on in Serbia in years, yet it is being used for completely tactical reasons, said a Western diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was not permitted to comment on the matter for attribution.
The new constitution is intended to replace one drawn up in 1990 by the government of Slobodan Milosevic, the autocratic ruler who was ousted in the 2000 Yugoslav presidential election by Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbias prime minister.
Mr. Kostunica, a moderate nationalist who favors Serbias integration with the European Union, has long promised a more reform-minded constitution. He supports the draft document and is touring the country promoting it. A government-financed campaign is also urging people to vote yes.
Some provisions are revolutionary in a way, Mr. Kostunica said in a recent interview with Politika, a conservative newspaper in Belgrade.
But many politicians and constitutional experts say the new document in some cases turns back reforms passed since Mr. Milosevic left power. One area that is particularly worrisome for critics is the amount of power the government will have over the judiciary.
For instance, under the current Constitution, Parliament has the final say on who becomes a judge, but an independent council of judges, the High Judicial Council, controls who is promoted to higher courts. Under the new system, Parliament will retain the power to select judges, but will also appoint the majority of the members of the council.
All the protections of the judiciary enshrined in the Constitution are put into question by the way the High Judicial Council is appointed, said Omer Hadzimerovic, a district court judge. He also noted that the judiciarys financing is still going to be decided by the Finance Ministry.
Another area of concern is the amount of control the central government will have over local government leaders. The national government will be able to fire democratically elected local officials. The new constitution would also give the power to appoint mayors to city assemblies, which are beholden to the countrys major political parties. Since 2004, mayors have been elected.
In addition, Parliament would gain the right to dismiss the president with a two-thirds majority, although the presidency, largely a symbolic post, is elected by popular vote. That constitutional change, among others, has prompted accusations that Serbias leading political parties are seeking to sustain the substantial powers garnered by the Socialist Party of Mr. Milosevic, rather than to establish a state with complete separation of powers.
We inherited this system from Milosevic and the Communists this desire to have control over everything said Goran Jesic, the mayor of Indija, near Belgrade, who will lose his job if the new constitution is approved.
Critics also say the constitution is fundamentally undermined because Albanians, a majority in Kosovo, cannot vote on it.
Despite the criticism of the constitution inside Serbia, neither the Council of Europe nor the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has commented on the document. That has prompted some critics of the draft to suggest those groups were more interested in Serbias short-term political stability than its long-term interests.
Most respected [Nazi] party friend Lammers! I received your letter of April 29 together with the letter of the president of the central committee of the Second Albanian League of Prizren. At this time one Albanian SS division is being formed. As things now stand, I plan to form a second SS division, and afterwards an Albanian SS corps will be formed… Heil Hitler! Yours very faithfully, H. Himmler Arrogantly strutting around the opulent OSCE restaurant, on an upper floor of its Pristina headquarters, Richard Holbrooke cut an imposing figure. The “Balkan peace negotiator” whose bloody legacy stretched from Vietnam and Indonesia to Belgrade minced no words about US policy for the region.
In front of the five heads of UNMIK he bellowed: “Forget multi-ethnic Kosovo. Forget Resolution 1244. We only signed that to get rid of the Serbs.”
It was a warm August 1999, and the official representatives of the “international community” remained coolly silent. Only one official, Dennis MacNamara, head of UNHCR spoke up, questioning why the UN took on the mission if the expulsion of the Serbs was a foregone conclusion. Holbrooke brushed off his inquiry; the other “dignitaries” remained quiet.
The Serbian province of Kosovo is nearing the artificially imposed time limit for a “final decision” on its status as either an autonomous Serbian province, or an independent state, albeit an international protectorate. And indeed the “decision” has probably already been made, which will see another tragic human exodus.
The casual observer could be forgiven for attributing normalcy to present day Kosovo upon first glance. Pristina’s cafes are filled with reveling Albanian and international patrons. Perhaps a quarter of the cars in urban areas are late-model BMWs, Mercedes or Audis. Shiny new construction projects rise along many major roads and Albanian population centers. It appears that Albanian Kosovo is undergoing an economic boom. The Albanian flag waves proudly beside the Stars and Stripes, perhaps the only Muslim region where it does so. And a spirit of freedom pervades the majority Albanian society. But image is not reality – neither in media, nor in strategic issues. And Kosovo is neither normal, nor stable.
Kosovo Serb widow and refugee (IDP) Dragana Dejanovic must raise her three small children without their father after her 23 year old husband Ivan was murdered by Albanians, shot to death on 8/27/2005, while she was still pregnant. The Serb members of the Kosovo Police Force (15%) tried to help, but the Albanian dominated force does not seek perpetrators of crimes against Serbs. Local Albanians told her: "What are you waiting for [to leave]? We already killed your husband. Do we have to kill you and your children too?"
Kosovo today is the nerve center of organized crime in Europe. The Kosovo Albanian mafia – whose capos are the ethnic Albanian leaders of Kosovo (Hashim Thaci, Agim Ceku, Ramush Haradinaj, and hundreds of others), and America’s allies – control most of the heroin, arms, and white slavery rings in Europe. Most of the luxury autos in Kosovo are stolen in central Europe, and given false papers; there are so many that prices are as low as 4000 Euros.
Kosovo is the safe-haven for their laundered funds, often invested back into construction projects on real estate stolen from Serbs. Kosovo Albanians have committed armed robberies in France with automatic weapons and RPG’s, and have overtaken the Sicilian Mafia in Italy, largely due to their ruthlessness, and closed society. Their criminal rackets stretch into London and throughout the US. Their money has bought off US senators and congressmen; their revisionist history and expansionist aims made official policy of the US Congress, and State Department.
In Kosovo, their heroin labs are protected and heroin transported by units of the US military. During the Albanian insurgency of 1997-1999 (and through 2001 in Macedonia and Presevo), US Special Forces and British SAS armed, trained, and gave battlefield expertise to Albanian separatists waging brutal separatist campaigns in the region. During the war in Kosovo in 1999, the US military airlifted the Albanian UCK terrorists into some Serbian villages, where every civilian was slaughtered.
The Kosovo “Prime Minister” General Agim Ceku, is perhaps the most blood-soaked leader in the region. Ceku, an American-trained former General of the Croatian Army, led the brutal Operation Storm in the Krajina in 1995 – Europe’s largest ethnic cleansing since World War 2 – which drove 250,000 Serbs from their ancestral homelands, and killed over 2000 civilians. The operation received Clinton's air-cover and precision bombing, used UN observers as human shields, and violated other Geneva Convention rules of war by disguising military vehicles as if belonging to the UN, calling out to Serbs to come out of hiding, then slaughtering them by bullet, knife, and axe. European Neo-Nazis joined as volunteers, and participated in the carnage. Ceku’s Albanian UCK forces operated similarly against largely defenseless Serb civilian populations. Given these facts, Ceku’s recent claim that “the Serbs are cowards” seems profoundly hypocritical.
Cynically, one of Kosovo’s most notorious Albanian war criminals and Mafiosi, Hashim “The Snake” Thaci (darling of Madeleine Albright and Christiane Amanpour, whose Victory Hotel in Pristina is adorned with a Statue of Liberty) recently stated in Koha Ditore:
“…organized crime and mafia which has penetrated to the highest ranks of the government pyramid are the biggest dangers for Kosovo…but what will happen after the status? Who will stop the criminal gangs that have been installed by this weak government?”
Certainly it won't be the very criminals who are the prime culprits.
Islamist influence is spreading rapidly in Kosovo, due to the influx of Arabs.
The official response of US Government officials to questions about the role of jihadist and radical Islamist elements in the Kosovo Albanian independence movement is that it is an inconsequential phenomenon, and that most Albanians are secular nationalists.
However, Western military intelligence officials have extensively documented the inroads made by jihadist/terrorist elements, and their presence throughout Kosovo, and links to global Islamist terror networks and narco-mafias is widely known.
In many areas young Kosovo Albanians are being converted to the Wahabist faction, and are highly visible in their telltale short haircuts, beards, and ankle-length pants. As well, many Arabs are present from the Middle East and France, presumably leaders of jihadist cells.
Anti-Western jihadist sermons are now a regular feature at many of the new mosques. Western military intelligence officials have stated that the findings of their investigations into the jihadist terror networks is routinely ignored or blocked by NATO, UN and US officials.
While globalist “think tanks” and policy hacks espouse an independent “Kosova”, they are either party to that policy, or are seeing only the roadside glitz because there are two very distinct Kosovos easily visible today to inquiring minds.
In minority enclaves (Serbs, Gypsies, Gorani, Egyptians, Croats, Turks, Ashkali and others) populations live in a state of constant fear from Albanian intimidation and attack, which occur almost daily.
Not one Jew remains in Kosovo. All have been cleansed by Muslim Albanians.
Serbs are wantonly and routinely murdered with no legal recourse, as the “justice” system is entirely in the hands of Muslim Albanians, placed there by Hashim Thaci and blessed by the UNMIK officials.
While 9% of the Kosovo Police Corps are ethnic Serbs, they are mere stage-props, as the real power is in the hands of its Albanian core that temporarily maintains a façade of minority tolerance to appease their backers in the “international community.”
In one incident, Muslim Albanians dressed in NATO/KFOR uniforms approached a group of 14 Kosovo Serb farmers in Staro Gradsko, slaughtered them, and mutilated some of the ones they killed. British NATO forces botched the entire forensics investigation and no one has been caught.
Since 1999, over 1000 ethnic Serbs have been kidnapped and murdered, with few of the bodies recovered. Few Muslim Albanians have been arrested or tried for these murders, or for the destruction of over 130 Serbian churches, the countless monuments and graveyards vandalized, or the ethnic cleansing of 230,000 Serbs and other minorities. Even where a rare personal relationship exist between a Christian Serb and a Muslim Albanian, the Muslim will not testify against another, either out of a religious duty of being a Muslim or fear that being just and truthful will cost him his life.
Those non-Christian minorities that remain in Kosovo do so in conditions very different from the majority Muslims.
Serbs and other persecuted minorities venture out of their hamlets and enclaves at great risk, and having been completely disarmed by KFOR/NATO, have no means of defense even within them. Armed incursions by Albanian attackers still occur, and are often directed against isolated, defenseless, and often elderly civilians.
Even if Serbs had the means to defend themselves, the Albanian leadership waits for any possible excuse to launch another pogrom against Serbs, such as that of March 2004, where thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed under the watchful eyes of NATO troops, and dozens of centuries’ old churches demolished. Then, the pretext was a false rumor that some Albanian boys drowned in a river, drummed up by an Albanian radio to have been chased there by Serbs and their dogs. The pogrom was centrally directed, well organized, and methodic in its brutality. One Western military intelligence officer in the region commented that one of the reasons for the pogrom might have been a suggestion that the UN may pull out of Kosovo, thus divesting many Albanians from the biggest source of employment in the region.
When the “international community” has voiced any consternation at the Muslim savagery in Kosovo, it has been at the inconvenience it causes to American policy designs for the region.
Holbrooke, returning to Kosovo in 2005 as a $250,000 paid advisor of the Kosovo Albanian regime, suggested that it would be easier to get independence “if [they'd] stop killing Serbs.”
Given his anti-Serb penchant, and previous comments that “Serbs are murderous assholes,” one assumes he would lodge no protest if the “final solution of the Serbian Question” was resolved AFTER the status decision.
In Kosovo, an intolerantly violent nationalism (the Albanian flag) has its complement in the Islamic jihadism as Albanian mosques are springing up across the province while Churches are being destroyed and looted.
The League of Prizren in 1878 sought to create a Greater Albania autonomous from the Ottoman Empire throughout Albania, Kosovo, parts of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece. This was promoted at the Congress of Berlin, and the Second League of Prizren in 1943. The issue of militarist Albanian designs on the region was made known as early as 1912 when at a London conference a Kosovo Albanian leader said “We will fertilize the land of Kosovo with the bones of Serbs.”
The invading Muslim Ottomans, Imperial Austrians, Communist Tito, Nazi Albanians, and now NATO have killed or driven out the Serbs in huge waves, reducing their numbers from majority to a minority in less than two generations.
Bali i Kombetar, the Albanian NAZI party insignia on Pristina wall, 2006. Bali i Kombetar was a volunteer Kosovo Albanian Nazi organization formed in 1939 and reported of by Himmler to Hitler as the most elite of Kosovo Albanian Nazis that have killed and expelled thousands of Serbs and Jews in WWII. Today, this Albanian Nazi organization is freely flourishing under the protection of NATO troops.
The map Hitler created of a Greater Albania based on the League of Prizren is espoused by current Albanian nationalists, and openly backed by some in Washington and Brussels. Hitler’s legacy thus continues today. Bill Dorich writes:
"Albanians exposed their Nazi ideas during the Holocaust when they joined Hitler in liquidating over one million Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 80,000 Roma. That should preclude Albanians from stealing Serbian or any territory 60 years later. Kosovo’s autonomy was a dictator's decision and Tito did this without a single vote of the people of Yugoslavia or its communist government. Demanding that the Serbs now abide by rules of law is absurd… during the “autonomy” (1974-89) the Albanians banned the Cyrillic alphabet of their minority Serb population - an alphabet and language used by the Serbs since the 800s. Serbs were fired from their jobs in Kosovo and a reign of persecution followed. Every policeman, judge, teacher, doctor, and government official was an Albanian. These Albanian authorities removed Serbian books on history, religion and music from Kosovo schools and libraries and burned over 2 million volumes. During this period they also destroyed a Serbian monastery, raped Serbian nuns and Serbian girls and burned hundreds of Serbian barns to encourage Serbs to leave… more than 125,000 Serbs fled Kosovo from 1974 to 1989."
Gracanica Monastery seen through barbed wire.
Even during the times of Tito’s multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, Muslim Albanians of Kosovo were known for their brutal campaigns against Christian Serbs. As Balkan authority David Binder noted in the New York Times throughout the 1980’s:
Nov. 28, 1982 “In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designated to drive Kosovo’s remaining indigenous Slavs – Serbs and Montenegrins -- out of the province.”
Nov. 9, 1982 “Such incidents have prompted many of Kosovo’s Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically ‘pure’ Albanian Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots.”
Nov. 1, 1987 “Ethnic Albanians in the government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs…Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned, and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls…As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have demanded for years…an ethnically ‘pure’ Albanian region, a ‘Republic of Kosovo’ in all but name.”
The predatory, aggressive and expansionist behavior prevalent in the 1980’s continues today. Serbs watch from their houses as Albanians usurp their fields and livestock. Many rural Serbs live in abject poverty, unable to continue farming or herding to feed their families for fear of attack or murder. When Serbs try to farm, herd or fetch firewood on their land, they are often shot on the spot.
Those Serbs that remain in predominantly Albanian areas fare the worst, under constant pressure to either sell their property at rock-bottom prices, or abandon their homes and farms outright.
One woman whose 23 year old husband was shot dead by Muslim Albanians was warned: “What are you waiting for? We already killed your husband. Do we have to kill you and your three children too? Go!”
Kosovo Serb refugees at Obilic container camp, live in containers donated by Russia. They were ethnic cleansed by Albanians. Hot in summer and freezing in winter, the people have little assistance. Some are handicapped, and other are aged. Since 1999, over 200,000 Kosovo Serbs have been ethnic cleansed by Albanians, over 1000 murdered. Many have had their land, livestock, houses and posessions violently expropriated from them by Albanians, with no protection of justice offered by NATO, the EU or UN who occupy the Serbian province. Meanwhile, UNICEF has spent billions of dollars renovating mosques in the province.
The Clinton administration billed the bombing of Yugoslavia as a “humanitarian intervention to stop genocide” – in reality a low-level counter-insurgency that had killed 1800 people in one and a half years of fighting, one third of them non-Albanians. The bombing killed an estimated 2,600 Serbian civilians of various ethnicities. A CIA official admitted last year in the European press that the US had been supporting Kosovo Albanian guerillas since 1997. A Human Rights Watch report is particularly instructive of how the Albanians operated:
“…The KLA was responsible for serious abuses in 1998, including abductions and murders of Serbs and ethnic Albanians considered collaborators [sic: loyal to] the state. In some villages under KLA control in 1998, the rebels drove ethnic Serbs from their homes. Some of those who remained are unaccounted for and are presumed to have been abducted by the KLA and killed… The KLA detained an estimated 85 Serbs during its July 19, 1998 attack on Orahovac. Thirty five of these people were subsequently released, but the others remain missing as of August 2001. On July 22, 1998, the KLA briefly took control of the Belacevac mine near Obilic. Nine Serbs were captured that day and they remain on the ICRC’s list of the missing. In September 1998, the Serbian police collected the 34 bodies of people believed to have been seized and murdered by the KLA, among them some ethnic Albanians, at Lake Rodanjic, near Glodjane. Prior to that the most serious KLA abuse was the reported killing of 22 Serbian civilians in the village of Klecka… The KLA… engaged in military tactics which put civilians at risk. KLA units sometimes staged an ambush or attacked police and army outposts from a village, and then retreated, exposing villagers to revenge attacks… Most seriously, as many as 1000 Serbs and Roma [gypsies] have been murdered or have gone missing since June 12, 1999…elements of the KLA are clearly responsible for many…of these crimes… There is also a clear political goal in many of these attacks: the removal from Kosovo of non-ethnic Albanians in order to better justify an independent state.”
Kosovo Serb Djordjevic family in October 2006. Kosovo Christian children like these are growing up in poverty and are precluded from schooling because Muslim Albanians will kill them if they ever venture out of their enclave.
While the international community [sic: Washington] screamed at Belgrade for alleged discrimination of ethnic Albanians during the 90’s, it has been noticeably silent in demanding Muslim Albanian compliance with modern human rights standards of tolerance.
The northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica is particularly instructive. There, the town is divided by the Ibar River into a multi-ethnic North, and a “pure” – cleansed – Muslim Albanian South. No Christian was left alive in the South, nor are any able to visit or return.
In the predominantly Serb North, 4000 ethnic Albanians, plus Roma, Bosnian Muslims, and Croats live side by side with Serbs in normalcy and tolerance. But the South of Mitrovica has been totally cleansed of its non-Albanian inhabitants, violently so, and is a focal point for Islamist/jihadist organizing in the region.
Serbs in the North suffer insecurity due to provocations and raids by Albanians who cross over from the South to bomb, knife and shoot Serbs with impunity. Recently, a 16 year old Albanian youth crossed over from the South and threw a hand grenade in a multi-ethnic café, wounding several people. The Muslim was arrested, but liberated very quickly and no trial is pending.
While UN and NATO troops stage frequent raids of Christian Serb houses to confiscate the last vestiges of arms for self-defense, few such operations are undertaken against the heavily armed Muslim Albanians.
As UN forces and Muslim Albanians create “facts on the ground,” Holbrooke’s stated policy of ridding Kosovo of Christian Serbs is coming to fruition.
Fight Islamic Fascism in Kosovo -- Support RICK SANTORUM!
Fight Islamic Fascism in Kosovo -- Support RICK SANTORUM!
To Our Fellow Orthodox Christians:
This message is from Stella and George Jatras. Hopefully, many of you are already familiar with our strong efforts on behalf of Orthodox Christians from Chechnya, to Bosnia and Kosovo, to Cyprus and the Middle East. To those for whom our names are unfamiliar, an internet search will clearly show that our writings are not about political endorsements.
This time is different.
As Election Day approaches, this is our appeal to you to support Rick Santorum with your contributions and, where applicable, your votes in his bid for re-election to the U.S. Senate from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. For reasons explained below, this year's election may not only determine control of the U.S. Congress, its outcome may determine the survival of our country. Not since the Vietnam War has this country been so divided.
In 1992 the winning slogan was, "It's the economy, Stupid." But today, with the economy booming, the stock market hitting all time highs and the unemployment rate near record lows there is a more important issue, one that should not be lost in the squabble for power and political campaign policies of personal destruction.
We firmly believe that today there is a far greater danger to our country than those we faced from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Militant Islamic Jihadists are bent on establishing world dominance. Which political candidates recognize that threat and are prepared to deal with it are the ones we should support whether they be Republican, Democrat or Independent. If we lose the struggle against what the Jihadists themselves say is their goal of world domination, the United States will cease to exist as we know it and we will have squandered the future of our children and grandchildren.
There is no better example of the struggle we must win than Senator Rick Santorum's bid for re-election as senator from Pennsylvania. While his opponent has been vague about his stand on the issues, Santorum has been up front with the voters. Now, that may not be the best political thing to do, but with Santorum what we see is what we get. With him we have a senator who sees the danger and is ready to fight for the American people. He was the first in the U.S. Senate to speak of Islamic Fascists, whether in Iraq, Iran or Kosovo. He took the political risk to write a letter of support of His Grace Bishop Artemije of Kosovo. In part, his letter reads:
I commend you for your mission to Washington with a much-needed reminder that the defense of freedom, like the global terror movement itself, is indivisible. In Kosovo, no less than in the United States or the Middle East, the reality of Islamic Fascist violence must be called by its proper name and opposed in every way possible.
Senator Santorum sees the struggle as a world-wide ideological battle, not just individual criminal issues to be fought out in the courtroom. On the other hand, his opponent represents those who deliberately distort the NSA phone surveillance program as being a domestic program, not to or from foreign parties as it actually is. Those whose primary concern is control of the Senate are willing to put so-called rights of Islamo-terrorists over the security of our country. They do this not because they are unpatriotic; they do it because they don't see the threat to our country and, therefore, are concerned only about political power.
Did we expect more from a Republican Congress? Have we been disappointed that they haven't done more about Illegal Immigration, Social Security, Income Tax Reform and other issues? You're darn right! But we're not willing to give control of our grandchildren's future to those who criticize, but have no solutions, and who want to treat the ideological struggle that will determine the future of our country as a matter to be solved by lawyers.
We lived in Saudi Arabia for more than eight years. We also served for two years in the Soviet Union where George was the Senior U.S. Air Force Attaché at our embassy in Moscow and Stella worked in the Political Section. We have seen both Islam and communism up close. Just as George spent most of his Air Force career fighting the communist threat to our nation, our military is fighting Islamic Fascism today. We need men and women in Congress who understand the threat to our very existence . There are already too many empty suits in Washington, politicians interested in just getting along and protecting their jobs. We cannot afford to lose a senator like Rick Santorum, whose primary concern is the security of this country; who is willing to stick his neck out and make the hard decisions; who is not afraid to ask us to face the truth no matter how unpleasant it may be.
For the sake of our country and our children's future I'm asking you to help keep Rick Santorum in the U.S. Senate. There are only a few days until the election. Go to his web site at http://www.ricksantorum.com/. Make a contribution to the campaign. Pass this message to friends and relatives, especially those living in Pennsylvania, asking them to do the same. And above all, VOTE for SANTORUM on NOV 7.
Stella L. Jatras and Col. George Jatras, USAF (Ret.) Camp Hill, PA
By Thomas Caywood Special to the Harvard News Office
Years of diplomacy aimed at stabilizing the troubled Balkans region have begun to yield some promise and reason for optimism, the Greek ambassador to the United States Alexandros Mallias told Harvard faculty and students this week during a daylong campus visit.
"There is a lot of progress," said the veteran Greek diplomat, who spent more than a dozen years working on Balkans issues before he was appointed ambassador to the United States last October.
Mallias shared his vision for a stable, peaceful Balkans integrated into the broader European community Monday (Oct. 16) during a roundtable discussion with Greek students and faculty sponsored by the Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe and later that evening in a lecture at the Center for European Studies.
"The 2003 European Summit opened the door for membership in the European Union, potentially, to all Balkan countries with no exception. That was an important part of European history," Mallias explained in an interview.
Mallias said Greece, which has been a leader in stabilizing and investing in the neighboring Balkans, sees great promise in the potentially transformative process of wobbly, squabbling Balkan nations seeking entrance into the European Union. The act of moving toward EU membership is likely to foster a new, harmonious "European focus" across southeastern Europe, he predicted.
Even so, the thorny issue of Kosovo's status continues to confound envoys working on a negotiated settlement to the Balkan conflict. The United Nations has administered Kosovo since Serb forces were driven out by NATO in 1999.
Many of the ethnic Albanians living there are insisting on independence from Serbia, while the Serbian parliament recently adopted a new constitution, yet to be ratified at the polls, declaring the region an integral part of Serbia.
"We need to secure Kosovo in a way that will not destabilize Serbia. If we do stabilize Kosovo and this decision leads to the destabilization of Serbia, this decision will not argue well for European and American policies," Mallias said.
But the ambassador said he sees no reason why both areas can't be steadied simultaneously through patient, careful diplomacy.
"In the near future, we have to make some decisions. Our approach is for a phased process to orchestrate things that will be acceptable both to Pristina and Belgrade," Mallias said, referring to the capitals of Kosovo and Serbia, respectively.
"Or, at least," he added after a moment of thought, "acceptable to Pristina and tolerated by Belgrade."
Despite his optimism, Mallias said there has been no progress yet in the talks.
Meanwhile, the ambassador said he's not worried that the United States' all-out diplomatic campaign to stymie nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea while fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will overshadow its commitment to the Balkans.
"Of course, it's not the top priority of American diplomacy right now, but the State Department does have high officials who are focused on this," Mallias said. "Second, the level of cooperation between the European Union and the United States is now very good. That is important for the Balkans, and that was not the case in the mid-'90s on Bosnia."
Mallias was last at Harvard in 1991 and 1992 while working with the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Conflict Management Group think tank, which has since been folded into the global humanitarian relief and development agency Mercy Corps.
"This is an important part of my resume, working with the Conflict Management Group," Mallias said. "I also have studied regularly the literature coming out of this University on negotiation as well as the most recent Harvard study on Libya."
Since his last trip to Harvard 14 years ago, the United States' diplomatic relations with Europe have been strained by opposition to the Iraq War among EU members including France and Germany. Mallias said those wounded relationships largely have been mended over the past few years.
"I think the war in Iraq - now, in 2006 - is a greater issue inside the United States than between Europe and the U.S.," Mallias said, later adding, "We had our difficult times, no doubt. Our Stone Age between the EU and the United States was in 2003."
During his engagements on campus, Mallias also stressed Greece's growing economic power in its region. He pointed to $15 billion in investment by Greek companies in the Balkans as well as the acquisition by two Greek banks of major banks in neighboring Turkey.
"We do have a key position in the shipment and transshipment of crude oil and natural gas," the ambassador said. "We are building a natural gas pipeline with Turkey and Italy, and we are very much advanced in our talks with Bulgaria and Russia for a crude oil pipeline from the Black Sea to the Aegean port of Alexandroupolis."
Mallias also highlighted his country's key role in arranging last month's top-level meeting of foreign ministers including U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the Middle East.
As a member of the United Nations Security Council, Greece last week cast a vote in favor of unanimously approved sanctions against North Korea in the wake of that country's recent nuclear test.
"Greece now has a role going well beyond the region," Mallias said.
There's no evidence that he ordered the murder of Anna Politkovskaya
by Justin Raimondo
The death of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist and avowed foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was the occasion for a veritable orgy of Russia-bashing, one that the Western media and their Russian teachers' pets lingered over with voluptuous abandon. Amid elegies praising Politkovskaya as a veritable saint and valorizing her opposition to the Chechen war were warnings from pundits and government officials alike that Russia – after a few bright years of promising openness – is descending into Slavic darkness. The clear implication of all this is that Politkovskaya's death, if not personally ordered by Putin, was certainly condoned and even celebrated by the Russian authorities.
Evidence? Who needs evidence? This crowd isn't interested in such bothersome details. They, after all, are the guardians of "human rights" in Russia. To expect these worthies to come up with such vulgar accouterments of the legal process as proof, witnesses, and credible testimony is to ask for the sun, the moon, and the stars in heaven. Their idea of evidence is the fact that Politkovskaya was killed on Putin's birthday. What more do we need to know? And, oh yeah, she was preparing a scathing exposé – with pictures – of torture carried out by the thuggish head of the pro-Russian puppet government in occupied Chechnya, portions of which were published posthumously.
That is their "proof" that Putin's was the deadly hand behind the assassin's bullet. In short, they have no evidence, not a shred of it, that points to Putin or anyone in his administration as masterminding the assassination. This embarrassing truth is carefully glossed over by the Western media, which is eager to portray Politkovskaya's death as emblematic of the re-Stalinization of Russian society.
A recent segment on PBS' NewsHour was typically credulous. After a sonorous buildup and introduction, in which PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown solemnly portrayed Politkovskaya's death as the latest in an ongoing pogrom directed at journalists, he asked Nina Ognianova, of the Committee to Protect Journalists,"What more, if anything, is known at this point about who might have been behind this killing?"
Ognianova's shifty-eyed evasion had me laughing out loud:
"What we know is that Anna Politkovskaya was just about to release a report this Monday about alleged torture in Chechnya by the military services under the command of the Kremlin-appointed prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov. Several reports in the Russian media said that Anna Politkovskaya was ready to release the material and was actually in possession of two photographs of the alleged torturers, but after her tragic death, the two photographs actually disappeared."
Brown didn't press her; instead, he mercifully changed the subject: "Tell us a little bit about her work over the years…"
Observant viewers will have noticed the complete lack of relevant facts in Ognianova's little narrative, which is all supposition and speculation. The rest are meant to be diverted from questioning this scenario by the sheer emotional power and inventiveness of the Putin-offed-Politkovskaya story: heroic journalist goes up against the neo-Stalinist regime of ex-KGB officer Putin, and pays for her scathing exposures of corruption and creeping authoritarianism with a bullet in the back of the head.
Truth no longer matters: objective reality is "out." That is a relic of the pre-9/11 era, clung to only by the beleaguered remnants of the "reality-based community." What counts, nowadays, is not who has the facts, but who has the winning narrative.
That a noted journalist was killed, gangland-style, in today's Russia is hardly shocking. Corruption is rife in the former Soviet Union, and journalists who stumble on it – or are looking for it – are often, and not surprisingly, victimized by gangsters. To automatically attribute Politkovskaya's death to Putin or the Russian government is like blaming George W. Bush and his administration for every violent death in the District of Columbia.
Putin condemned the killing, and had this to say about her killers:
"We have information, and it is reliable, that many people hiding from Russian justice have long been nurturing the idea of sacrificing somebody in order to create a wave of anti-Russia feeling in the world."
Two exiled "oligarchs" – Russian billionaires who grew wealthy because of their political connections to the former Soviet dictatorship – are identified by Izvestia as among the possible suspects:
"The political theory has it that Politkovskaya's murder was ordered from abroad. We were the first to draw attention to this theory. A similar assumption was expressed by President Putin at a press conference in Dresden on October 10. Developments of this theory have mentioned the names of Boris Berezovsky and Leonid Nevzlin – the most prominent of the individuals Russia is trying to extradite. Both Berezovsky and Nevzlin will probably face extradition attempts for a long time to come, having to prove in foreign courts why they should not be returned to Russia. One of their primary objectives is to portray Russia as a state where people can get shot in the head for their pro-democracy convictions."
Boris Berezovsky, interviewed by phone from London, did not deny his desire for regime change:
"A revolution in Russia would certainly be to my advantage. But all my actions are within the law – especially since the Russian authorities are doing far more to destabilize the situation in Russia than I ever could. I had a difficult relationship with Anna Politkovskaya. At first, she directly accused me of instigating the war in Chechnya. But then she learned more about the situation and withdrew those accusations. I understood that her work was dangerous, but I didn't attempt to tell her what to do. Everyone chooses their own risks. Trying to stop her would have been futile."
Driven out of Russia by Putin's campaign to stamp out official corruption, the exiled oligarchs continue their activities abroad, and have hired platoons of public relations spinners to give them a makeover as "political dissidents." As Izvestia points out,
"Others besides Berezovsky and Nevzlin would also stand to benefit from 'correcting' Russia's image. Russia is also trying to extradite common criminals, who often argue in foreign courts that they're being persecuted for political reasons."
The drama of Politkovskaya's martyrdom at the hands of unknown assassins comes as Putin's relations with the West have reached a crescendo of hostility approaching Cold War levels. The flashpoints of the widening conflict – Ukraine, Georgia, and the Middle East – are all areas either in or bordering on the former "Soviet near abroad," the shattered remnants of the old Russian empire. The West, including the EU, is eager to absorb these broken-off pieces into its own sphere of political and economic influence. Bush's visit to Tbilisi on his way to Moscow for the summit was a clear signal that Washington was about to go on the offensive. The Georgians are pushing hard for NATO membership, and are busy antagonizing the Russians as best they can.
A vision of a Ukrainian-style "Orange Revolution" in Putin's Russia is the wet dream of Washington's professional regime-changers. These would-be exporters of Bushian "democracy" protest "human rights" violations in Chechnya and complain that Putin wants to be a dictator, yet they haven't said a word about the odious PATRIOT Act. They kvetch that Putin is the reincarnation of Stalin and wail crocodile tears over the alleged loss of civil liberties in Russia, but the passage of the Military Commissions Act [.pdf] and its signing into law by President Bush evinces not even a peep of protest from these inveterate crusaders for "human rights."
Freedom House, which rated Russia "not free" in its latest world survey, is strangely silent when it comes to the growing loss of liberty in the U.S., and it's no mystery as to why. These guys are on the U.S. government payroll: they get subsidies from the U.S. Treasury in order to promote "democracy" worldwide. "Democracy," in this context, means the installation of a compliant American sock-puppet, one who, like Georgian strongman Mikheil Saakashvili, knows what side his bread is buttered on. Never mind his atrocious "human rights" record: let's pretend, for the moment, that he isn't jailing his political opponents and intimidating the rest into silence. He is supported by the "pro-democracy" movement because weakening Russia, at all costs, is the primary goal of those who are handing out the cash.
As long as Russia was weak and ruled by the oligarchs, in league with their front man, Boris Yeltsin, it was treated like an ally, with plenty of aid to bail out the sinking Russian economy – which the oligarchs were bleeding to death – and lots of favorable media coverage for "Russia's emerging democracy." With the rise of Putin, a capable, no-nonsense, and staunchly nationalist leader, who wasn't about to take orders from abroad, American policy has shifted to containing and surrounding the Russian bear as he emerges from his decades-long hibernation, flush with vigor and plenty of petro-dollars. That's what the U.S.-subsidized-and-directed "color revolutions" were all about: that "fire in the mind" noted by both Dubya and Dostoevsky lit a blaze that stretched from Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan, but that flame has since sputtered out. Ukraine is veering back toward the Russian orbit, and the various Central Asian 'stans are moving in the same direction.
Russia has come a long way since the implosion of the Soviet Empire. Despite reversals – and copious foreign interference – it is making its way toward a market economy and the rule of law, albeit in fits and starts. Those who criticize Putin for supposedly reintroducing authoritarian rule can marshal not a single iota of evidence: opposition political parties exist and conduct vigorous public campaigns. No newspapers or media outlets have been closed down for giving voice to dissident anti-government views. They have changed owners, yes – but isn't that an essential characteristic of the market economy we are always urging on them? Russia has more political parties than the U.S., and the ballot-access laws are much more accommodating to dissident (or "third") parties. Yet Putin is supported by 70 percent of the voters: the "dissidents" are, for the most part, a handful of noisy, self-promoting professional malcontents, each of them competing for handouts from Uncle Sam.
Washington is now faced with a choice: it can get off Putin's back, recognize that he's an ally in the fight against the worldwide Islamist insurgency that threatens our homeland with terrorism, and butt out of his internal affairs – or it can escalate the war against the Kremlin. The oligarchs and their American allies are hoping – and lobbying furiously – for the latter. Common sense – do we really need to open up another front in our never-ending war against everyone? – and American interests argue in favor of the former. Given the record and past pronouncements of American policymakers from both parties, one needn't be Nostradamus to predict which way we'll go. A confrontation with Russia is the one crazed foreign policy blunder on which neocons and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, can all agree. As such, a new cold war with Russia seems almost inevitable, unless the American people suddenly wake up to this enormous con job and start demanding accountability from their leaders.
The frame-up of Vladimir Putin for the murder of Anna Politkovskaya is the latest chapter in an ongoing propaganda campaign that seeks to topple the Russian government and install a more pro-Western regime – one that won't send missiles to Syria, trade with Iran, or exercise its UN veto.
Suzanne Field's Op-Ed, "The Journalist and the jihadi," (Thursday) was a fitting tribute to the honest, unbiased reporting that separated Daniel Pearl from so many in today's media.
It is ironic that those attributes of his reporting of the war in Kosovo may have led to his gruesome and barbaric murder in Pakistan. The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 31, 1999, carried Mr. Pearl's article, "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn't." The subtitle of the article that stated, "Tales of Mass Atrocity Arose And Were Passed Along Often With Little Proof," also went against the anti-Serb hysteria of the mainstream media in this country.
Mr. Pearl exposed as a hoax the purported massacre of 700 Kosovo Albanians at the Trepca mines, which claimed that the victims' bodies were either incinerated in the mine's furnaces or thrown down the mine shaft. In his article, Mr. Pearl wrote, "By late summer, stories about a Nazi-like body-disposal facility were so widespread that investigators sent a three-man French gendarmerie team spelunking half a mile down the mine to search for bodies. They found none. Another team analyzed ashes in the furnace. They found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies."
Why is this important? Because the Trepca mine massacre story is another example of media disinformation designed to get the American people to take sides in a tragic civil war in Kosovo, a war between the Christian Serbs and Islamic jihadists who now have taken control of the territory and are seeking independence. If independence is granted, Kosovo will become another radical Muslim state in the underbelly of Europe, a mini-Iran, able to freely infiltrate terrorists throughout Europe.
By Howard LaFranchi CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR Published October 15, 2006 With unsettling nuclear developments in North Korea, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and political upheaval in the Middle East, little attention is being paid to the Balkans, which might seem like a preoccupation of the post-Cold War 1990s. But Kosovo -- a Serbian province of 2 million people that experienced a NATO bombing campaign in 1999 -- is on the brink of bursting onto the world stage once again. With the United States and the European Union pressing for resolution of Kosovo's final status this year, it once looked like independence was assured. But now Serbia is trying to put that decision off, which could reawaken Balkan unrest. After seven years of United Nations control, the majority Albanian and Muslim population is clamoring for independence. But the Serbian, largely Christian, minority is campaigning to remain attached to Serbia. The Serbian Kosovars claim that independence would mean creation of an Islamic fundamentalist state in Europe and expose them to ethnic violence. Beyond those issues, other factors seem primed to raise Kosovo's status on the international agenda. The United States would like to free up the 1,700 peacekeeping troops it still has in the province. Economic investment in a region that is an important trade and energy route is being held up by uncertainty over Kosovo's status. Closely watched region And while some specialists warn that failure to resolve Kosovo's status could turn it into a powder keg again, others caution against hasty action. They say Kosovo is being closely watched by other restless regions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia -- including Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova -- and could be used to fire up breakaway movements. "It may seem hard to imagine that there was a day not so long ago when the Balkans were the biggest foreign policy issue on the U.S. plate, but the simple issue is still there," said Daniel Serwer, a Balkans specialist at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington. "Part of the population wants to pull away and be independent, and another part wants things to stay the same. It's the repercussions that make things complex." U.S. officials have been saying since January that this will be the year of decision on Kosovo's final status. "The people of Kosovo deserve greater clarity, and as we approach the end of the year, I suspect they will get greater clarity," said Daniel Fried, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, on a stop last month in Pristina, Kosovo's capital. The U.N. special envoy to Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, is supposed to deliver a status settlement recommendation next month. Anticipating that the report will favor independence, Serbia is seeking to head it off by proposing a new constitution that specifies Kosovo is part of Serbia. U.S. and European Union officials say Serbia's actions are unlikely to derail the push to determine Kosovo's status -- though they say the tactics (possibly including a referendum on the new constitution and elections) could delay a decision, which ultimately is to be made by the U.N. Security Council, until next year. U.S. groups active While these maneuvers are going on, in Washington supporters and opponents of Kosovo's independence are redoubling their efforts to win adherents. Anti-independence groups backed by Serbia have been running newspaper ads and sponsoring seminars in Washington to warn of a radical Islamist state and renewed ethnic cleansing if Kosovo is allowed to break from Serbia. "Granting independence to Kosovo would be a reward for the crimes the Albanians have committed, and would create a base for criminality and jihad in the very heart of Europe," said Artemije Radosavljevic, a Serbian Orthodox bishop in Kosovo. Bishop Artemije, who has made several trips to Washington to plead the case of the Serbian population, claims that more than 3,000 Kosovo Serbs have been killed or kidnapped in the years of international administration. He adds that 150 churches and monasteries have been razed and thousands of Serbian houses destroyed. He says he has found sympathetic ears in the U.S. Congress, but little movement from a pro-independence stance in the State Department. Mr. Serwer, who is also vice president of USIP's Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, said that while there have been some cases of violence against Serbs, the numbers have been "grossly trumped up" by the anti-independence lobby to create a more alarming picture. Mr. Serwer reserves his ire for the references these groups make to Islamic terrorism "in an attempt to tap into American fears," he said. "These claims, that go so far as to equate an independent Kosovo to an al Qaeda refuge, are so outrageous and blatantly anti-Muslim that they are despicable," Mr. Serwer said. Pro-West orientation Holding a similar assessment is Janusz Bugajski, director of the New European Democracies Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and an independence advocate. "The population of Kosovo is one of the more pro-Western and pro-American populations in the world," he said. "They had volunteers to fight [alongside the United States] in Afghanistan and Iraq, so to say they are [Islamic] fundamentalists is to spread disinformation." Beyond that, Mr. Bugajski cites reasons to settle Kosovo's status now. He worries the population could start to see the peacekeepers as occupiers, and he says uncertainty over the province's status is discouraging foreign investment. "I also believe that Serbia doesn't need the distraction of Kosovo as it modernizes and moves toward membership in the European Union," he said. Indeed, some European officials say the international community must be careful not to play the Kosovo issue in a way that reinforces reactionary forces in the anticipated elections. Such potential political implications have other specialists cautioning about Kosovo's influence. "This goes beyond Kosovo and affects a number of countries in the greater Black Sea area that are fractured," said Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of the National Interest political journal in Washington. "You have to at least ask the question if a too-hasty move to independence in Kosovo encourages the disintegration of other states."
THE leader of Kosovo gave a warning yesterday that his people would not settle for anything less than full independence and statehood by the end of the year.
Amid growing calls for a decision on the province’s status to be delayed until 2007, Agim Ceku, the prime minister of Kosovo, said his countrymen could lose faith with the international community if the promise of sovereignty was snatched away from them at the very last moment.
While the world’s attention has been focused on events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, experts fear that the Balkans, where wars raged for much of the 1990s, could erupt again unless the current situation is carefully handled.
At issue is the status of Kosovo, a province of Serbia until 1999, when the area was seized by Nato forces and placed under United Nations control as a protectorate.
Kosovo has remained in this political limbo ever since. But Martti Ahtisaari, the UN envoy to Kosovo, has been formulating an agreement that would recognise the province’s independence, the dream of the majority ethnic Albanian population.
Mr Ceku, 45, who met Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, described his country yesterday as “the final piece of the European puzzle”. He told The Times: “If we win independence it will silence the extremists. We will close the door on the Balkans’ history.”
The United States and Britain support his view and the move to independence was expected to be contained in a report by Mr Ahtisaari due to be completed by early next month.
But other countries in the six-nation Contact Group are more sceptical. Russia, which has traditionally supported its orthodox brethren in Serbia, is adamant that no solution should be imposed against the wishes of any party.
Belgrade insists that Kosovo must remain part of Serbia and has called a referendum at the end of this month for a new constitution, which explicitly states that it remains a province of the Serbian state. Serbs will then go to the polls for general elections in December.
This has persuaded some European players that it would be best to postpone a decision on Kosovo until 2007 or risk handing ultranationalist Serb forces an election victory.
A senior official from a neighbouring country said: “Unless you live next to Serbia it is hard to understand the volatility of the situation. I cannot exaggerate the danger of making a decision on Kosovo’s status against Serbia’s wishes. Solving Kosovo could create a whole new conflict in the region.”
Western diplomats are also concerned about the impact farther afield. Russia has made it clear that if the West pushes for an independent Kosovo, it would see no reason to prevent pro-Russian regions also seeking independence. It has in mind Trans-Dniester, a breakaway province of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Georgia.
Nearer to home, Kosovo’s neighbours in Serbia and Macedonia fear that an independent state ruled by the majority Albanian population could rekindle separatist moves among their own Albanian populations.
A Nato-led force provides security for Kosovo but if there were a flare-up of violence between Serbs and Albanians Britain would be expected to send reserve troops to restore order.
Simon Tisdall Friday October 13, 2006 The Guardian
Plain-speaking Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president who has been widely tipped to win the Nobel peace prize today, let the Kosovo cat out of the bag this week with potentially unpredictable consequences for Balkan stability.
As UN envoy charged with brokering a settlement by the end of the year between Serbia and the ethnic Albanian leadership in Pristina, Mr Ahtisaari conceded the negotiations were not going well. In fact, he went further. Agreement on Kosovo's final status was not on the cards, "at least not in my lifetime", he said. "The parties remain diametrically opposed." The breakaway province might have to wait a little longer for its long-sought independence, he said.
That was definitely not what the US, Britain or most Kosovans wanted to hear. They say 2007 must be the year when Kosovo becomes a sovereign country. And almost regardless of whether this ill-starred entity of about 2 million people with no visible means of support and a dispiriting history of crime, violence and division can be transformed into a viable state, they seem determined, at least in public, to have their way.
Other factors have a bearing. Nato still has more than 16,000 troops tied down in Kosovo, seven years after intervening to end the late Slobodan Milosevic's oppressive rule. The EU has 6,500 soldiers in Bosnia. Both organisations, facing expanding commitments elsewhere and keen to encourage Balkan self-sufficiency, want out.
On present plans, the international presence in Kosovo would be drastically reduced following a settlement. In Bosnia, the EU hopes to deploy the new pan-European gendarmerie. Any delay would badly upset these calculations. According to the US, it would also increase the chances of renewed sectarian fighting involving Kosovo's put-upon ethnic Serb minority.
US and British officials have moved quickly to re-bag Mr Ahtisaari's cat, insisting the talks are on course. After meeting Kosovo's prime minister, Agim Ceku, in London yesterday, the Europe minister, Geoff Hoon, said Britain "remains committed to working towards a settlement of Kosovo's status by the end of 2006". Mr Ceku, too, is adamant. "Nothing less than independence will be acceptable ... Kosovo is ready. We are going to be a modern, democratic, secular country," he said this week. If Kosovan aspirations were thwarted even temporarily, a unilateral declaration of independence could not be ruled out.
Unsurprisingly, Serbia has other ideas. Having watched Montenegro go its own way this year, the Belgrade government offered autonomy but resolutely opposed Kosovo's secession. So, too, has the Serbian Orthodox church.
Both government and clergy back a new national constitution, to be voted on (by Serbs but not Kosovo's ethnic Albanians) in a referendum later this month. It deems the province an "integral part" of Serbia and is expected to be approved. Early elections in December are also likely to focus on the issue.
Indeed, some fear the Kosovo controversy may act as a lightning rod for wider discontents. This year's suspension of Serbia's EU membership talks, the perceived failure of the 2000 pro-democracy revolution, and entrenched economic problems are all fuelling an anticipated surge in support for the far right.
The Radical party, led by the jailed war crimes indictee Vojislav Seselj, looks likely to win most votes. Liberal and left-of-centre parties are meanwhile urging a boycott of the constitutional referendum, saying its passage will trigger renewed confrontation with the west.
All this might be dismissed as internal politicking. But Russian sympathy for Belgrade's stance adds a whole new dimension to rising Balkan tensions. Moscow, a member of the so-called Balkans Contact Group, opposes Kosovo's independence partly because it may encourage secessionists elsewhere, such as in Chechnya. If Kosovo is cut loose, it says, then Abkhazians and South Ossetians in Georgia and ethnic Russians in Moldova should be afforded similar licence.
But Moscow's stance has little to do with resolving the Kosovo conundrum and a lot to do with the wider, ongoing geopolitical struggle between Russia and the west. By suggesting delay Mr Ahtisaari, like a hapless England goalkeeper, may have missed his kick and given the game away.
Comments
robgulick
October 13, 2006 09:41 AM
Fascinating. With all due respect, how does one win the Nobel Peace Prize by being the first to leave the negotiating table? I am not aware of a single success having come out of the Pristina-Belgrade talks in Vienna. If Ahtisaari had found a way to help these two parties find some common ground before throwing up his hands, THEN I would say, "That guy deserves a Nobel." (BTW, I am an American living in Pristina, been here for five years. I came to Kosovo/a as a bridge-builder, and I'll leave the same -- though I must say, it's killing me. BTW2: My country is not SCG. If you were to add 'Kosovo' to the pop-up list on your registration page, you'd make a lot of people happy down here -- the *compromise* being that Kosovar Albanians spell it with an 'a'.)
spencer
October 13, 2006 10:41 AM
Who is Agim Ceku? It's great to see that Margaret Beckett greeted him with such respesct.
How can anyone be the Prime Minister of a PART of a country? The only comparison I can make is say, being Prime Minster of Scotland, Wales or Ireland!
Kosovo and Metohija are a part of Serbia and no amount of ethnic cleansing by the Albanians of all other minorities is going to chage that fact. NATO occupation will not change that fact either. It will end for them just like Iraq.
NATO is desperate enough to get out and leave the region in a worse mess than when they went in. If they don't deliver on their promises the Albanians will have their guts for garters. Not a nice prospect. The soldiers on the ground have seen what the Albanians are capable of.
Sverdlovsk
October 13, 2006 11:09 AM
I think it would be wrong to see Russia as utterly opposed to Kosovan independence. In fact the only reason I can see for them opposing it is that they want to maintain close relations with Serbia. It would certainly be wrong to see them as opposed because it might encourage secessasionary struggles in the former Soviet Union. Russia WANTS secessationary struggles. Not on its own territory obviously, but many years of appalling brutality and bloodshed have seen that Russia's territorial integrity is intact. If Kosovo gets its independence however, then Russia will feel free to call for independence in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Trandniestria, Eastern Ukraine etc etc. In fact Kosovan independence would almost definitely strengthen Russia's hand in its backyard.
Bladerunner
October 13, 2006 11:47 AM
If full independence can be granted to Kosovo - from which a large proportion of the Serbain minority has fled due to intimidation - where would that leave the future status of Republika Srbska? Why should the Bosnian Serbs be expected to accept a Bosnian Muslim-dominated government in Sarajevo while the Albanians in Kosovo are granted independence from the Serb-dominated government in Belgrade?
marrakesh
October 13, 2006 12:00 PM
The "bad news" from Kosovo is that 240,000 people remain ethnically cleansed from their homes. Meaningless "independences" that get handed back the next day to Brussels and other EU elite unaccountable structures are not worth a single death.
WheatFromChaff
October 13, 2006 12:31 PM
Ah yes ... Kosovo. The part of Serbia which NATO (without the UN resolution which "progressives" seem to think is mandatory nowadays) fought so hard to remove from Serbia and hand to a bunch of terrorists (the KLA) - and without so much as a squeak of protest from the BBC (but that was the nice Mr Clinton - wasn't it. Not the nasty Mr Bush).
From a part of the world where all the artificially created (by Tito) internal boundaries of Yugoslavia are considered sacrosanct and unchangeable ... except Serbia's.
This being a place which NATO went into to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe", which ... erm ... only kicked off *after* the bombing started - to Clare Short's apparent surprise (she not having made any preparations for the unforseen fact that civilian populations tend to run away from places that are being bombed - and where NATO has fulfilled its promise of preserving a "multi-ethnic Kosovo" by presiding over a colony which has seen the systematic ethnic cleansing of a large proportion of its ethnic Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Macedonians and even non-Albanian Muslims (most of whom had to take refuge in nasty racist Serbia).
A place chock-full of as yet undiscovered "mass graves" and "rape camps" alleged to have been created by people who had the cheek to believe that they had the right to put down a terrorist uprising within their own country.
As somebody else has pointed out - why should Serbia be liable to be carved up according to demography, but not Bosnia? It is no wonder that the Serbs believe that double-standards are being applied here.
And the result of all this wonderful western intervention? The re-Balkanisation of the Balkans, a Bosnia which has even less independence now (and for the foreseeable future) than it had when it was part of Yugoslavia (and which even had to suffer having Paddy Pantsdown as its Grand Poobah for a while), and a Balkans where the only remaining multi-ethnic society is ... erm ... nasty racist Serbia.
Way to go.
coventrian
October 13, 2006 12:50 PM
"Warrant for the arrest of Agim Ceku has been withdrawn because of his new prime ministerial status," quotes an Interpol release issued on March 24.
So much for 'the end of impunity'. NATO and their thuggish allies are still immune from prosectuion for the crimes they committed in Kosovo.
robgulick
October 13, 2006 12:56 PM
Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, managing director of the Grameen Bank, was awarded the Nobel for his efforts toward eradicating world poverty. [MSNBC] Mr. Ahtasaari is a shoe-in for 2007. I'm assuming, of course, that he'll find a way to get a picture of Agim and Vojislav shaking hands -- with smiles on their faces.
Pelasgian
October 13, 2006 02:05 PM
Agim Ceku was one of the greatest generals in Croatian army. He has won nine major awards for achievment during the Croatian-Serbian war. What people don't know is that he never fought in Kosova/o. He was only appointed the head of KPC (Kosovo Protection Corps) only few weeks before the end the war in 1999. As a person he is very nice, honest and friendly. He is a former Army University tutor in Belgrade-Serbia.
mj123
October 13, 2006 02:39 PM
Aim Ceku was only great because he killed and cleansed Serbs as did Godovina. And if they were great then Milosevic was great too. He could have been appointed the head of KPC but that does not do him justice for heading the KLA so I am sorry, but your statement does not clear his name. Second, your other statement that he is very nice, honest and friendly, is impossible, because as we have seen he is a successful politician and no politician gets there by being nice, honest and friendly. Look at George Bush!! Politicians are greedy, driven, full of B.S. and can lie to your face. Those are the facts don’t try to make it seem like he is innocent and a nice guy because we all know its untrue, otherwise Kosovo would be a stable region within Serbia if this all was true but in fact even without Serb "ethnic cleansing" and "aggression" it is the most violent and unstable region in the Balkans. Thank you very much.
I write to you today to express my deep concerns about the situation in Kosovo. I am concerned that we are moving too quickly toward a final status in Kosovo and have not developed a sound plan for implementation with support from both sides involved. We may be facing a crisis in Kosovo if we do not slow down and engage more heavily with Serbia and the Kosovar Albanians to ensure that the final plan can be implemented.
Bishop Artemije: Independence could trigger tragic consequences for Europe
Bishop Artemije: Independence could trigger tragic consequences for Europe
October 12th 2006
Independence could trigger tragic consequences for Europe
MOSCOW, Oct 12 (Tanjug) - Raska and Prizren Bishop Artemije of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) warned on Thursday that if Kosovo and Metohija were granted independence, this could trigger tragic consequences throughout Europe. "I would compare the independence of Kosovo with a malignant toumor that is spreading and which could affect both its surrounding regions and the entire Europe," Bishop Artemije told reporters in the Interfax news agency in Moscow. According to him, seven years after the deployment of the international troops in the province, it has become a black hole rife with crime, narcotics trade, arms smuggling and human trafficking. "An independent Kosovo would become a base for extremist forces, and its separation from Serbia would result in the annihilation of the Christian community and the erasing of all traces of the 1000-year history of Christianity," Bishop Artemije set out. He pointed out that since the arrival of the international forces, over 150 orthodox churches and monasteries have been demolished, and more than 400 mosques have been built from funds supplied by Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf countries. (end)
Serb negotiator says revision of Kosovo talks needed
Serb negotiator says revision of Kosovo talks needed
Report: Serb negotiator says revision of Kosovo talks needed in order to reach compromise
The Associated Press
MONDAY, OCTOBER 9,
BELGRADE, Serbia A chief Serb negotiator in the Kosovo talks called Monday for a "serious revision" of the U.N.-brokered process, including the replacement of U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari, according to a news report.
Slobodan Samardzic, an adviser to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, said that a "new methodology" is needed in order to reach a compromise between Serbia and Kosovo Albanians on the future status of the contested province, according to the official Tanjug news agency. He did not elaborate.
The negotiations, which started early this year under U.N. auspices, so far have produced no result with both sides entrenched in their positions — the ethnic Albanians demanding independence from Serbia and Belgrade offering broad autonomy for the breakaway region.
On Monday, the chief mediator, Ahtisaari acknowledged that compromise is nowhere in sight because he said both sides remain too far apart.
"The parties remain diametrically opposed," Ahtisaari said in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. "I can't see there will be a negotiated settlement."
But, he added his team "will continue to press forward until all potential areas for compromise have been explored."
Kosovo, formally a Serbian province, has been run by the United Nations and NATO since a 1999 war. The region remains a potential flash point in the Balkans.
The United States and its allies in the so-called Contact Group for Kosovo — which also includes Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia — have sought to wrap up the talks by year end.
Most analysts have predicted Kosovo would be granted some form of independence, despite Serbia's opposition to the secession.
The plans to find a solution for Kosovo this year have failed, Samardzic said, according to the Tanjug interview. He said a different approach and a new envoy are needed next year to push the process forward, the report said.
"The situation will take a new course from Jan. 1," Samardzic was quoted as saying. "I believe this course will entail a serious revision of the entire process by the United Nations and the Contact Group."
In Finland, Ahtisaari failed to specify what would be the next step in case no solution is found for Kosovo at the negotiating table.
But he warned that "Kosovo is the last piece of the Balkan puzzle. Without a lasting solution for Kosovo, there will be no lasting solution for the Balkans."
Sorry for the lateness of this posting, but here is the text of a report of the address given by Mihajlo Markovic, one of the founders of the Socialist Party of Serbia, on 8th September.
Markovic makes some excellent points on the way that since the fall of President Milosevic in a US funded coup in 2000, Serbia has surrendered its freedom-- and like all the other countries in the region- has become a vassal state of the New World Order. The point he makes about the lack of independent media in Serbia today- compared to the situation during the allegedly authoritatian Milosevic era is particularly apt.
SERBIA "FREE" UNDER MILOSEVIC, NOW HAS "VASSAL GOVERNMENT" ACADEMIC BBC Monitoring International Reports - September 8, 2006 Friday Text of report by Serbian independent news agency FoNetBelgrade, 8 September:
Academic Mihajlo Markovic, one of the founders of the Socialist Party of Serbia [SPS] today assessed that Serbia was "free and honourable" during the time of [former Serbian and Yugoslav President] Slobodan Milosevic while it was now a semi-colony "whose government is a vassal government with each ministry populated by foreign intelligence officers and experts who now sit there drafting bills and passing undesirable decisions".
During a presentation of the book of documents on the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic published by the "Sloboda" Association under the title "Slobodan means to be free [pun]", Markovic asked if ever in the history of Serbia some of its authorities had behaved in "such an irrational and irresponsible manner"." The Serb people knew what they had lost when in Belgrade and Pozarevac they staged a magnificent farewell to the slain president, while those who had killed him turned him into a legend who would never be forgotten," he noted.
According to Markovic, during the time of the Milosevic administration, Serbia was "a military power", while now the soldier who shot down the US stealth plane during the NATO bombing "was thrown out of the military and proceedings are being conducted against him over some alleged offence". Markovic emphasized that "in allegedly authoritarian times" each citizen had an opposition paper of his or her own, they had various radio and a television stations, whereas these days "only those in possession of capital own and possess the media, and this cannot be called opposition".
He assessed that with the death of Milosevic, the epoch started on 27 March 1941 [military coup against Yugoslav authorities who signed Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany on 25 Mar 1941] during which the Serb people were free had ended, while now this people lived "in servility towards the new world order". Leaflets saying "Slobo is alive, he is not dead, as long as Serbs and Serbia live" were distributed during the promotion.
A Berlin wall is being built around the western Balkans’
No welcome for Serbia in the EU
Nations within the European Union are hardening their attitudes towards migrants from those eastern European countries that have recently joined, or soon hope to join, the EU. Meanwhile the western Balkans, though promised entry, have been left to wait.
By Chris J Bickerton
REFERENDUMS were organised in 2005 in France and the Netherlands on the proposed European Union constitution, and in both the no campaigns won by sizeable margins. At the heart of the campaigns were debates about enlargement of the EU after the arrival of 10 new members in 2004. The image of the Polish plumber, the incarnation of collective ideas about cheap eastern European labour flooding the market of old Europe, expressed the reservations about enlargement.
The immigration debate has become lively again recently. In Britain, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Poles since 2004 has provoked calls for a restriction of eastern European immigration, and members of the Labour government have already promised tighter restrictions on future jobseekers from Romania and Bulgaria. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, frontrunner in France’s 2007 presidential election, has reiterated his doubts about further enlargement.
National politicians have responded to immigration fears by reconsidering their commitment to further enlargement. Some countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, are too far along the process of accession for any U-turn. At the end of September the EU Commission recommended in its final progress report that Romania and Bulgaria join in January 2007. But both countries have faced tighter EU demands on anti-corruption measures, organised crime and agriculture (1). Other countries have not been given any fixed dates for their entry into the EU. This has left the door open to long negotiations, where measures may be introduced to stem the fears of populations within member states. In France, future enlargements will probably be subject to national referendums.
In Serbia, enlargement fatigue is a serious problem for some. Ksenija Milivojevic, the secretary general of the European Movement in Serbia, thinks that while the basic framework of conditionality and negotiations will not change, negotiations over entry will take more time. She thinks, too, that the differences between first- and second-class membership, where access to all EU funds and institutions is not open to all members, will grow.
Doubts back home
Jovan Ratkovic, Serbia’s presidential adviser on European affairs, also feels that the EU is falling short of its commitment to a full membership perspective. He believes the EU should demonstrate its commitment to the integration of the western Balkans by extending the Thessaloniki promise of 2003. However, in the context of the evolving relationship between the EU and Serbia, and under the present conditions of enlargement fatigue, there are fears that the EU may not even honour that promise.
Oliver Dulic, chairman of the European Integration Committee of the now-defunct parliament of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (2), remains pessimistic. In June 2003, at the joint European Council and western Balkans meeting in Thessaloniki, the EU offered the Balkans its “unequivocal support to the European perspective of the western Balkan countries”. It also stated clearly that “the future of the Balkans is within the European Union”.
The reasons behind this reaffirmed commitment to Balkans membership of the EU are clear. Greece had the presidency of the EU in the first half of 2003 and, for its own reasons of regional stability and influence, placed closer integration of the western Balkans at the top of its list of priorities. In March 2003 the pro-reform prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated. According to Milica Djilas, a professor at Belgrade’s faculty of political science, the killing was a formative moment for the EU. It signalled to Brussels that reform in Serbia was not inevitable and needed to be supported from the outside.
Dulic observed that, since Thessaloniki, little has been done to reassure the western Balkans. Recent attempts to reaffirm the Thessaloniki promise have been made with little fanfare, as if the EU had something to hide. The British presidency of the second half of 2005 organised nothing for the western Balkans. The Austrian presidency of the first half of 2006, widely touted as an opportunity to push the EU’s western Balkans agenda forward, only heightened speculation about flagging support for enlargement within the EU.
There was no high profile western Balkans summit. Instead, the enlargement agenda was discussed at a two-day, informal meeting in Salzburg in March. While the Austrian foreign minister, Ursula Plassnik, stated that “European unification is incomplete without the Balkans”, there was also much talk of the “absorption capacity” of the EU (3). For Dulic, the difference in tone between Thessaloniki and Salzburg was a sign that enlargement had become a cause of trepidation rather than celebration in Europe.
For all this pessimism, fatigue has not overwhelmed the enlargement process. In spite of the postponement of the stabilisation and association agreement (SAA) negotiations, because of Serbia’s failure to hand over Ratko Mladic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the EU Commission is keen to maintain contractual relations with Serbia. It uses any opportunity it has to engage with the ministries in Serbia on issues of legal harmonisation with EU standards. It also continues to make full use of the enhanced permanent dialogue meetings, which are the only formal instance that remains for dialogue between the EU and Serbia now that the SAA negotiations have been put on hold (4).
A Potemkin village
Some conclude from this that enlargement fatigue only applies to Europe’s national politicians. While the EU Commission and its directorates take the lead on enlargement, the member states drag their feet. A simple explanation is that the Commission’s isolation from the European public enables it to move forward on unpopular dossiers; national leaders are far more conscious of public opinion, and have less room for manoeuvre.
The former foreign minister of Serbia, Goran Svilanovic, has little time for the idea of enlargement fatigue. He claims it reflects Europe’s inability to adapt to the challenge of globalisation. This challenge demands that EU member states reform their welfare states, liberalise their labour markets and adapt themselves to outsourcing to India, China and eastern Europe. Rather than confront this reality, EU governments are blaming enlargement. He believes that tensions caused by globalisation take the xenophobic form of the Polish plumber, leaving enlargement a victim of Europe’s internal battle with its own social reform.
Svilanovic is not alone in believing this. Enlargement fatigue is, in the words of another Serbian politician, Gordana Comic, a Potemkin village designed to hide the seedier side of western European politics. The underlying problem is a lack of political will: hiding behind the label of enlargement fatigue, Europe’s elites absolve themselves of responsibility. We can see this by comparing the economics and politics of immigration.
The economic benefit for the EU-15 of the recent 2004 enlargement has been considerable. Britain and Ireland, two countries that opened up their labour markets fully to workers from the new EU member states in 2004, have benefited hugely. A recent study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 75% of employers in Britain felt that EU enlargement had been good for business, and that migrant workers from eastern Europe did jobs that British-born workers were often unwilling to do (5).
The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, has argued that cheap immigrant labour has dampened wage inflation, keeping interest rates low. King said in 2005: “In an economy that can call on unlimited supplies of migrant labour, the concept of output gap is meaningless” (6). In Britain there are even discussions around how to take advantage of a new phen-omenon, the Polish pound.
In spite of this, national politicians in EU member states have increased fears of enlargement by hardening their line on immigration. Svilanovic bitterly comments that not all the slabs of the Berlin wall are in museums. He says: “A new Berlin wall is being built around the western Balkans, with it becoming increasingly difficult to obtain visas to travel in the EU.” Visa facilitation remains a dream for Serbia and in Belgrade long queues form outside embassies, with some people sleeping overnight in the hope of obtaining the necessary travel documents. The situation seems to be worsening as neighbouring countries join the EU. Hungary’s entry into the EU in 2004 provoked considerable tensions with the neighbouring Serb province of Vojvodina, which has an important Hungarian minority. The introduction of visas prevented many families from regularly seeing close relatives.
This lack of visa facilitation is a feature of the hardening immigration debate within the EU. A particularity of the direction currently taken by immigration policy is that there is both an introduction of less liberal immigration regimes and a greater tightening of integration requirements. Traditionally, liberal immigration regimes were accompanied by tight integration requirements, and vice versa. Today there is a tightening in both directions.
Svilanovic explains this situation by pointing to the mediocrity of European politicians. He laments that there are no great leaders any more in Europe, echoing François Mitterrand’s claim that: “I am the last great president, after me, there will only be financiers and accountants”. The debate over immigration in Europe reflects the problem of weak political will. Rather than directly combat the racist arguments of the French Front National (FN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the French Socialists stressed the threat in order to weaken the Gaullist right. Leaders on the right brought the FN’s hard-line immigration stance into the mainstream, most famously in the 1991 comment by Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, about the “noise and smell” of foreigners (7).
There has been a similar approach in other European countries, such as Italy, with the rise of neofascist parties such as Gianfranco Fini’s Allianza Nationale. Instead of recognising their role in heightening immigration fears, Europe’s leaders turn to enlargement fatigue as an excuse for further restrictions.
In Belgrade, enlargement fatigue is believed to be slowing down Serbia’s chances of joining the EU. Enlargement, the EU’s most successful foreign policy, has been transformed into a liability. Only the EU Commission, isolated from European public opinion, still remains firmly attached to the vision of a Balkans enlargement. The view from Belgrade is that responsibility for this lies with Europe’s elites. Public scepticism over enlargement expresses the outlook that the political elites themselves fostered. Those paying the price for this are the people of the western Balkans, whose freedom of movement is today far more limited than it was in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Serb Negotiator Says Kosovo Talks Revision Needed -Report
Serb Negotiator Says Kosovo Talks Revision Needed -Report
Serb Negotiator Says Kosovo Talks Revision Needed -Report
Monday October 9th, 2006 / 13h57
BELGRADE (AP)--A chief Serb negotiator in the Kosovo talks called Monday for a "serious revision" of the U.N.-brokered process, including the replacement of U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari, according to a news report. Slobodan Samardzic, an adviser to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, said a "new methodology" is needed in order to reach a compromise between Serbia and Kosovo Albanians on the future status of the contested province, according to the official Tanjug news agency. He didn't elaborate. The negotiations, which started early this year under U.N. auspices, so far have produced no result with both sides entrenched in their positions - the ethnic Albanians demanding independence from Serbia and Belgrade offering broad autonomy for the breakaway region.
On Monday, the chief mediator, Ahtisaari acknowledged compromise is nowhere in sight because he said both sides remain too far apart. "The parties remain diametrically opposed," Ahtisaari said in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. "I can't see there will be a negotiated settlement." But, he added his team "will continue to press forward until all potential areas for compromise have been explored."
Kosovo, formally a Serbian province, has been run by the U.N. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since a 1999 war. The region remains a potential flash point in the Balkans. The U.S. and its allies in the so-called Contact Group for Kosovo - which also includes the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Russia - have sought to wrap up the talks by year end. Most analysts have predicted Kosovo would be granted some form of independence, despite Serbia's opposition to the secession.
The plans to find a solution for Kosovo this year have failed, Samardzic said, according to the Tanjug interview. He said a different approach and a new envoy are needed next year to push the process forward, the report said.
"The situation will take a new course from Jan. 1," Samardzic was quoted as saying. "I believe this course will entail a serious revision of the entire process by the United Nations and the Contact Group."
In Finland, Ahtisaari failed to specify what would be the next step in case no solution is found for Kosovo at the negotiating table. But he warned "Kosovo is the last piece of the Balkan puzzle. Without a lasting solution for Kosovo, there will be no lasting solution for the Balkans."
In the quest to establish stability and democracy in Serbia, yet another tumultuous chapter is now beginning. In May of this year, the EU suspended Stabilization and Association talks due to the Kostunica government’s failure to arrest and extradite General Ratko Mladic. On October 1st, the Kostunica government fell over the same inability to capture Mladic and renew EU talks.
Further, the International Contact Group on Kosovo has decided that the Serbian province’s final status shall be determined by year’s end, with the most likely outcome being imposed secession and independence. All the while, the right-wing Serbian Radical Party lurks in the domestic foreground: growing in popularity, sipping on a double-cocktail of international malaise and economic hardship, and eyeing the December parliamentary elections in Serbia with optimism.
Typically, the above storyline is narrated as the fault and handiwork of Serbian nationalism. A great number of analysts and policy-makers have made a venerable career casting “Serbian nationalism” as the causal variable for most Balkan ills. Yet, with this most recent chapter, one has to question whether the present tumult has its “cause” in the discursive chestnut of “Greater Serbia” or, rather, in less-scrutinized US and EU foreign policies. In short, while Slobodan Milosevic may be dead and ousted from power, it often seems that US and EU foreign policy is operating as if the late president were still at the helm in Belgrade.
The 6th anniversary of the democratic revolution in Serbia that toppled Milosevic has just passed. With this in mind, it might be time for a critical re-appraisal of existing policy towards Serbia. The present Washington/Brussels consensus of ‘the harder you squeeze, the better the results’ has reached its end and is likely contributing to Serbia’s present instability and struggle for democratic consolidation. While such an approach may have been appropriate during the Milosevic era, squeezing the Serbian lemon is now proving counter-productive with respect to the democratically-oriented, pro-European leadership of the country today. Pro-democracy leaders in Serbia need to be treated as allies and not as adversaries endangering regional security and democratic stability.
Serbia is entering its most important elections since the fall of Milosevic in 2000, and further international pressure will only play into the hands of Serbia’s resurgent right-wing and risks undoing hard-won progress made over the past six years. Policies ripe for a rethink are those related precisely to Mladic’s capture and Kosovo’s final status.
First, regarding the former issue, it still appears that both US and EU foreign policy toward Serbia hinges on one man. Or, to frame it another way, that democratic consolidation in an entire country, Serbia, and the security of the Balkans as a region is contingent upon the arrest and extradition of a single fugitive. Clearly, one has to question the proportionality, risk and ethics of such a stance. While policy-makers buttress such a position with reference to legalistic norms (e.g. justice and criminal responsibility) and select images of ‘Srebrenica’, such a discourse creates more questions than it answers. For instance, does the norm of ‘doing justice’ negate all other norms, such as a stable and democratic Serbia? Or, need the aforementioned norms be mutually exclusive or work at cross-purposes?
The popular contention that legalistic norms stand in some kind of hierarchical priority should strike many as a rather austere political and legal fiction. Surely, if Serbia can demonstrate that it has undertaken reasonable measures to apprehend Mladic, such as Croatia did with respect to then fugitive General Ante Gotovina, then clearly Serbia’s democratic and European progress should not be jeopardized further.
Kosovo’s final status is another case where Western policy is in need of serious reappraisal. US and EU decision-makers have taken the rare and unprecedented step of setting a ‘deadline’ to resolve a complex ethnic and regional problem. One need only look at conflicts of a similar nature to view the folly of such a doctrine. Imagine the Palestinian question, Cyprus or even Sri Lanka receiving similar final-status ‘deadlines.’ How Kosovo is any less complicated than the above conflicts escapes sound reason and judgment.
One explanation for such a misreading rests perhaps in what experts deem to be salient ‘facts’ with respect to the Kosovo problem. Currently, analysis on Kosovo is dominated by a material-rationalist approach, whereby only the quantifiable is considered of tangible significance. For instance, we hear repeatedly how the vast Albanian majority in Kosovo represents a hard ‘fact,’ while the constitutive place Kosovo occupies within Serbia’s national identity is represented as a lesser, more trivial concern. The alleged experts fail to acknowledge how the intangible (e.g. identity) is very tangible with respect to a lasting solution on Kosovo, which is not unlike the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Fortunately some regional diplomats, such as Greek foreign minister Dora Bakoyannis, have recognized the perils of hard-and-fast solutions and pointed to their fallacious use with respect to the Balkans: “…we must not risk achieving a long-lasting viable solution for the sake of meeting a preset, arbitrary deadline.”
Others, however, mostly within the foreign bureaucracies of the great powers, such as US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, do not see a problem at all: “I have yet to hear any argument which demonstrates a delay would bring anything at all.”
Yet the question for the latter camp is whether (a) it is that they have not heard a good argument or (b) they have not heard an argument that is consistent with their predisposition for hard-and-fast solutions. Addressing the complexities of Balkan and Serbian politics in a sophisticated manner is clearly a messy and difficult enterprise. However, should US and EU diplomacy not embrace such an approach, we will only have a fiction of peace in Kosovo. Poor political fictions produce dire consequences eventually, and by cheating time and detail we may be only making matters worse in the long run.
In conclusion, while hard-and-fast diplomacy may have made a significant contribution to Milosevic’s ouster, that was a policy appropriate to a certain time which is now long past; ironically, its continuation now may only return his disciples to power.
*Nikolas Rajkovic is a political sciences researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. From 2001-2002, he served as is an advisor to the Federal Government of Yugoslavia.
My OPINION in response to "Emancipating Kosovo." (Stella)
My OPINION in response to "Emancipating Kosovo." (Stella)
(Once again, much of this information has been written in some form in my other letters and commentaries. The trick is to get it published where it has never been published before. Don't hold your breath!!!! Stella)
"Emancipating Kosovo," or "Creating Another Rogue State?"
by Stella L. Jatras
9 October 2006
When I first read Eric Malloga's OPINION of 9 October titled Emancipating Kosovo, I was reminded of Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, whose famous quote was, "If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth." Therefore, Mr. Malloga's "OPINION" must not go unchallenged. The question, however, is, how does one undo over a decade of disinformation and hatred against the Serbian people that emanates from the pen of Mr. Malloga and his ilk?
If anything, Mr. Malloga is guilty of presenting a one-sided picture of the events in Kosovo. Therefore, let us take a look at some of the facts.
Mr. Malloga omits, intentionally or otherwise, the fact that the Serbs were once the majority in Kosovo until Hitler's Nazis drove out hundreds of thousands of Serbs, followed by communist dictator Josip Broz Tito, who, in his hatred for the Christian Orthodox Serbs, encouraged Albanian Muslims to cross over illegally into Christian Kosovo.
Let us take a look at Prime Minister Agim Ceku whom Mr. Malloga so admires. Journalist Jeffrey Benner wrote as far back as 1999, "The Kosova Liberation Army (KLA)'s new chief of staff, Agim Ceku, has been linked to two of the grisliest episodes of brutality in the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia."
As though irrelevant, Mr. Malloga also omits atrocities committed against the minority Serb population by Kosovo Albanian mobs with the help of the Kosovo Liberation Army, such as was reported in National Review of March 2004, whereby, "A pogrom started in Europe on Wednesday. A UN official is quoted as saying that a Kristallnacht is underway in Kosovo. Serbs are being murdered and their 800 year old churches are aflame. Much of the Christian heritage in Kosovo and Metohija is on fire and could be lost forever. By these deeds too many of Kosovo's Albanians have shown that all the speeches about democracy and multiethnicity we have been hearing in Kosovo since June 1999, and the naïve repetition of them by the international community, are false. These words too are burning, as is the hope in the hearts of right-thinking policymakers across the world that Kosovo's barbarians can be civilized at little cost to the West." Thus far, over 150 Serbian churches and monasteries in Kosovo have been destroyed or desecrated without any outage from the civilized world.
As a result, today, Serbian culture, language and religion are being eradicated by Kosovo Albanian mobs aided by Agim Ceku's KLA war criminals.
The Wall Street Journal reported on 1 November 2001, "For the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri [emphasis added] has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo (FYROM) Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade."
And let us not forget how the Serbs were accused of murdering 700 Kosovo Albanians at the Trepca mines, grounding the bodies and incinerating them. Daniel Pearl on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, on 31 December 1999, exposed the gruesome massacre as a hoax, when he wrote, "By late summer, stories about a Nazi-like body-disposal facility were so wide-spread that investigators sent a three-man French Gendarmerie team spelunking half a mile down the mine to search for bodies. They found none. Another team analyzed ashes in the furnace. They found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies." Pearl paid with his life for writing the truth.
Former UNPROFOR Commander, Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie said it right, when he said, " The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early ´90s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world."
The Washington Times further reported on 4 May 1999, that "Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden."
In a 1994 letter to President Bill Clinton regarding claims of Serbian rape camps, Herb Brin, editor of Heritage Southwest Jewish Press wrote, "When I visited the Serbian front a year ago, I learned to my dismay that the rape story was a total concoction." Daniel Pearl also reported that allegations of indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums and mutilation of the dead -- haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo.
President Bush said that we would do whatever it takes to defend the United States against Muslim terrorists, yet we denied the Serbs the right to defend themselves against the same Muslim terrorists that we are fighting today.
Efforts, like those of Mr. Malloga, are being made to cede Serbia's Jerusalem to war criminals such as Agim Ceku. To do so would be creating another rogue state in the underbelly of Europe - another mini-Afghanistan which the world certainly doesn't need.
I finish with the following quotes for your readers to ponder:
John Ranz, USA Chairman of Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. "The gigantic campaign to brainwash America by our media against the Serbian people is just incredible, with its daily dose of one-sided information and outright lies."
Yohanan Ramati, Director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense. "This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda should cause anyone believing in democracy and free speech serious concerns. It recalls Hitler's propaganda against the allies in World War II. Facts are twisted and, when convenient, disregarded."
As a career military officer's wife, Stella Jatras has traveled widely and has lived in many foreign countries where she not only learned about other cultures but also became very knowledgeable regarding world affairs and world politics. With the advent of the war in Bosnia, Mrs. Jatras immediately recognized the bias of the Western media and the Clinton administration's flawed foreign policy in the Balkans and began her efforts to present to the American people a more accurate view of that tragic situation. Her letters and articles have been published in The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Arizona Republic, The Patriot- News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), Chronicles, The Stars and Stripes, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as a number of magazines and periodicals. In addition her writings have had worldwide distribution via the Internet such as Citizen Soldier and Jihad Watch. Stella Jatras lived in Moscow for two years (where her husband, George, was the Senior Air Attaché), and while there, worked in the Political Section of the US Embassy. Stella has also lived in Germany, Greece and Saudi Arabia. Her travels took her to over twenty countries.
Serbia, which has just adopted a new Constitution, heads towards early elections. According to the media speculations, the general elections would take place either in late December this year or in spring 2007. And the big wigs of the international community began to give the signal that the postponement of the Kosovo final status until after elections in Serbia is now a serious option. Will they really avoid inserting the stick into the most unpredictable bee hive of the Balkans?
Constitution: Not without Kosovo
In 1913, after the Balkan wars, the Ottoman Empire lost almost all of its European territory. While retreating, Ottoman officers promised those peoples, who had still some sense of loyalty to the declining Empire, that they would be back one day. The preamble of the new Serbian Constitution, which mentions Kosovo as the “constituent part of Serbia’s territory”, has no valour than the hollow promise of those Ottoman officers.
Serbian Parliament approves new Constitution
Many criticise this preamble as non-realistic, defiant or even belligerent. In fact, none of these qualifications are correct. Serbia would not have drawn up no other preamble but this, for two main reasons. First, it is an incontestable fact that Kosovo is still de facto part of Serbia. Secondly, given the official position of Belgrade at the status talks, Serbia would not have been expected to trip up herself by omitting to mention Kosovo as an integral part of the country. Therefore, this preamble is nothing but the logical continuation of the legal fiction, according to which Kosovo is still part of Serbia. Far from being a belligerent act, this is a just a symbolic gesture, an indirect message to the Serbian minority of Kosovo -and to the Serbian electorate of course- that assures that “we will be back one day”. Since no Serbian politician would ever sign the independence of Kosovo, these politicians will then be able to carry on with this fiction for years to come. And after all, the preamble of the new Serbian Constitution is not that belligerent as long as it mentions a territory that still de facto belongs to the country as its own. For example, the preamble of the Armenian Constitution openly demands the eastern region of the neighbouring country, Turkey. In spite of Turkey’s numerous protests, the international community does not seem to care about this only too obvious belligerence from Armenia.
Referendum: With what electorate?
Serbian Parliament decided that the referendum on the new Constitution should be held on 28th October. In order to be valid, the new Constitution must be approved by the majority of the electorate. In Serbia there are around 6.533.000 registered voters. However, some 1.300.000 are from Kosovo. Only 186.000 of them are ethnic Serbs. This is an impossible situation: - To exclude the Kosovo Albanians from the electorate would be not only democratically condemnable, but also contradictory. After all, why vote for a Constitution that claims Kosovo as the integral part of Serbia while excluding the inhabitants of this region from the electorate? - To include them would be most ironic, for no Albanian would ever vote for a Constitution in which Kosovo is mentioned as an integral part of Serbia. Moreover, here are three facts that make the situation even more complicated: - Counting the Kosovo Albanian voters would increase the number of the Serbian electorate. If the Albanians boycotted the referendum -which is more than probable-, the adoption of the new Constitution would be seriously endangered, since it must be approved by the majority of the electorate. - To establish a new electoral list which would exclude the Kosovo Albanians would be very contradictory, for in such case, the preamble of the Constitution would be automatically invalid. - For Serbia has no real control on Kosovo, it is physically impossible for the Republic Election Commission (RIK) to determine an electoral list with exact number of voters. And the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) has no permanent electoral list. How the RIK will resolve this intriguing situation is indeed a real legal and political curiosity.
The matrix: Early elections in Serbia
Early elections in Serbia became the matrix according to which the exact timeline of the Kosovo final status will be determined. According to the speculations, the general elections would take place either in late December this year or in spring 2007. Recent statements made by UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari and EU foreign policy and security chief Javier Solana insinuate that the postponement of the Kosovo final status until after elections in Serbia is now a serious option. Last decision is up to the six-nation Contact Group. As to the timeline, it is known that the EU and Russia are more flexible and tolerant than the USA that insists for the end of 2006 as the timeline for the Kosovo status solution. Note that four countries of the Contact Group are EU-members and the other one is Russia. Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku warned that the postponement of the decision would increase risks and tensions. It seems that the international community must choose the least evil between two probabilities: risks and tensions created by the Serbs or risks and tensions created by the Albanians. One could claim that a possible delay would be easier for the Albanians to tolerate since the happy end unconditionally awaits them at the end of the process. However, with Serbia, things are a bit more complicated. On the one hand, according to the polls, the two leading parties of these elections are expected to be Tomislav Nikolic’s Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party (DS). In this regard, cooperation between DS and Vojislav Kostunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) is essential in order to halt the rise of the Radicals. Will the two frères ennemies make truce for the sake of their country? On the other hand, both opinion polls and sociological research show that the Serbian people are in fact somehow ready for Kosovo’s independence. And their main concern is the current difficult economic situation as any other standard electorate in any country. However, a wounded national pride should never be underestimated. Thus the chances are fifty-fifty. Serbia obviously needs time. And it would be wise for the international community to grant a little break as long as it costs nothing. Some analysts worry that for electoral reasons the pro-Western politicians indulge themselves in nationalistic rhetoric in order to nullify the propaganda of the Radicals, and that they become more inflexible than ever on the Kosovo status in their turn thereafter. However, there is a basic difference between the Democrats and the Radicals: the former does not live in a political dreamland and are not keen for uncertain adventures. That is why, at the negotiation table, to confront Boris Tadic is always preferable than to confront Vojislav Seselj.
Oct 5th 2006 | SARAJEVO From The Economist print edition
The future of both Kosovo and Bosnia gets murkier
THE Balkan endgame is starting to look messy. Expectations that Kosovo would be independent by early next year have just suffered a blow. Over 1.8m of the Serbian province's 2m people are ethnic Albanians who will settle for nothing less than independence. Yet the UN talks on Kosovo under Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president, have got nowhere. Two weeks ago Mr Ahtisaari was given the go-ahead to draft his own plan for Kosovo's future. On September 22nd the UN Security Council said it hoped that the talks would finish by the end of the year.
Mr Ahtisaari, who is likely to propose some form of independence, was expected to present his plan later this month. But on September 30th the Serbian parliament adopted a new constitution that declares Kosovo to be an inalienable part of Serbia. This was a shrewd delaying tactic on the part of Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister. The constitution must be ratified in a referendum at the end of October, and it will be followed by an election. Mr Ahtisaari can hardly put forward his plan before then, as the voters might react by switching in droves to the extreme nationalist Radical Party. That could destabilise the whole region.
Diplomats dealing with Kosovo prefer Serbia to have its election first, in the hope that democratic forces will win and then come round to accepting Kosovo's independence. But the election could be delayed. And if Kosovo's Albanians then start fretting that Serbia is successfully outmanoeuvring them, there is a risk that extremists among them will return to violence, which would not do their cause any good.
Voters in Bosnia also caused an upset on October 1st. A majority chose to put Bosnia's wartime foreign minister, Haris Silajdzic, into the Bosniak (Muslim) presidential seat in Sarajevo, turning out Sulejman Tihic, who was seen by Western diplomats as a moderate with whom they could work. Mr Silajdzic wants to scrap the Bosniak-Croat federation, as well as the Serbs' Republika Srpska. That upsets the Croats, who form a 14% minority, mostly in the south and west of the country. It also ruffles Milorad Dodik, who was easily re-elected as prime minister of Republika Srpska.
Many Bosnian Serbs see their republic as a legitimate legacy of the war. Mr Dodik has been making secessionist rumblings, claiming that, should Kosovo gain independence, his republic should be allowed to do so as well. The election of Mr Silajdzic will encourage more such talk, even though Bosnia's international overseers firmly reject the idea.
Christian Schwarz-Schilling, the German who now wields the power of international proconsul, has said that his office should be closed in mid-2007. It will be replaced by a lower-key European Union mission (and some of the 6,000 soldiers of the EU peacekeeping mission will stay). Although most parties in Bosnia say they want to get into the EU, one analyst, Senad Pecanin, fears that the necessary reforms could be blocked by the political radicalisation that is splitting the country into opposing camps. It does not help the moderates in Bosnia and Kosovonor in Serbia, for that matterthat the mood in Brussels and other EU capitals has recently turned against letting any more countries into their club.
The San Diego Union-Tribune October 6, 2006 Opinion
Negotiating Kosovo's final status
By William Slomanson
The international protectorate of Kosovo is perched in southern Serbia. Kosovo has been under military occupation since the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia's now defunct regime of Slobodan Milosevic.
The United Nations previously announced its intent to end its unique governmental administration of Kosovo within the next 90 days. Kosovo has been a major financial drain, at a time when U.N. members are demanding more bang for the assessed dues buck. Serbia's government has just scheduled a new constitutional referendum for December, claiming its irrefutable right to the province. Kosovo is therein proclaimed to be an "integral part" of Serbia.
The Vienna-based Contact Group leads the on-going process of resolving Kosovo's final status. Membership includes the United Nations, European Union, NATO, Russia and the United States. Tight-lipped negotiators are presumably exploring the role that the European Union might play when the United Nations departs. Unfortunately, European Union members have yet to commit the requisite degree of resources needed to kick-start all levels of Kosovar infrastructure.
A patient international community should eschew temporary remedies, given the region's 400 wars in 300 years. Kosovo's currently unresolved status makes it the black hole of Europe. Its Balkan neighbors are progressing toward membership in NATO, the European Union, and other desired international linkages. As the United States National Security Strategy warns, weak states can threaten strong states.
The major impediment to independence is Kosovo's historically mono-ethnic society. A number of former Serbian soldiers and governmental officials have been prosecuted in the U.N.'s regional criminal tribunal for their war crimes and genocidal acts against the Albanian population in the 1990s. Serbs switched roles in post-conflict Kosovo. They became the ethnic minority. International human rights organizations cannot guarantee their safety. The prime example is the small-scale Krystal Nacht of March 17, 2004. Nineteen Serb churches were torched. Thirty people were killed.
The final status options include linkage with Albania. Sophisticated Albanian Kosovars do not favor this compromise, because of Albania's comparatively poor economic status in Europe. Another alternative is returning Kosovo to the autonomy it enjoyed in Tito's Yugoslavia, before Milosevic mounted his repressive ethnic cleansing campaign. But many Albanian Kosovars do not want to risk the remote possibility that one day, after departure of the international community, Belgrade would reinstitute repressive tactics.
This ubiquitous fear lacks a solid foundation for two reasons. First, the Serbian government surrendered its former president, Milosevic, for trial by the U.N.'s regional criminal tribunal. That concession appeased the United States and its NATO allies, whose bombing was directed at his government. Second, Belgrade would not want to short-circuit its incorporation into desirable European entities.
The majority Kosovar Albanian population's desired option is statehood. A growing number of Serbs, both in an out of Kosovo, see the international community's writing on the wall. They have acknowledged that Serbia's retention of Kosovo is a recipe for economic and political disaster. Kosovo is in the poorest part of Europe, and its rebellious population is nearly 95 percent Albanian.
The Serbian government is no doubt negotiating for retention of the northern 15 percent to 20 percent of this province. The city of Mitrovica is Kosovo's Mason-Dixon Line. This division was parented by Serb-friendly French NATO forces, upon cessation of the 1999 NATO bombing. Parallel Serb institutions reign in this northern portion of Kosovo, where the United Nations has de jure but not de facto control. This reality is most evident by the Serbian flag at the northern edge of the Ibar River Bridge. It effectively divides Kosovo into the Serbian north and Albanian south. The civilian-policed guard shack, and the NATO installation on the river below, evince the ethnic undercurrent forcibly restrained by their presence.
Such a geographical division may be a convenient Contact Group pressure point. But it would be a particularly discomforting precedent. International practice abhors geographic divisions based on ethnicity. If Vienna's negotiators were to force the Mitrovica division piece into this geographical puzzle, ethnic adversaries elsewhere would expect like treatment. For example, the international community possesses something Serbia wants. That is international recognition of Republika Srpska, the unrecognized Serb entity in the eastern half of Bosnia. Unlike the Kosovo situation, however, Bosnia's constitution expressly provides that it consist of both Bosnia-Herzegovina and this otherwise unrecognized Serbian entity within Bosnia.
Balkan news reports on the Vienna Contact Group negotiations are now referring to "conditional independence" as a likely final status option. The term conditional implies that Kosovo's independence could not be complete until Kosovar Serbs and other minorities enjoy a robust existence in terms of equal opportunity education, employment and housing. During conditional independence, NATO's barbed wire fences and its soldiers would gradually disappear from the current Serb population enclaves in Kosovo.
Regardless of what the Vienna Contact Group achieves, a functioning multiethnic society will be the unavoidable price tag for full independence. This cannot occur until the international community is satisfied that the majority Albanian populace has convincingly demonstrated the requisite degree of tolerance. The minority population's human rights cannot be passively inherited from the international community's occupation of Kosovo. True independence is literally in the hands of Kosovo's majority population. They have to credibly demonstrate that an independent Kosovo will not erupt into a fresh ethnic cleansing crisis, requiring yet another humanitarian intervention in Kosovo.
Slomanson is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and visiting professor at the University of Pristina in Kosovo. He is past chair of the American Society of International Law United Nations Section. He can be reached via e-mail at bills@tjsl.edu.
Serbia, which has just adopted a new Constitution, heads towards early elections. According to the media speculations, the general elections would take place either in late December this year or in spring 2007. And the big wigs of the international community began to give the signal that the postponement of the Kosovo final status until after elections in Serbia is now a serious option. Will they really avoid inserting the stick into the most unpredictable bee hive of the Balkans?
Constitution: Not without Kosovo
In 1913, after the Balkan wars, the Ottoman Empire lost almost all of its European territory. While retreating, Ottoman officers promised those peoples, who had still some sense of loyalty to the declining Empire, that they would be back one day. The preamble of the new Serbian Constitution, which mentions Kosovo as the “constituent part of Serbia’s territory”, has no valour than the hollow promise of those Ottoman officers.
Serbian Parliament approves new Constitution
Many criticise this preamble as non-realistic, defiant or even belligerent. In fact, none of these qualifications are correct. Serbia would not have drawn up no other preamble but this, for two main reasons. First, it is an incontestable fact that Kosovo is still de facto part of Serbia. Secondly, given the official position of Belgrade at the status talks, Serbia would not have been expected to trip up herself by omitting to mention Kosovo as an integral part of the country. Therefore, this preamble is nothing but the logical continuation of the legal fiction, according to which Kosovo is still part of Serbia. Far from being a belligerent act, this is a just a symbolic gesture, an indirect message to the Serbian minority of Kosovo -and to the Serbian electorate of course- that assures that “we will be back one day”. Since no Serbian politician would ever sign the independence of Kosovo, these politicians will then be able to carry on with this fiction for years to come. And after all, the preamble of the new Serbian Constitution is not that belligerent as long as it mentions a territory that still de facto belongs to the country as its own. For example, the preamble of the Armenian Constitution openly demands the eastern region of the neighbouring country, Turkey. In spite of Turkey’s numerous protests, the international community does not seem to care about this only too obvious belligerence from Armenia.
Referendum: With what electorate?
Serbian Parliament decided that the referendum on the new Constitution should be held on 28th October. In order to be valid, the new Constitution must be approved by the majority of the electorate. In Serbia there are around 6.533.000 registered voters. However, some 1.300.000 are from Kosovo. Only 186.000 of them are ethnic Serbs. This is an impossible situation: - To exclude the Kosovo Albanians from the electorate would be not only democratically condemnable, but also contradictory. After all, why vote for a Constitution that claims Kosovo as the integral part of Serbia while excluding the inhabitants of this region from the electorate? - To include them would be most ironic, for no Albanian would ever vote for a Constitution in which Kosovo is mentioned as an integral part of Serbia. Moreover, here are three facts that make the situation even more complicated: - Counting the Kosovo Albanian voters would increase the number of the Serbian electorate. If the Albanians boycotted the referendum -which is more than probable-, the adoption of the new Constitution would be seriously endangered, since it must be approved by the majority of the electorate. - To establish a new electoral list which would exclude the Kosovo Albanians would be very contradictory, for in such case, the preamble of the Constitution would be automatically invalid. - For Serbia has no real control on Kosovo, it is physically impossible for the Republic Election Commission (RIK) to determine an electoral list with exact number of voters. And the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) has no permanent electoral list. How the RIK will resolve this intriguing situation is indeed a real legal and political curiosity.
The matrix: Early elections in Serbia
Early elections in Serbia became the matrix according to which the exact timeline of the Kosovo final status will be determined. According to the speculations, the general elections would take place either in late December this year or in spring 2007. Recent statements made by UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari and EU foreign policy and security chief Javier Solana insinuate that the postponement of the Kosovo final status until after elections in Serbia is now a serious option. Last decision is up to the six-nation Contact Group. As to the timeline, it is known that the EU and Russia are more flexible and tolerant than the USA that insists for the end of 2006 as the timeline for the Kosovo status solution. Note that four countries of the Contact Group are EU-members and the other one is Russia. Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku warned that the postponement of the decision would increase risks and tensions. It seems that the international community must choose the least evil between two probabilities: risks and tensions created by the Serbs or risks and tensions created by the Albanians. One could claim that a possible delay would be easier for the Albanians to tolerate since the happy end unconditionally awaits them at the end of the process. However, with Serbia, things are a bit more complicated. On the one hand, according to the polls, the two leading parties of these elections are expected to be Tomislav Nikolic’s Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party (DS). In this regard, cooperation between DS and Vojislav Kostunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) is essential in order to halt the rise of the Radicals. Will the two frères ennemies make truce for the sake of their country? On the other hand, both opinion polls and sociological research show that the Serbian people are in fact somehow ready for Kosovo’s independence. And their main concern is the current difficult economic situation as any other standard electorate in any country. However, a wounded national pride should never be underestimated. Thus the chances are fifty-fifty. Serbia obviously needs time. And it would be wise for the international community to grant a little break as long as it costs nothing. Some analysts worry that for electoral reasons the pro-Western politicians indulge themselves in nationalistic rhetoric in order to nullify the propaganda of the Radicals, and that they become more inflexible than ever on the Kosovo status in their turn thereafter. However, there is a basic difference between the Democrats and the Radicals: the former does not live in a political dreamland and are not keen for uncertain adventures. That is why, at the negotiation table, to confront Boris Tadic is always preferable than to confront Vojislav Seselj.
Crossfire War - Three Way Ethnic Divsions Restablished in Bosnia Elections
Crossfire War - Three Way Ethnic Divsions Restablished in Bosnia Elections
Op-Ed Contributor
Crossfire War - Three Way Ethnic Divsions Restablished in Bosnia Elections
By Willard Payne
Crossfire War - TEHRAN WATCH - Southeast Europe Theatre: Tehran - Sarajevo - Zagreb - Belgrade/Brussels - Vienna - Berlin; Three Headed Bosnia Presidency at Odds with Itself - Recent Elections Create More Divisions
Night Watch: SARAJEVO - When the fighting ended in 1995 in Bonsia-Herzegovina an attempt to prevent further conflict was made by instituting a three-man Presidency, each one representing a major ethnic group, which the fighting in the former Yugoslavia revolved around. One representative was Muslim, one Serb and the third Croatian. Elections held Sunday revealed that not only are the ethinc divisions still very much there. but it seems with the campaign rhetoric still going on, that the country could come apart at the ethnic seams. [RAWSTORY]
The Bosnian Muslim winner, the one who will hold the Muslim seat of the Presidency, Haris Silajdzic ran on a campaign of national unity, in order to strengthen the central government. With that in mind he openly advocated the elimination of the other two ethnic "statelets", Republic of Srpska that represents Bosnian Serbs, based in Banajulka, and to also eliminate the Croat ethnic federation. Responding in kind has been Bosnian Serb representatives including the winner of the Serbian seat of the Presidency - Nebojsa Radmanovic. He has stated that if Srpska is elimanted then Bosnian Serbs will secede from the country, which would cause Bosnia-Herzegovina to disappear from the map of Europe.
Recently, crossfirewar.com reported on the state ceremony in Banjaluka by the Presidents and Prime Ministers of both Serbia-Belgrade and Republic of Srpska-Banjaluka in which they signed an economic unity agreement. I wrote at the time that I also suspected there was an understanding between both Serb communities that in times of crisis they would work together again militarily as in the first Balkan war from 1991-95. Both capitals know they are by no means alone as a result of the security agreement signed in January between Belgrade - Tehran. Iran is aware that a resumption of fighting here will direct Vienna - Brussels - NATO's attention away from Tehran's nuclear weapons program. This is definitely a crisis opportunity Tehran cannot pass up.
Contributing to the self-destructive forces within this three headed monster Presidency is that the Croatian winner of the Croat Presidential seat may not have the support of most Croats. Zeljko Komsic does not have widespread support among the Croatian community and it seem he was mostly supported by Bosnian Serbs. Political analyst Tanja Topic told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, "If Silajdzic (Muslim) and Dodik (Serb) continue with their rhetoric we can expect the radicalization of the situation in Bosnia." She added, "Such a situation would push us some five to ten years back and would just prolong the agony of a certain international protectorate here." Nationalistic Croatians are openly threatening to overturn the elections.
Nothing would please Tehran more than to have the West confined to fighting so close to home in Southeast Europe in a desperate attempt to prevent the war from spreading into Central Europe, Vienna and beyond. But Vienna has only itself to blame along with the European capitals, Berlin - Brussels - Paris, that created this three headed monster when they eagerly recognized the preverse, twisted boundary of Croatia that deliberately cut off Serbia's access to the Adriatic Sea. Nor was it any coincidence the Muslim community was the most victimized by the resulting violence, war, when NATO imposed an arms embargo on Bosnia-Herzegovina. But that opened the door for Tehran-Ankara to send Islamic fighters into the area and those military-terrorist bases are still there waiting for the call to be re-activated.
The stage for this front was set by the 55 headed hydra called the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), it was supposed to have been orchestrated by Vienna in the name of the New World Order proclaimed in 1990. They intended to conduct a carefully arranged crisis which they assumed they could solve diplomatically but they underestimated the impact of weapons dealears. According to official statistics the ethnic demographics are 48% of Bosnia-Herzegovina is Muslim, 34% Serbian Orthodox Christian and 15% Croatian Catholic. Since the divided Yugoslavia unleashed a lot of dormant old world chaos, each division can be a religious-nationalistic reason to restart the war.
So now there are three flashpoints in the Balkans that can erupt simultaneously: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Macedonia. The eventual conclusion of that war will re-draw the map of Europe once again.
A brief report on the conference held on 28 September
A brief report on the conference held on 28 September
********************************************************************************************* On Oct 1, 2006, at 6:50 PM, Mila Nolan wrote:
Thank you Mila.
I would like to add that Congressman Trent Franks (R-Arizona) made some encouraging remarks during lunch.
Stella ********************************************************************************************* On Oct 1, 2006, at 6:50 PM, Mila Nolan wrote:
Dear Friends,
This is a brief report on the conference held on September 28 at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington D. C coordinated by James Jatras and the American Council for Kosovo with Christian Solidarity International and Religious Freedom Coalition.
My comments are rather personal and informal because I did not take notes, but listened intently to the many excellent speakers and panelists who came to express views and concerns about religious freedom, independence and "Islamic fascism" that is becoming daily, a fast growing global concern.
The issue of Kosovo and its future was of course the main reason for this conference and the range of speakers was impressive and included Ambassador James Bissett, former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia; Peggy Birchfield, Executive Director, Religious Freedom Coalition; Joseph Grieboski, President, Institute on Religion and Public Policy; Robert Spenser, Director of JihadWatch. org.; Fr. Keith Roderick, Christian Solidarity International; Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media; Nikolas Gvosdev, The National Interest - along with many other significant writers, authors and journalists - Doug Bandow, Julia Gorin, John Hulsman, Steven Meyer, Wanda Schindley, Greg Copley and Srdja Trffkovic.
Very supportive and sincere luncheon remarks were given by Congressman Trent Franks - and a very poignant and moving opening speech was delivered by Bishop Artemije of Kosovo and Metohija.
I am naming these people ( and missed a few ) because those of you who track this issue should be aware of who is on our side. Below is a list of points that were most interesting to me.
* Kosovo and the issue of independence is increasingly linked by many "alert" people to the growing threat of Islamic fascism. The fact that 150 Christian churches in Kosovo have been destroyed under the watchful eyes of KFOR and NATO troops while nearly 300 new mosques have been erected of the Wahabbi persuasion, many donated by Saudi money and flying Saudi flags, surely flies in the face of those who pretend that an independent Kosovo will be a multinational state with religious freedom.
* However, in spite of these ominous signs, the U.S with its European partners seem, like Pontius Pilate to want to wash their hands of this bloody Balkan fiasco, finish the job and declare a victory for mob rule even if these pillars of high minded Western values have to rip Kosovo away ILLEGALLY from Serbia, a sovereign state, without its consent - and even if Russia and China veto independence in the UN Security Council. This rape represents not only the law of the jungle where "might makes right ", but in this case, given the obvious lunacy, it would appear that the inmates are running the asylum.
* Kosovo is in fact a terrorist zone and a black hole of corruption with criminality, drug trafficking/manufacturing, (three known laboratories, aided and abetted by members of America's own military camp, Bond Steel) and with white slave trafficking making up the only viable economy. Its prime minister, Agim Ceku is a KNOWN murderer, dripping with blood, though welcomed in Washington. There is no rule of law, minorities live in concentration camps in mortal fear of their lives and the new brand of Islamic fundamentalism has joined ranks with the Albanian mob to launch their Islamic fascist terrorism into Europe and beyond.
* People at the conference representing religious freedom around the world, did not mince words and found it hard to locate ANY minority religious group that lived freely and without threats or intimidation where there was a majority Muslim rule. Because the law of Islam allows only three possibilities for the infidel; convert to Islam, become part of the dhiimmi ( slaves or second class people who pay steep taxes ), or lastly, leave or lose your head!
* Some other interesting points made were that Muslim leaders at meetings like one held in Pakistan made clear Muslim strategic interests in Bosnia and Kosovo. Dreams of the Caliphate are growing exponentially! Also alarming was the tracking trend that found that political and other types of projects, worldwide, backed by Wahabbi money tended to win acceptance every time proving once more that money talks.
* The prognosis for Kosovo is not good, but there is a glimmer of hope if the issue of independence can be postponed and if the very real threat of Islamic JIHAD rattles a few more brains in Washington so that the dots can be connected before independence for Kosovo is declared.
* Also, the leaders of the Serbian government are hanging tough on this issue and will remain unified at least until after November's elections. Nor is the West offering any real carrots! There is no fast track or even a slow track for Serbs to enter the EU which some panelists thought might be a blessing in disguise because Serbs would only have to give in, give up and humiliate themselves even more to get into Le Club EU. It was noted by some panelists for instance that the political mindset in the U.S . was so STUCK that Serbs were automatically discounted in any argument in favor of the opposing group.
This was a remarkable conference with some of the best and sanest voices in the land, but the message must reach beyond the choir. Bishop Artemije was profound when he said " Detaching Kosovo from Democratic Serbia, of which it is an integral part would mean a virtual sentence of extinction for my people... and create a rogue state in which the terrorists are the government. .... Sacrificing our land and our blood cannot buy protection from JIHAD".
I pray to God that the Powers That Be are listening well and hear these prophetic words!
The Serb government's restated claim over Kosovo was more a symbolic gesture than 'war talk'.
David Chandler
The announcement by the Serbian government that there will be a national referendum on a new constitution, which will declare Kosovo to be part of Serbia, has caused a flurry of international criticism. The international press portrayed the Serbian governments statement as a sign of Belgrades belligerence and as an indication that the Balkan state is still trapped in the language of ethnic nationalism (1). Yet once the rhetoric and reality are disentangled, it is clear that neither of these conclusions is correct.
The new constitution recognises Serbia as a separate and independent state after the dissolution of the federal Yugoslav state and Montenegros independence in June. It asserts in its preamble that the province of Kosovo is a constituent part of Serbias territory (2). It would be strange if it did not. Despite being under United Nations administration, Kosovo is formally part of the Serbian state according to international law. Many international declarations and agreements with the Serbian government, and previously with that of Serbia-Montenegro, expressly mention Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo in the preamble.
However, while there is no problem if international institutions or Western states pay lip service to the legal fiction that Serbia has sovereignty over Kosovo, it is considered a controversial act for the Serbian government to do the same. It is held to be particularly controversial for the Serbian parliament to make declarations over Kosovo now, because Belgrade is currently engaged in negotiations over the provinces final status with the government in Pristina.
Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica claims that the parliaments consensus of support for the constitution underlines the truth that Kosovo has always been and will always remain a constituent part of Serbias territory, and says Serbia will defend Kosovo with all democratic and legal means (3). However, the Serbian parliaments near unanimous support for asserting its sovereign claim over Kosovo is purely a symbolic one.
Opinion polls show that only 12 per cent of the Serbian public believe that Kosovo will remain part of Serbia (4). Far from the Serbian government asserting itself over Kosovo, the symbolic declarations of Serbias unity and of the importance of Kosovo are a direct reflection of the parliaments weakness and irrelevance when it comes to questions of concern to the Serbian people.
Kosovo is not the only issue where the Serbian government has little real say. The process of government policymaking has increasingly been subordinated to the requirements of the European Union. Even the newly revised constitution was essentially part of the external programme set down by Brussels requiring the revision of the constitution in line with European standards (5). The Serbian parliaments role has become one of merely rubber-stamping legislative reform proposals stemming from Brussels and coordinated by the Serbian governments EU Integration Office, responsible for preparing and amending government legislation (6).
The irony is that the inequality of power and influence between international institutions, such as the UN and the EU, and Balkan states, such as Serbia, has created a context in which the rhetoric on all sides loses its relationship to reality. Nowhere is this more the case than over the final status of Kosovo.
Serbia has formal sovereign rights over the Kosovo province, yet cannot exercise them. Kosovo looks set to gain its sovereignty at the end of the current negotiations, yet this sovereignty will be equally constrained, with elected officials subordinate to internationally appointed interlocutors from the EU and NATO (7). The Kosovo question reveals the lack of content behind traditional conceptions of sovereignty in the Balkans.
This is highlighted in the negotiations allegedly taking place between Belgrade and Pristina over the future status of Kosovo. In fact, there are no direct talks between the Serb government and the Kosovo-Albanian one; this has been formally prevented by the UNs chief negotiator, Martti Ahtisaari, who has insisted on the UNs intermediary role (8). Not only are external agencies developing the proposals for the future status of Kosovo; they are also the key actors in the negotiating process.
The key negotiations on Kosovos future status are taking place between the US, the UN and the EU. The government in Belgrade has little say over Kosovos future and the UN is in the advanced stages of preparations for handing responsibility for Kosovo over to the EU (9). Despite the rhetoric, the Serbian government is not even planning to use the referendum on the constitution to strengthen its hand in the negotiating process.
The outcome looks likely to change little in Kosovo, for either the Serbs or Kosovo-Albanians, as the UN Mission will effectively become that of the European Union. The future quasi-independent status of Kosovo will enable international institutions to run Kosovo at arms length, rather than taking direct responsibility for protectorate powers as it does at present.
It seems that in the near future Kosovo will take over Montenegros title of being the newest sovereign state in the Balkans (10). However, the increase in sovereignty in the region has not been accompanied by any increase in political independence. The existence of sovereignty without policymaking independence has undermined the public sphere, reducing parliaments in the region to stages for formal gestures and reducing politics to empty rhetoric. When international administrators and policy advocates mistake this rhetoric for strength and influence, they are not just mistaken in their understanding of the region; they are also seeking to exaggerate the role of local actors to evade responsibility for their own actions in the Balkans.
David Chandler is professor of international relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster, London. His latest book is Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building. He is speaking on the panel discussion Empire of Regulation or Lawless World? at the Battle of Ideas festival of debate in London in October 2006.
(1) See, for example, Nicolas Wood, Serbia reasserts claim to rule over Kosovo, International Herald Tribune, 1 October 2006; Serbia claims Kosovo sovereignty, BBC News, 30 September, 2006
(2) Parliament unanimously adopts Serbias new Constitution, Serbian Government Office, Belgrade, 30 September 2006
(3) Douglas Hamilton, Kostunica sets Serbia on course for early polls, Reuters, 30 September 2006
(4) Serbs see Kosovo lost, despite wishful thinking, KosovaReport, 29 September 2006
(5) Council Decision of 30 January 2006 on the principles, priorities and conditions contained in the European Partnership with Serbia and Montenegro including Kosovo, Official Journal of the European Union (L 035, 07/02/2006 P.0032- 0056), p.5
(6) See, for example, the short- and medium-term priorities, set out in the 97 page table, Plan for the Implementation of the European Partnership Priorities (adopted on 7 April 2006), Serbian Government
(7) See, for example, the conclusions of the report of the International Commission on the Balkans, The Balkans in Europes Future, 12 April 2005, pp.19-23
(8) Only direct talks can produce solution for Kosovo, Serbian Government Office, Belgrade, 25 September 2006
(9) This was signalled in the EU Thessaloniki Declaration of June 2003 and confirmed with Kosovos adoption of European Partnership agreements in June 2004. See A European Future for Kosovo, Communication from the Commission, Commission of the European Communities, 20 April 2005.
(10) On Montenegros independence, see, for example, Neil Clark, Montenegro had more independence as part of Yugoslavia than it will as an EU-Nato protectorate, Guardian, 23 May 2006
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Bosnians appeared sharply split Monday in key elections on the country's future, reflecting the deep ethnic divisions that persist more than a decade after the country's civil war.
In Sunday's election, Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats supported politicians who want to unify the Balkan nation, according to a partial count, while Serbs backing a candidate whose party advocates ethnic division.
The vote was Bosnia's attempt to decide who should lead the country as it tries to free itself from the ethnic divisions that remain from its 1992-95 war and move toward European Union membership.
Since the end of the war, important decisions have been made by an international administrator. But that office recently announced it will close next year if newly elected leaders find ways to put in place reforms that will bring the country closer to joining the EU.
Voters cast their ballots Sunday for a state parliament and the country's three-member presidency, as well as leaders of the two mini-states - a president and parliament of the Serb republic and a president and parliament of the Bosniak-Croat federation, as well as parliaments of the federation's 10 cantons.
With up to 50 percent of the vote counted, officials said it appeared that Nebojsa Radmanovic - whose party chief recently proposed a referendum that would allow Serb territories to secede - will represent Orthodox Christian Serbs in Bosnia's three-member presidency.
Based on the partial count, they said Haris Silajdzic, a strong advocate of a united Bosnia, won election to the Muslim Bosniak seat, and that Ivo Miro Jovic would be re-elected as the Croat representative.
The German diplomat who is the top international administrator in Bosnia said the election went well.
"One must give these people a chance now," Christian Schwarz-Schilling told Germany's Deutschlandfunk radio on Monday. "One should not bring these parties into disrepute for being in part nationalist."
The race for the Croat seat was close. The election commission announced hours after polls closed, that Jovic of the Croat Democratic Union had 11.84 percent, narrowly ahead of Social Democrat Zeljko Komsic, who had 11.41 percent in an incomplete count.
However, votes from a major Bosnian city traditionally favoring the Social Democrats had not been submitted in time and Komsic announced that according to his party's count, he has won the seat of the Croat presidency member.
Jovic admitted Monday that Komsic may have won.
Muslim Bosniaks, the largest ethnic group, generally back a united country, as do their Roman Catholic Croat allies. Their ultimate hope is that Bosnia - currently divided between a Bosniak-Croat federation and a Serb republic - will join the EU when its political and economic reforms are completed.
But many Serbs still cling to beliefs that sparked the war - namely, that their half of the country can secede and become independent.
The complex political setup is confusing even for Bosnians, but was a compromise reached in the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war. Up to 200,000 people were killed and 1 million were driven from their homes during that conflict.
I am just trying to help people get usually under-reported news and sources so that they can go for a news coverage comparison. But I would never suggest what "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" is. I do believe the average people is capable of drawing his or her own conclusions. I hope I'm helping them create their own criteria for judging who is who or what really happened.
Comments
October 13, 2006 09:41 AM
Fascinating. With all due respect, how does one win the Nobel Peace Prize by being the first to leave the negotiating table? I am not aware of a single success having come out of the Pristina-Belgrade talks in Vienna. If Ahtisaari had found a way to help these two parties find some common ground before throwing up his hands, THEN I would say, "That guy deserves a Nobel." (BTW, I am an American living in Pristina, been here for five years. I came to Kosovo/a as a bridge-builder, and I'll leave the same -- though I must say, it's killing me. BTW2: My country is not SCG. If you were to add 'Kosovo' to the pop-up list on your registration page, you'd make a lot of people happy down here -- the *compromise* being that Kosovar Albanians spell it with an 'a'.)
October 13, 2006 10:41 AM
Who is Agim Ceku? It's great to see that Margaret Beckett greeted him with such respesct.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/total_coverage/kosovo/ceku.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/00,,1920947,00.html
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/polbet0306.htm
http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/july00/hed292.shtml
How can anyone be the Prime Minister of a PART of a country? The only comparison I can make is say, being Prime Minster of Scotland, Wales or Ireland!
Kosovo and Metohija are a part of Serbia and no amount of ethnic cleansing by the Albanians of all other minorities is going to chage that fact. NATO occupation will not change that fact either. It will end for them just like Iraq.
NATO is desperate enough to get out and leave the region in a worse mess than when they went in. If they don't deliver on their promises the Albanians will have their guts for garters. Not a nice prospect. The soldiers on the ground have seen what the Albanians are capable of.
October 13, 2006 11:09 AM
I think it would be wrong to see Russia as utterly opposed to Kosovan independence. In fact the only reason I can see for them opposing it is that they want to maintain close relations with Serbia. It would certainly be wrong to see them as opposed because it might encourage secessasionary struggles in the former Soviet Union. Russia WANTS secessationary struggles.
Not on its own territory obviously, but many years of appalling brutality and bloodshed have seen that Russia's territorial integrity is intact. If Kosovo gets its independence however, then Russia will feel free to call for independence in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Trandniestria, Eastern Ukraine etc etc. In fact Kosovan independence would almost definitely strengthen Russia's hand in its backyard.
October 13, 2006 11:47 AM
If full independence can be granted to Kosovo - from which a large proportion of the Serbain minority has fled due to intimidation - where would that leave the future status of Republika Srbska? Why should the Bosnian Serbs be expected to accept a Bosnian Muslim-dominated government in Sarajevo while the Albanians in Kosovo are granted independence from the Serb-dominated government in Belgrade?
October 13, 2006 12:00 PM
The "bad news" from Kosovo is that 240,000 people remain ethnically cleansed from their homes. Meaningless "independences" that get handed back the next day to Brussels and other EU elite unaccountable structures are not worth a single death.
October 13, 2006 12:31 PM
Ah yes ... Kosovo. The part of Serbia which NATO (without the UN resolution which "progressives" seem to think is mandatory nowadays) fought so hard to remove from Serbia and hand to a bunch of terrorists (the KLA) - and without so much as a squeak of protest from the BBC (but that was the nice Mr Clinton - wasn't it. Not the nasty Mr Bush).
From a part of the world where all the artificially created (by Tito) internal boundaries of Yugoslavia are considered sacrosanct and unchangeable ... except Serbia's.
This being a place which NATO went into to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe", which ... erm ... only kicked off *after* the bombing started - to Clare Short's apparent surprise (she not having made any preparations for the unforseen fact that civilian populations tend to run away from places that are being bombed - and where NATO has fulfilled its promise of preserving a "multi-ethnic Kosovo" by presiding over a colony which has seen the systematic ethnic cleansing of a large proportion of its ethnic Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Macedonians and even non-Albanian Muslims (most of whom had to take refuge in nasty racist Serbia).
A place chock-full of as yet undiscovered "mass graves" and "rape camps" alleged to have been created by people who had the cheek to believe that they had the right to put down a terrorist uprising within their own country.
As somebody else has pointed out - why should Serbia be liable to be carved up according to demography, but not Bosnia? It is no wonder that the Serbs believe that double-standards are being applied here.
And the result of all this wonderful western intervention? The re-Balkanisation of the Balkans, a Bosnia which has even less independence now (and for the foreseeable future) than it had when it was part of Yugoslavia (and which even had to suffer having Paddy Pantsdown as its Grand Poobah for a while), and a Balkans where the only remaining multi-ethnic society is ... erm ... nasty racist Serbia.
Way to go.
October 13, 2006 12:50 PM
"Warrant for the arrest of Agim Ceku has been withdrawn because of his new prime ministerial status," quotes an Interpol release issued on March 24.
http://www.ccmr-bg.org/vesti/frommedia/media0180.htm
So much for 'the end of impunity'. NATO and their thuggish allies are still immune from prosectuion for the crimes they committed in Kosovo.
October 13, 2006 12:56 PM
Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, managing director of the Grameen Bank, was awarded the Nobel for his efforts toward eradicating world poverty. [MSNBC] Mr. Ahtasaari is a shoe-in for 2007. I'm assuming, of course, that he'll find a way to get a picture of Agim and Vojislav shaking hands -- with smiles on their faces.
October 13, 2006 02:05 PM
Agim Ceku was one of the greatest generals in Croatian army. He has won nine major awards for achievment during the Croatian-Serbian war.
What people don't know is that he never fought in Kosova/o. He was only appointed the head of KPC (Kosovo Protection Corps) only few weeks before the end the war in 1999.
As a person he is very nice, honest and friendly. He is a former Army University tutor in Belgrade-Serbia.
October 13, 2006 02:39 PM
Aim Ceku was only great because he killed and cleansed Serbs as did Godovina. And if they were great then Milosevic was great too. He could have been appointed the head of KPC but that does not do him justice for heading the KLA so I am sorry, but your statement does not clear his name. Second, your other statement that he is very nice, honest and friendly, is impossible, because as we have seen he is a successful politician and no politician gets there by being nice, honest and friendly. Look at George Bush!! Politicians are greedy, driven, full of B.S. and can lie to your face. Those are the facts don’t try to make it seem like he is innocent and a nice guy because we all know its untrue, otherwise Kosovo would be a stable region within Serbia if this all was true but in fact even without Serb "ethnic cleansing" and "aggression" it is the most violent and unstable region in the Balkans. Thank you very much.
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