Bold steps to Europe

Vuk Jeremic

March 28, 2008 11:30 AM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/vuk_jeremic/2008/03/vuk_jeremic_serbia_kosovo.html

Five weeks ago, the provincial authorities in the Serbian province of Kosovo unilaterally and illegally declared their independence. Around 30 countries have recognised this illegitimate and destabilising act, setting back the region's European membership perspective.



The vast majority of UN member states are not following suit,
uncomfortable with a precedent that is making the international system
unstable. International law has been grossly violated, and a revival of
the global debate about the legitimacy of internationally recognised
borders has been triggered. This needs to be addressed, not wished
away. For there are clearly dozens of Kosovos throughout the world,
happy that an attempt has been made to legitimise unilateral secession
in the international system - and pleased to have been provided with a
detailed plan on how to achieve success. Accordingly, many existing
conflicts may escalate and new ones could be instigated. Already the
recognition of Kosovo has increased the danger that the doctrine of
imposing solutions to ethnic conflicts will be legitimised, that the
right to self-determination will be transformed into an avowed right to
independence.



Recent events
in Kosovo, triggered by Pristina's unilateral declaration of
independence, suggest that the situation is dangerously close to
escalating beyond control. It is important to realise that we are all
in this together, and that we must find a way forward together.

The first step requires talking to one another honestly and
respectfully. We have to address the real life concerns of the
province's most vulnerable, and we have to pay attention to the human
cost of our actions. The alternative is a frozen conflict solidified by
entrenched, maximalist positions that only perpetuate the continuation
of defensive, self-preservationist moves that drive us further apart.
We must therefore work to instil the confidence necessary for all the
western Balkans to once again take bold, historic steps to full EU
membership.



This brings me to the second step. Serbia's president, Boris Tadic,
spoke recently of his willingness to sign the stabilisation and
association agreement
with the EU immediately. Were that to happen, Serbia and the rest of
the region would be put back on the EU membership fast-track, justly
gaining entry into one of the world's greatest political projects.

The third step involves the tricky question of the future status of
Kosovo. Sooner or later, responsible stakeholders will realise that it
cannot achieve sustainable prosperity without Belgrade. Once this sinks
in, an opportunity will be created in which, perhaps for the first
time, a true negotiation can take place between the parties - one that
leads to a mutually acceptable compromise.



This will not be easy. But the alternative is for Kosovo to remain in
limbo, unattractive to foreign investment, unresponsive to the rule of
law and unable to control its freefall into failure.



The formula for success revolves around finding a way to satisfy the
right of Kosovo's Albanian community to substantial self-governance
while remaining under a common sovereign roof with Serbia. Anything
less than that constitutes a fundamental threat to our democratic
development, the European future of southeast Europe and the legitimacy
of the international system that has brought unprecedented prosperity
to the world since 1945.



Serbia is ready to take all three of these steps, because we believe
that Serbs and Albanians must find the courage to act in wisdom and in
conscience, propelled by a hope that beckons us on in this time of
trial. To build on this hope is a bold and solemn purpose. It requires
men and women confident in their strength, compassionate in their
hearts, clear in their minds and steady in their vision. The time is
ripe for daring.

By Douglas Hamilton
Reuters
Monday, March 24, 2008; 9:21 AM

BELGRADE
(Reuters) - Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica marked the anniversary of
NATO's bombing of Serbia on Monday with an attack accusing the West of
cynically grabbing territory in the name of humanitarian intervention.

"Now
it is more than obvious that the cruel destruction of Serbia during the
NATO bombardment had only one aim: to turn the province of Kosovo into
the world's first NATO state," he told the state news agency Tanjug.

NATO
began bombing strategic targets in Serbia on March 24, 1999, and kept
it up for 78 days until the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to
pull his forces from Kosovo and end the killing of Albanian civilians
in a counter-insurgency war.

Launching the first war in its
history, and freighted with a failure to act in Bosnia, the alliance
said it would not stand by and watch another bloodbath in the Balkans
by Serb forces.

Kosovo has been run by the United Nations and
patrolled by NATO troops since June 11, 1999. Its 90 percent Albanian
majority declared independence on February 17 with Western support.

The
European Union, which Serbia wants to join, plans to deploy a
supervisory mission in the country, following a blueprint set out by
United Nations envoy Martti Ahtisaari.

"The illegal construction
of the huge American military base Bondsteel and Annex 11 of the
Ahtisaari plan -- which enshrines NATO as the ultimate authority in
Kosovo -- reveal the true reason why Serbia was mindlessly devastated
and why on February 17 a NATO state was illegally declared," Kostunica
said.

When Serb voters toppled Milosevic in 2000 and elected
Kostunica, the West greeted him as a reformist. But Kostunica is now
the loudest voice of Serb nationalism, leaning to Russia for support and strongly anti-Western in his daily rhetoric.

"UNPATRIOTIC" LABELLING

Kostunica's
10-month-old coalition government collapsed this month under the strain
of deep divisions over Kosovo. President Boris Tadic would not agree to
freeze Serbia's EU aspirations as Kostunica wants, until it revokes its
recognition of Kosovo.

Serbia faces a May 11 election with this as the key issue.

"The
next two months are going to be potentially very difficult, if not
dangerous," said former U.S. ambassador to Serbia, William Montgomery,
in a weekly commentary.

He predicted Kostunica and fellow
"isolationists" would try to keep Kosovo centre stage by means of
provocations and confrontations with NATO and the United Nations.

"The
Prime Minister will continue his tactic of taking hard, nationalistic
positions and forcing his political opponents to choose between meekly
swallowing their objections and following his lead like sheep or
appearing 'unpatriotic'," he wrote.

Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, a guerrilla in the 1998-99 conflict, said NATO fought for the right reasons.

"The
people of Kosovo express their life-long gratitude to NATO and all
countries that supported this just war...in support of the highest
values of western civilization -- freedom, peace and democracy," he
said in a statement. "Today Kosovo is free."

Kostunica on Sunday
accused NATO troops and U.N. police of using "snipers and banned
ammunition" to quell a riot in the Kosovo Serb stronghold of Mitrovica
last week.

A Ukrainian U.N. policeman was killed by a Serb
grenade and a Serb rioter badly wounded. The United Nations and NATO
say the violence was instigated by Belgrade.

Defense Minister
Dragan Sutanovac, of Tadic's pro-EU party, said the start of NATO
bombing was "the saddest day in the recent history of our nation, when
we showed that we didn't understand the world, and the world understood
us even less."

"I hope we've learned the lesson from those
events, that we think much more in political not military terms, and
that it's better to negotiate for 100 years than to have a day of war."

(Edited by Ibon Villelabeitia)

George Jonas on Kosovo's independence and how the West presided over ethnic cleansing
Posted: March 19, 2008, 1:40 PM by Marni Soupcoff
George Jonas

Last month, the Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence. This week, Canada became the 31st country to recognize it. Foreign affairs critic Bob Rae wondered what took our government so long. Well — perhaps we hesitated recognizing what we went to war for because we recognized that we should have hesitated going to war for it.

Wait a minute, someone might say. Canada didn’t go to war in 1999 as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to help Kosovo secede from Serbia. That would have been like Germany dismantling Czechoslovakia in 1938 to liberate the Sudetenland. We only participated to prevent what we believed was an attempt at ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

Yes, well, so much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. The forces of Western liberalism that went into Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing ended up presiding over it.

It was exactly four years ago, during the last week of March, that nearly 1,000 Serbs fled their homes after Albanian Muslims attacked Serb Christians in their churches and villages. News agencies quoted Admiral Gregory Johnson, U.S. Commander of NATO forces for Southern Europe at the time, saying: “This kind of activity almost amounts to ethnic cleansing.” Almost? By the spring of 2004, an estimated 200,000 Serbs had been driven from the province.

To prevent the expulsion of Kosovar Albanians by Serbs, NATO engaged in a war that ended up facilitating the expulsion of Serbs by Albanians. Had this been an unforeseeable result, it might be excused — but it was predictable. Had it been the West’s aim to wrest Kosovo from Serbia, NATO’s entry into the conflict would have made sense. As it wasn’t, it didn’t.

Our bias for multicultural models of nationhood made us reluctant to support Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian ambitions for independence in 1990-91. Though a prompt and unequivocal Western endorsement of self-determination might have averted bloodshed altogether, we didn’t want to see the multicultural federation of Yugoslavia, a model we liked, break up into its ethnic/religious components. Then, when war became inevitable, we needlessly prolonged the conflict through a vapid UN arms embargo imposed on all factions in September, 1991 — which naturally gave an edge to the better-equipped Serbs. The savage war had an extended run, especially on the Croatian front, due to our humanitarian-pacifist folly.

Slow to protest against the illegitimate ambition of multicultural Yugoslavia to forcibly keep in its fold three nations that wanted to separate, we came down like a ton of bricks on ethnic Serbia for its far more legitimate ambition to preserve the country’s territorial integrity against the secessionist guerrillas of Kosovo. Washington, which resisted recognizing genuine, if splinter, nations such as Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia until April, 1992, was quick to launch Stealth bombers to ensure the autonomy of ethnic Albanians in a Serb province. As a multiculturalist thug, the late Slobodan Milosevic was a protected species. As a nationalist thug, NATO declared an open season on him.

Why did the West go to war in Kosovo? Probably for three reasons. One, to make the world safe for multiculturalism; two, to appease the Muslim world; and three, to avert another humanitarian tragedy in Europe. Though hardly evil motives, in the circumstances all three amounted to a profound misreading of the time and place to which they were being applied.

The Kosovo conflict was the flower children’s war, waged by politicians who emerged from a ‘60s generation of confused peaceniks, eco-freaks, and draft resisters. After a life-long opposition to everything NATO stood for, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Javier Solana, and their friends hijacked the alliance to act out their mushy liberal fantasies of fitting every region into the Procrustean bed of a multicultural dream. They failed to notice that Albanians had even less interest in multiculturalism than Serbs; that the Muslim world wasn’t being appeased; and that for every Albanian saved from being ethnically cleansed in the region, a Serb was being condemned to it.

The law assumes that people intend the natural consequences of their acts. I wonder what we thought the natural consequences of putting NATO’s air force at the disposal of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) would be – other than eventual secession. Canadians are lucky Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Javier Solana weren’t in charge of the alliance in 1970 when Pierre Elliott Trudeau brought in the War Measures Act. They might have put NATO’s air force at the disposal of the FLQ.

Kosovo spurs more Greater Albania dreams

Encouraged by Kosovo’s independence, Albanians in
Macedonia are now discussing ambitious plans for a new country made up of
Albania, Kosovo, large parts of Macedonia and part of Ipiros in Greece.

If you walk down the streets of Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia, the
signs and the language is Slavic.



But if you drive just 25 kilometres on, it appears to be a completely different
country where the language and tradition is Albanian and the religion is Muslim
- that’s Tetovo. In 2001, civil war broke out there between Albanian and Slav
populations. Nowadays it’s more peaceful.



Small restaurant owner Agim Berzati says Albanians are treated as second-class
citizens in a country where they make up at least 30% of the population. He’s
Albanian and the food he serves up is traditional kebab and shishlik alongside
Turkish coffee.



”We are born here and deserve equal rights. Macedonians don’t give us equality.
I don’t feel they treat us with respect. There were lots of things we fought
for and were promised in 2001, but nothing has been implemented,” he
complained.



But what has changed though is Kosovo’s declaration of independence. For
Mustafe Hasani it was the dream of a lifetime. He spent a month in prison for
his political activities and for years he’s donated part of his salary to
developing an independent Kosovo.



”We only want an ethnic Albania, for all the Albanians in all the countries
to get together. Now is the end of protest and war. Now we Albanians have to
get educated and then we’ll get what we want. Albania is like our mother,
Kosovo is our father,” Hasani thinks.



What many Albanians want is a greater Albania that incorporates the country Albania,
Kosovo, big parts of Macedonia and part of Ipiros, which is in Greece.



Tailor Shahin Osmani, Albanian who has lived all his life in Tetovo believes a
greater Albania is inevitable and will happen once the country becomes part of
the European Union:



”There will be a time of great Albania in the future, maybe after thirty
years. History repeats itself, and if we get into the European Union, borders
will be eliminated. We’ll be free and it’ll be like having a greater Albania”.



But it’s not a certainty that Macedonia will join the European Union, largely
because Greece objects to it using the name Macedonia.







Post this story to del.icio.us

http://www.russiatoday.ru/news/news/21950

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=529

Government Falls in Belgrade

by Srdja Trifkovic

Far from indicating Serbia's readiness to cower into the vivisection
kennel, Tadic's victory on February 3 was the last chance for the U.S. and the
EU to stop the Kosovo trainwreck. Both Washington and Brussels decided to play
va banque instead. Serbia's resulting anger against the West will translate
into the well-deserved demise for the DS and other "pro-Western
democrats" at the parliamentary election on May 11.

*************************

The collapse of Serbia's government on Saturday was unsurprising and
necessary. Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica finally stated what we've known
for months: that his coalition government "has no united policy any more
on an important issue related to the future of the country, on Kosovo as a part
of Serbia." The immediate cause of the split was the refusal of two
pro-Western parties in the coalition to support Kostunica's position that
Serbia would only seek to be integrated into the EU if it can be so in its
entirety, including Kosovo.

The underlying causes of the rift are complex. Their explanation requires
semantic clarity that is absent among Western analysts of Balkan affairs and
their Serbian colleagues alike. Thirteen years of Slobodan Milosevic's rule in
Serbia have left many ugly marks on the political and cultural scene of the
country. One of them, of a secondary order yet illustrative of the
country's mood, is the reluctance of participants in Serbia's public discourse
to use certain eminently useful words, such as "conspiracy," and
"treason." [ ... ]

In reality there had been many full-bloodied conspirators, enemies,
and traitors among the Serbs' foes throughout the 1990s. In 1993, for
instance, Bill Clinton actively conspired with the mullahs in Tehran to smuggle
arms to Bosnia's Muslim mujaheddin, in blatant violation of the very UN
resolution which the United States had proposed a year earlier. Albright's
brutal ruse at Rambouillet in February 1999, executed with all the subtlety of
Reinhardt Heydrich or Zia ul Haq, was a conspiracy against peace par
excellence. Its perpetrators were Serbia's enemies in the
technical, rather than ideological, sense of that term.

A semantically precise description of political events is the prerequisite
for their proper understanding and analysis. We need those words to explain
accurately and adequately what has been going on in connection with Kosovo over
the past few months.

THE CONSPIRACY

In the final quarter of 2007 we've witnessed a coldly premeditated
conspiracy by the United States administration to prevent any possibility of
compromise in Kosovo. Earlier statements by various U.S. officials, from Mr.
Bush and Ms. Rice down, that Kosovo's independence was "inevitable"
and that it would be achieved "one way or another" (June-July 2007)
were a classic case of policy makers actively torpedoing a diplomatic outcome
they dislike - and then claiming that the failure of "diplomacy" had
been preordained, and therefore an imposed solution was necessary.

This same trick was played by then-U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, Warren
Zimmermann, when he actively sabotaged the Bosnian peace accord brokered by the
Portuguese Presidency on behalf of the EU in early 1992. Zimmermann flew
post-haste to Sarajevo to tell Alija Izetbegovic that the U.S. would support
him if he were to renege on this agreement. The rest is history: Izetbegovic
followed American advice, thereby igniting the Bosnian civil war. Zimmermann,
his masters at Foggy Bottom, and the White House all share the responsibility
for the bloody results.

The present American conspiracy over Kosovo went far beyond engineering the
failure of diplomatic efforts. It was focused on getting the EU to follow the
Diktat from the Potomac. The doubters were to be cajoled, threatened, maligned
as Russian stooges, or otherwise press-ganged into submission. As
Slovenian analyst Tomaz Mastnak noted in the latest issue of Foreign Policy in Focus, this behind-the-scenes collusion
revealed two violations with regard to Kosovo:

The United States, with Slovenian assistance, sought to circumvent the
European political process - not to speak of the UN. And Kosovo itself, by
unilaterally declaring independence, violated international law. These two
violations - of a political process and of the rule of law - will come back to
haunt Europe and the United States in the coming months and years.

Slovenia plays a disproportionately important role in this story, Mastnak
explains, because it assumed the European Union presidency on January 1, 2008.
A week before, on Christmas Eve 2007, a top official of the Slovenian Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, its Political Director Mitja Drobnic, had a meeting in
Washington with Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European
affairs, his deputy Rosemary DiCarlo, and Judy Ansley, NSA senior director for
European affairs. An internal Slovenian report of this meeting was leaked to
the Slovenian daily Dnevnik and the Belgrade daily Politika and
published on January 25. Their authenticity was beyond doubt, causing the
immediate resignation of Mr. Drobnic.

According to Drobnic's minutes, the Americans presented a list of demands,
including "a mention of Iraq and rogue states, such as Iran, Burma, and
Syria" in the US-EU declaration at the forthcoming summit in Ljubljana.
Regarding Kosovo, the conversation was a careful orchestration of the timetable
for independence. Drobnic asked for help with obtaining the UN Secretary
General's statement in support of sending the European Security and Defense
Policy mission to Kosovo, "since some EU member states have difficulties
with making the decision to send the ESDP without the UN agreement." Fried
responded that "the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon is under the pressure
of the Russian Federation and thus in a difficult position," but the U.S.
had assurances that the UN was not going to put restrictions on the sending the
mission. Washington, he explained, "will help the UN Secretary General in
the case of difficulties with the Russian Federation, while [Slovenia] has to
achieve within the EU the sending of the ESDP in the shortest time."

As Mastnak points out, the decision to send the ESDP mission to Kosovo was
of key importance for the United States, since it was effectively replacing the
UN mandate over the province with the EU mandate. In pushing that decision
through, Fried was clear: "one can ignore the critical positions and
statements of the Russian Federation and Serbia." His deputy Rosemary
DiCarlo noted that it would make sense if "the session of the Kosovo
Parliament, in which they pass the declaration of independence, were to be on
Sunday, since this way the Russian Federation would not have the time to call
for the UN Security Council. In the meantime, the first recognitions would
already have happened."

Fried further told the Slovenes that "the US is drafting the
constitution with the Kosovars" and that the situation on the ground was
"promising." Fried added, "The US hoped that the Kosovars would
not lose confidence in themselves, because that would mean that the US will
lose its influence."

Both by the formal and substantive criteria, the U.S. Kosovo policy in
general and Daniel Fried's behavior in particular is a classic case of
CONSPIRACY: the pursuit of illegal and illegitimate objectives through secret
association with other plotters. Mr. Fried's manner of a mastermind telling his
Euro-underlings how to stage a heist offers far more incontrovertible evidence
of conspiratorial culpability than, say, the Hague "Tribunal's"
accusation against Milosevic or Seselj that they had forged a conspiracy for
the creation of a "Greater Serbia."

The US-EU plot is not aimed only at Serbia, Russia, and those EU members
that oppose Kosovo's independence. Let us recall that Swedish foreign minister
and former premier Carl Bildt declared last December that the EU should seek to
maintain a "mere appearance" of respect for international legality.
In reality the trans-Atlantic Kosovo conspiracy is directed against the very
foundations of the global legal and political order, and therefore against
peace as such. This is a capital crime par excellence under the
Nuremberg Rules.

THE TRAITORS' SWAN SONG

There is no more overtly inimical act in international relations than taking
territory away from one nation for the benefit of another. Throughout history
it has been a perfectly legitimate casus belli. Accordingly, the proponents of
Kosovo's independence are stricto sensu Serbia's enemies, just as the
proponents of the Munich Diktat in September 1938 were the enemies of the
Czechs. Accordingly, Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns - Daniel Fried's
boss - "explained" why UNSC Resolution 1244 did NOT prevent
Kosovo's secession in terms worthy of a Ribbentrop or Molotov:

The language referring to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the
Former Republic of Yugoslavia is mentioned in the resolution's preamble, not in
any of its legally operative language. In other words, while UNSCR 1244 aimed
for a negotiated agreement, it did not prejudge the ultimate outcome and did
not legally require a negotiated agreement.

By this standard of "legality" this world is a Hobbesian jungle in
which the life of small nations that do not obey the will of Messrs Burns,
Fried, and their ilk, is nasty, brutish, and short. By allowing its Kosovo
policy to be shaped by these dysfunctional bureaucrats and recognizing the
monster of its own creation, the United States government - the
Conspirator-in-Chief - has declared itself as an enemy of Serbia in the purely
value-neutral sense, just as the proponents of a "free" Chechnya are objectively
Russia's enemies. This is the context needed to understand the motives of
demonstrators who damaged an auxilliary wing of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade
just over two weeks ago.

Within Serbia there are prominent "pro-Western" political leaders
and top-level state officials belonging to the "reformist" and
"pro-European" parties who have coordinated their domestic political
strategies with the likes of Messrs. Burns and Fried, and their Euro-ilk. By
any normal, i.e. non-ideological yardstick they are guilty of treason:
of criminal disloyalty manifest in actions that undermine or jeopardize the
interests of their nation and state. There is ample prima facie evidence of
such culpability among Tadic's coterie. The recent presidential elections, for
example, were called on December 12, 2008, by the Democratic Party without
prior agreement among coalition partners - but in agreement with, and the
approval of, Washington and Brussels.

Contrary to Mr. Burns' stated expectation of "a period of
stability" after Kosovo's declaration of independence, the U.S. policy has
destabilized the Balkans and divided the world. The good news is that the
polarization will finally debunk the myth of the "International
Community." If about a half of all sovereign states, accounting for more
than two-thirds of the world's population, are not on board with the United
States on this issue - intense pressure, threats and promises notwithstanding -
the result will be a long-overdue and welcome loss of face and credibility by
the global-hegemonist "foreign policy community" inside the Beltway.

Mr. Burns' confident expectation that, after some passing anger, Serbia
would "take its place in the European Union in the future and in a better
relationship with NATO and as a friend of the U.S." is as absurd as his
"legal opinion" on UNSC Resolution 1244. The flames in the U.S.
embassy in Belgrade were easy to put out, but the country's anger is deep and
the people's resentment of America abiding.

President Boris Tadic's narrow victory (51 percent) in the second round of
the presidential election on February 3 was entirely due to his claim that, as
a pro-Western reformist, he could obtain less brutal treatment for Serbia from
Brussels and Washington than his "nationalist" opponent. But Mr.
Burns et al misinterpreted his victory as a sign that the Serbs were throwing
in the towel. (Oh yes, had Tomislav Nikolic of the Serbian Radical Party won,
they would have said that their scenario should be applied because Serbia
proved herself to be irredeemably nationalist . . . )

Far from indicating Serbia's readiness to sling into the vivisection kennel,
however, Tadic's victory was the last chance for the U.S. and the EU to stop
the train wreck. The anger against the West will translate into the
well-deserved electoral demise for Tadic's Democratic Party at the
parliamentary election on May 11.Kosovo will linger on for a few years, as an
expensive albatross costing American and European taxpayers a few billion a
year. It will continue developing, not as a functional economy but as a black
hole of criminality and terrorism. The ever-rising and constantly unfulfilled
expectations of its unemployable multitudes will eventually turn -
Frankenstein's monster-like - against the entity's creator.

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=529

Government Falls in Belgrade

by Srdja Trifkovic

Far from indicating Serbia’s readiness to cower into the vivisection kennel,
Tadic’s victory on February 3 was the last chance for the U.S. and the EU to
stop the Kosovo trainwreck. Both Washington and Brussels decided to play va
banque instead. Serbia’s resulting anger against the West will translate
into the well-deserved demise for the DS and other “pro-Western democrats” at
the parliamentary election on May 11.

The collapse of Serbia’s government on Saturday was unsurprising and
necessary. Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica finally stated what we’ve known
for months: that his coalition government “has no united policy any more on an
important issue related to the future of the country, on Kosovo as a part of
Serbia.” The immediate cause of the split was the refusal of two pro-Western
parties in the coalition to support Kostunica’s position that Serbia would only
seek to be integrated into the EU if it can be so in its entirety, including
Kosovo.

The underlying causes of the rift are complex. Their explanation requires
semantic clarity that is absent among Western analysts of Balkan affairs and
their Serbian colleagues alike. Thirteen years of Slobodan Milosevic’s rule in
Serbia have left many ugly marks on the political and cultural scene of the
country. One of them, of a secondary order yet illustrative of the
country’s mood, is the reluctance of participants in Serbia’s public discourse
to use certain eminently useful words, such as “conspiracy,” “enemy,” and
“treason.”

Those words have a clear meaning and semantic utility, but they are
suspect in today’s Serbia (no less than the word Volksgemeinschaft is
suspect in Germany) because they have become associated with the spirit of
Milosevic’s era. Having been over-used and abused by his domestic propaganda
outlets to malign his foreign foes and domestic political rivals alike, they
are considered unclean. The legal, rhetorical, and moral weight of those three
words was devalued by Milosevic and his inept media bosses no less than the
country’s currency was devalued by his Weimar-style hyperinflation.

In reality there had been many full-bloodied conspirators, enemies,
and traitors among the Serbs’ foes throughout the 1990s. In 1993, for
instance, Bill Clinton actively conspired with the mullahs in Tehran to smuggle
arms to Bosnia’s Muslim mujaheddin, in blatant violation of the very UN
resolution which the United States had proposed a year earlier. Albright’s
brutal ruse at Rambouillet in February 1999, executed with all the subtlety of
Reinhardt Heydrich or Zia ul Haq, was a conspiracy against peace par
excellence. Its perpetrators were Serbia’s enemies in the
technical, rather than ideological, sense of that term.

A semantically precise description of political events is the prerequisite
for their proper understanding and analysis. We need those three words to
explain accurately and adequately what has been going on in connection with
Kosovo over the past few months.

THE CONSPIRACY

In the final quarter of 2007 we’ve witnessed a coldly premeditated
conspiracy by the United States administration to prevent any possibility of
compromise in Kosovo. Earlier statements by various U.S. officials, from Mr.
Bush and Ms. Rice down, that Kosovo’s independence was “inevitable” and that it
would be achieved “one way or another” (June-July 2007) were a classic case of
policy makers actively torpedoing a diplomatic outcome they dislike - and then
claiming that the failure of “diplomacy” had been preordained, and therefore an
imposed solution was necessary.

This same trick was played by then-U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, Warren
Zimmermann, when he actively sabotaged the Bosnian peace accord brokered by the
Portuguese Presidency on behalf of the EU in early 1992. Zimmermann flew
post-haste to Sarajevo to tell Alija Izetbegovic that the U.S. would support
him if he were to renege on this agreement. The rest is history: Izetbegovic
followed American advice, thereby igniting the Bosnian civil war. Zimmermann,
his masters at Foggy Bottom, and the White House all share the responsibility
for the bloody results.

The present American conspiracy over Kosovo went far beyond engineering the
failure of diplomatic efforts. It was focused on getting the EU to follow the
Diktat from the Potomac. The doubters were to be cajoled, threatened, maligned
as Russian stooges, or otherwise press-ganged into submission. As
Slovenian analyst Tomaz Mastnak noted in the latest issue of Foreign Policy in Focus, this
behind-the-scenes collusion revealed two violations with regard to Kosovo:

The United States, with Slovenian assistance, sought to circumvent the
European political process - not to speak of the UN. And Kosovo itself, by unilaterally
declaring independence, violated international law. These two violations - of a
political process and of the rule of law - will come back to haunt Europe and
the United States in the coming months and years.

Slovenia plays a disproportionately important role in this story, Mastnak
explains, because it assumed the European Union presidency on January 1, 2008.
A week before, on Christmas Eve 2007, a top official of the Slovenian Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, its Political Director Mitja Drobnic, had a meeting in
Washington with Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European
/affairs, his deputy Rosemary DiCarlo, and Judy Ansley, NSA senior director for
European affairs. An internal Slovenian report of this meeting was leaked to
the Slovenian daily Dnevnik and the Belgrade daily Politika
and published on January 25. Their authenticity was beyond doubt, causing the
immediate resignation of Mr. Drobnic.

According to Drobnic’s minutes, the Americans presented a list of demands,
including “a mention of Iraq and rogue states, such as Iran, Burma, and Syria”
in the US-EU declaration at the forthcoming summit in Ljubljana. Regarding
Kosovo, the conversation was a careful orchestration of the timetable for
independence. Drobnic asked for help with obtaining the UN Secretary General’s
statement in support of sending the European Security and Defense Policy
mission to Kosovo, “since some EU member states have difficulties with making
the decision to send the ESDP without the UN agreement.” Fried responded that
“the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon is under the pressure of the Russian
Federation and thus in a difficult position,” but the U.S. had assurances that
the UN was not going to put restrictions on the sending the mission.
Washington, he explained, “will help the UN Secretary General in the case of
difficulties with the Russian Federation, while [Slovenia] has to achieve
within the EU the sending of the ESDP in the shortest time.”

As Mastnak points out, the decision to send the ESDP mission to Kosovo was
of key importance for the United States, since it was effectively replacing the
UN mandate over the province with the EU mandate. In pushing that decision
through, Fried was clear: “one can ignore the critical positions and statements
of the Russian Federation and Serbia.” His deputy Rosemary DiCarlo noted that
it would make sense if “the session of the Kosovo Parliament, in which they
pass the declaration of independence, were to be on Sunday, since this way the
Russian Federation would not have the time to call for the UN Security Council.
In the meantime, the first recognitions would already have happened.”

Fried further told the Slovenes that “the US is drafting the constitution
with the Kosovars” and that the situation on the ground was “promising.” Fried
added, “The US hoped that the Kosovars would not lose confidence in themselves,
because that would mean that the US will lose its influence.”

Both by the formal and substantive criteria, the U.S. Kosovo policy in
general and Daniel Fried’s behavior in particular is a classic case of
CONSPIRACY: the pursuit of illegal and illegitimate objectives through secret
association with other plotters. Mr. Fried’s manner of a mastermind telling his
Euro-underlings how to stage a heist offers far more incontrovertible evidence
of conspiratorial culpability than, say, the Hague “Tribunal’s” accusation
against Milosevic or Seselj that they had forged a conspiracy for the creation
of a “Greater Serbia.”

The US-EU plot is not aimed only at Serbia, Russia, and those EU members
that oppose Kosovo’s independence. Let us recall that Swedish foreign minister
and former premier Carl Bildt declared last December that the EU should seek to
maintain a “mere appearance” of respect for international legality. In reality
the trans-Atlantic Kosovo conspiracy is directed against the very foundations
of the global legal and political order, and therefore against peace as
such. This is a capital crime par excellence under the Nuremberg
Rules.

THE TRAITORS’ SWAN SONG

There is no more overtly inimical act in international relations than taking
territory away from one nation for the benefit of another. Throughout history
it has been a perfectly legitimate casus belli. Accordingly, the proponents of
Kosovo’s independence are stricto sensu Serbia’s enemies, just as the
proponents of the Munich Diktat in September 1938 were the enemies of the
Czechs. Accordingly, Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns - Daniel Fried’s
boss - “explained” why UNSC Resolution 1244 did NOT prevent Kosovo’s secession
in terms worthy of a Ribbentrop or Molotov:

The language referring to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the
Former Republic of Yugoslavia is mentioned in the resolution’s preamble, not in
any of its legally operative language. In other words, while UNSCR 1244 aimed
for a negotiated agreement, it did not prejudge the ultimate outcome and did
not legally require a negotiated agreement.

By this standard of “legality” this world is a Hobbesian jungle in which the
life of small nations that do not obey the will of Messrs Burns, Fried, and
their ilk, is nasty, brutish, and short. By allowing its Kosovo policy to be
shaped by these dysfunctional bureaucrats and recognizing the monster of its
own creation, the United States government - the Conspirator-in-Chief - has
declared itself as an enemy of Serbia in the purely value-neutral sense, just
as the proponents of a “free” Chechnya are objectively Russia’s
enemies. This is the context needed to understand the motives of demonstrators
who damaged an auxilliary wing of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade just over two
weeks ago.

Within Serbia there are prominent “pro-Western” political leaders and
top-level state officials belonging to the “reformist” and “pro-European”
parties who have coordinated their domestic political strategies with the likes
of Messrs. Burns and Fried, and their Euro-ilk. By any normal, i.e.
non-ideological yardstick they are guilty of treason: of
criminal disloyalty manifest in actions that undermine or jeopardize the
interests of their nation and state. There is ample prima facie evidence of
such culpability among Tadic’s coterie. The recent presidential elections, for
example, were called on December 12, 2008, by the Democratic Party without
prior agreement among coalition partners - but in agreement with, and the
approval of, Washington and Brussels.

Contrary to Mr. Burns’ stated expectation of “a period of stability” after
Kosovo’s declaration of independence, the U.S. policy has destabilized the
Balkans and divided the world. The good news is that the polarization will
finally debunk the myth of the “International Community.” If about a half of
all sovereign states, accounting for more than two-thirds of the world’s
population, are not on board with the United States on this issue - intense
pressure, threats and promises notwithstanding - the result will be a
long-overdue and welcome loss of face and credibility by the global-hegemonist
“foreign policy community” inside the Beltway.

Mr. Burns’ confident expectation that, after some passing anger, Serbia
would “take its place in the European Union in the future and in a better
relationship with NATO and as a friend of the U.S.” is as absurd as his “legal
opinion” on UNSC Resolution 1244. The flames in the U.S. embassy in Belgrade
were easy to put out, but the country’s anger is deep and the people’s
resentment of America abiding.

President Boris Tadic’s narrow victory (51 percent) in the second round of
the presidential election on February 3 was entirely due to his claim that, as
a pro-Western reformist, he could obtain less brutal treatment for Serbia from
Brussels and Washington than his “nationalist” opponent. But Mr. Burns et al misinterpreted
his victory as a sign that the Serbs were throwing in the towel. (Oh yes, had
Tomislav Nikolic of the Serbian Radical Party won, they would have said that
their scenario should be applied because Serbia proved herself to be
irredeemably nationalist . . . )

Far from indicating Serbia’s readiness to sling into the vivisection kennel,
however, Tadic’s victory was the last chance for the U.S. and the EU to stop
the train wreck. The anger against the West will translate into the
well-deserved electoral demise for Tadic’s Democratic Party at the
parliamentary election on May 11.Kosovo will linger on for a few years, as an
expensive albatross costing American and European taxpayers a few billion a
year. It will continue developing, not as a functional economy but as a black
hole of criminality and terrorism. The ever-rising and constantly unfulfilled
expectations of its unemployable multitudes will eventually turn -
Frankenstein’s monster-like - against the entity’s creator.

Dr. S. Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor

CHRONICLES: A Magazine of American Culture

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?cat=4


www.trifkovic.mysite.com

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080308/EDITORIAL/188730052/-1/RSS_EDITORIAL&template=nextpage

The
Washington Times

8
March 2008

Letters
to the Editor

Serbs under siege

Sami Repishti's letter Thursday is an insult to Kosovo history. A real
genocide of the Serbs is taking place. Serbs were a simple majority of Kosovo
for hundreds of years until the Holocaust, when Albanian Nazis liquidated tens
of thousands of Serbs and expelled more than 150,000 people. Josip Broz Tito
forbade their return after the war and gave their land to the Albanian Nazis
who had fought for Hitler. In the past five years, 155 ancient Serbian churches
have been destroyed under the noses of 17,000 NATO troops.

When Mr. Tito granted autonomy to Albanians in 1974 without a vote of the
Yugoslav people, the Albanian authorities banned the Serbian language, fired
Serbs from their jobs and collected and burned more than 2 million books on
Serbian history, religion and culture. For Mr. Repishti to pretend that
Albanians were victimized by the Serbs is an appalling rewriting of the facts
and reveals the extent to which the facts are distorted through propaganda,
which exploits Western ignorance of Balkan history. Nearly 40 percent of the
Albanians in Kosovo are illegal aliens who crossed the border from Albania into
Kosovo.

Mr. Repishti does not mention that more than 400,000 Albanians fled into
Serbian-dominated regions of Macedonia and Montenegro and that 90,000 Albanians
fled to Belgrade into the arms of Mr. Milosevic and their Serbian enemies.

What is immoral about the Repishti letter is the implication that it is
acceptable to cleanse 300,000 Serbs, to destroy 155 of their ancient churches
and to punish Serbs by amputating their religious heartland just because
someone thinks they do not deserve equal human or legal rights. Serbs also
deserve justice for their victimization under Albanian terrorism.

WILLIAM DORICH

Los Angeles

As Goes Serbia, So Goes
Israel?



By Victor Sharpe



Oil has a peculiar smell. It has been described as a stench, which assails the
nostrils. But it does much more than irritate the membranes in the human nose.
It greases the machinery of geo-politics and lubricates the revenge and envy
that nation states harbor towards each other. It makes and destroys states and
peoples and befouls humanity. It is still a necessary evil, but much of this
black gold happens by fate to lie under the sands of the Arab Middle East and
thus morphs into a terrible weapon wielded by Arab despots and Islamo-fascist
fanatics.



The insane rush to create Kosovo, yet another Muslim state in the heart of the
Balkans, is testament to the curse of oil. Ever ready to enrich their
economies, the Europeans and the United States combine to appease and placate
the Arab kings, Emirs, and assorted dictators. The price demanded by the Saudis
and the Gulf States is a steep one; namely to pave the way for more and more
Muslim influence throughout the world and hostility to Israel.



The Saudis pour billions of their petrodollars into Europe and North and South
America in order to build lavish mosques where Wahhabi imams propagate
extremist forms of Islam. European and American universities hold out their
begging bowls to receive Arab money and in return help facilitate the spread of
anti-Israel and anti-Western falsehoods masquerading as Middle East studies.



The recent phenomena of the so-called sovereign funds are instruments through
which European and American financial institutions receive desperately needed
infusions of Arab money to bail themselves out of their own greed and monetary
shortcomings. And the financial help bestowed upon them comes with strings thus
adding yet another layer of Arab and Muslim pressure.



Islamist influence grows with every passing day. Facts are being created on the
ground, which are changing the demographics and national characteristics of one
European state after another. And it is in Europe that Arab oil is driving the
creation of a Muslim state that will become a radical Islamist beachhead and
threaten what is left of Christian Europe. In time it will inevitably become a
springboard for terror into the United States itself.



The U.S. State Department’s Nicholas Burns has now congratulated the Kosovars
in obtaining their independence from Serbia. This is a betrayal of the Serbian
people and will leave a disfiguring scar upon the United States for years to
come. For the Serbian people, the province of Kosovo is their very ancestral
heartland. The long suffering Serbs are now forced to witness the witless and
perfidious Western powers ripping away Serbia’s heart while their hated ethnic
Albanian and Muslim historical enemies take possession of it. The Serbs, in
fact, call Kosovo their “Jerusalem.” That is how holy they consider their lost
homeland.



And we must realize that Israel, too, is threatened by the same evil created by
Arab oil. The Palestinian negotiators all confirm that Jerusalem is up for
grabs and that Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Prime Minister and Tzippi Livni, the
Foreign Minister are in advanced negotiations to give away parts of Judaism’s
eternal holy city, Jerusalem.



Under U.S State Department pressure, the Israeli government is negotiating the
dismemberment of the Jewish ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria and we
must witness with growing fear that what has happened to the brave and ill
served Serbian people will also happen to Israel.



President Bush has said that before his term of office expires this year, he
will preside over the re-division of Judaism’s holy city of Jerusalem and the
creation of a Muslim state called Palestine within the Jewish biblical
heartland. Although Serbs living in enclaves within Kosovo are not yet being
forced to leave, the price of creating a Muslim Palestinian state is the
expulsion – the ethnic cleansing – of all Jews from its proposed territory. In
other words, it is even worse for the Jews as a new Arab state called Palestine
will be judenrein. And this unthinkable outrage will be sanctioned by President
Bush and the United Nations.



There are striking similarities between the Serbs and the Jews. Serbia lost its
province of Kosovo after being defeated in battle by the Muslim Turks at the
Field of Blackbirds on June 13th 1389. Like the Jews, who in their 2,000 years
of exile dreamed of restoring their ancient land and their holy city of
Jerusalem after losing it to the Romans, so too the Serbs dreamed of Kosovo and
wove their folk music and national identity around the lost Serbian heartland.



During the late 1990s when President Clinton and his Secretary of State
Madeline Albright, launched a disgraceful war against the Serbs, the Serbian
Deputy Prime Minister, Draskovitch said of Kosovo: “Our faith was born there,
as was our language, our nationhood, our pride. It is incumbent upon us to
defend Kosovo, even if we all die.”



His words were uttered as American bombers, repainted in NATO colors, bombed
Serbia for several months inflicting some 3,000 civilian deaths and destroying
all the bridges over the Danube River in Belgrade. This was not America’s
finest hour but is now largely dead and buried by the mainstream media.



The same mainstream media rarely, if ever, tells us about Serbia’s passion
during the many centuries leading up to the present and latest shameful act of
the West. When Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, it was the Serbs who fought alone
and unaided against the German divisions; fighting them to a standstill. No other
people in occupied Europe achieved that remarkable and heroic feat.



Croatia allied itself with Hitler and established a Nazi state. The Croatians
exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs and tens of thousands of Jews. If
you visit the Yasenovatz death camp in Croatia, you will find Jews and Serbs
buried there together in mass graves.



The anti-Jewish Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who spent many days
with Hitler in his Berlin bunker plotting the destruction of Mandatory
Palestine’s Jewish population, encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to form several
SS divisions who carried out mass murders and deportations of Jews to the
German death camps.



Serbia emerged from the Second World War with the distinction of defeating the
German invasion and inflicting severe losses on the German army. But the Serbs
paid a terrible price, losing nearly 2,000,000 dead or some 12% of their
population. The Serbian partisans, who included many Jewish fighters, were able
to save thousands of Jews from death at the hands of the Croatian, German and
Bosnian murderers.



During the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the Croatians expelled some 250,000 Serbs
from their homes in the Krajna district. As soon as the Muslims in Kosovo
received autonomy in 1974, they drove out 400,000 Serbs. At the same time a
vast influx of ethnic Albanians flooded over the border to take the place of
the disinherited Serbs.



The Serbian people have been reduced to only 10% of their original population
in Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing against the Serbs began long before the Western
press ran their lurid stories of Serbian ethnic cleansing against the Bosnian
Muslims. Predictably, the mainstream press ignored the earlier attacks by the
Muslims against the Serbs, which first led to the war.



The lesson for Israel is that foreign powers have conspired to strip the
expendable Serbs of their ancestral homeland and give it to the Muslims. In
doing so, these same western powers believe that by placating and ingratiating
themselves with the oil rich Arab and Muslim world they enrich their own
economies. After all, Serbia does not possess any known oil reserves.



Israel, too, is bereft of meaningful reserves of oil. It too is thus
expendable. The pressure upon Israel to give away its own ancestral, historic,
spiritual and biblical heartland in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) grows
relentlessly and insidiously.



Sadly and tragically, there exists no Israeli government or leader at this
critical time with the intestinal fortitude and spiritual certitude to
adamantly and resolutely resist the cynical and perfidious machinations of
western leaders. Israel desperately needs a leader who can talk to the world as
Draskovitch once spoke for the Serbian people. Instead Olmert, Livni and Barak
call for NATO to patrol the border with Gaza, monitor Judea and Samaria and,
heaven forbid, oversee a divided Jerusalem.



Carloline Glick, writing in the Feb 23, 2008 edition of the Jerusalem Post sums
up the Israeli government’s terminal confusion thus: “What the Serbs made NATO
fight its way in to achieve, Israel is offering NATO on a silver platter.” She
adds, “... the lessons of Kosovo are clear. Not only should Israel join Russia,
Canada, China, Spain, Romania and many others in refusing to recognize Kosovo.
It should also state that as a consequence of Kosovo's independence, Israel
rejects the deployment of any international forces to Gaza or Judea and
Samaria, and refuses to cede its legal right to sovereignty in Judea, Samaria,
Gaza and Jerusalem to international arbitration.”



Serbia must be supported by all who still cherish morality over expediency.
Historical correctness must in all such cases trump so-called political
correctness. As goes Serbia, so goes Israel.



Neither nation deserves to become victim to the international greed for black
gold and the attendant groveling acceptance by oil-importing states to the
demands of the oil producing dictatorships and Islamic theocracies. Indeed, the
stench from corrupting oil that permeates the international corridors of power
makes the very angels in heaven gag.

Source: Exclusive article submitted by the author, an IHC Featured Writer



Copyright © Victor Sharpe 2008



Edited by IHC staff, www.infoisrael.net



Published 2 March 2008

http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1431

INTERNATIONAL VIEWPOINT (UK)

February 2008

Kosovo A country without an economy?

Adam Novak

Media coverage of Kosovo's recent Unilateral Declaration of Independence has
focused on the risk of conflict with Serbia, and the broader geopolitical
risks for unresolved separatist struggles in Bosnia and the former Soviet
Union.

Many in the international peace movement blame the western powers for the
violent break-up of former Yugoslavia. But Kosovo's independence reveals
another dimension of the west's criminal responsibility in the destruction
and re-colonisation of Eastern Europe since 1989. The newly independent
state of Kosovo has no economy to speak of, and its poor and undereducated
population are dependent on remittances from family abroad, smuggling, and
foreign aid.

Newly-independent Kosovo is Europe's poorest country. Its per capita GDP is
$1,300), which is about the same as Ghana or Burkina Faso, and only one
tenth of the level in the poorest countries in the European Union, Bulgaria
and Romania. Kosovo's subsistence economy remained virtually unchanged
throughout the eight years of UN rule, and the standard of living of its two
million people is still lower than before the Serbian government imposed
central control of the province in 1989.

How is such crushing poverty possible in the heart of Europe?

Kosovo was always the poorest part of former Yugoslavia, with a GDP of about
10% of that of Slovenia, the richest part of the federation. But Tito's
Yugoslav system ensured investments in infrastructure and industry, mass
education, and the creation of autonomous institutions, all for the first
time in Kosovo's modern history. In the late 1980s, Serbian nationalist
leader Slobodan Milosevic allowed Kosovo's small Serbian minority to seize
these resources and political power, provoking a massive movement of
non-violent resistance among the Albanian-speaking majority. Albanians were
expelled from industrial and civil service jobs, and most families survived
on a mixture of small-scale agriculture and remittances from family members
working abroad - mostly in Germany, Switzerland and the USA.

The NATO war against Serbia in 1999 destroyed most of the industry and
infrastructure, either through bombing, or by looting as the Albanian
population took their revenge on the Yugoslav regime which had humiliated
them. A United Nations administration was rapidly put in place, and ran
Kosovo as a protectorate of the western powers until the declaration of
independence in mid-February this year.

This UN administration completely failed to develop economic activities that
would lift the population out of poverty. So much western food "aid" was
dumped into Kosovo that most of the local farmers went bankrupt, and were
forced to kill their livestock or abandon their fields. A free trade regime
was imposed, and the Yugoslav Dinar replaced as legal currency by the German
Mark, (Kosovo therefore became a de facto part of the Eurozone on 1 January
2002). As a result, Kosovo joined the other EU protectorate, Bosnia, as a
marginal but easy-to-penetrate market for west European companies, while
local companies found themselves unable to compete, and separated from their
former markets in the rest of former Yugoslavia.

One of the paradoxes of Kosovo's de facto separation from Serbia in 1999 is
that - since free trade always benefits the strongest at the expense of the
weakest - Serbian companies have been able to capture a large part of the
Kosovo market, even providing the basic foodstuffs which Kosovo used to
export to Serbia. Serbia is now Kosovo's largest trading partner, while
Kosovo has failed to penetrate either Serbia or any of the other ex-Yugoslav
markets. Kosovo has a disastrous balance of payments; in 2007, Kosovo
imported 1.5 billion euros worth of goods, but exported only about 150
million euros worth.

While it did little to help the small farmers and workshops that dominate
the Kosovo economy, the UN administration expended considerable effort on
the introduction of a textbook-style neoliberal legal system, ensuring that
Kosovo's natural resources (coal, lead, zinc, nickel, farmland) and the
handful of remaining industrial and food-processing companies can be easily
acquired by western investors, that civil infrastructure can only be built
by public-private partnerships, and that private investors will be able to
take over the most profitable part of public services like health and
education.

The electricity sector illustrates the economic dilemma facing Kosovo. The
territory has persistent power cuts and 'brown-outs.' The electric company
produces 800 megawatts of electricity each day, about 80 percent of what is
needed. It can't afford to buy more from neighbouring countries, because,
during the years of conflict and UN administration, almost everybody stopped
paying, and many homes and business are connected to the power grid
illegally. Western advisors have proposed privatising the electricity
supplier, so that private companies will be responsible for enforcing
payment - and for cutting off poor people's heat and light. Foreign
companies are expected to build a modern coal-fired power station in
exchange to unlimited access to the estimated 15 billion tons of brown coal
lying in the earth beneath Kosovo. The EU will help create a regional energy
market to swap surpluses (Kosovo could import from Balkan countries with
hydroelectric power at high season, and export back to them when water
levels are lower).

It would be better for Kosovo to build up a state utility, ensuring that
non-renewable resources are used in the national interest, (The ground is
also though to contain 20 billion tons of lead and zinc and 15 billion tons
of nickel). Only a public utility could ensure that the painful move towards
enforcement of energy bill collection is socially responsible. In private
hands, the energy company may provoke a massive non-payment campaign, as
followed utility privatisations in South Africa and Bolivia. Investors are
therefore trying to get the government to guarantee payment for minimum
supply to local households, and to allow the privatised utility to double
production, but sell all of the extra capacity abroad, effectively ignoring
the needs of the people who the coal belongs to.

Having destroyed all forms of Yugoslav state or social ownership, the UN has
created a Kosovo state administration that lives from import duties, a sales
tax, and subsidies from the European Union. Independence will allow a merger
between the UN and national administrations, but with former UN employees
(ie most educated Kosovars who can speak English) used to much higher wages
than in the national administration, their integration is likely to increase
the corruption of the civil service, as they try desperately to maintain
their western lifestyle.

Regional warlords, bosses of the UCK militia which confronted the Serbs
during the NATO war, are responsible for the implementation of state
functions in most of the territory outside the capital, Prishtina. They also
control the most lucrative export industries, which are all illegal. Kosovo
is part of the main transit route for drugs entering the European Union, and
is a major element in the trafficking of women into the European sex
industry - some studies suggest that 30% of trafficked women worldwide are
controlled by Balkan gangs. Kosovo (and the neighbouring post-Yugoslav state
of Montenegro) are also the main centres of smuggling of tax-free cigarettes
into the EU. As many Kosovars observe cynically, all these areas of activity
depend on cooperation between Kosovar and Serbian gangs, and show that, at
the top, there is a willingness to forget the war and work together.

The central government will try to weaken the warlords by incorporating some
militias into a Kosovo army, which has already been promised to the US and
NATO for any missions abroad. This mercenary role (which harks back to the
Albanian role within the Ottoman empire) offers the west, particularly the
USA, a motivated and dependable force of pro-western Moslems, for potential
use in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in a future move against Iran.

Meanwhile, the population continues to get by as best it can, in an economy
dominated by small-scale trading, subsistence agriculture, smuggling and
crime. The largest employer is the public sector, the private sector
consists mainly of shops and most businesses employ only two or three people
at minimum wage. Remittances from emigrant workers make up about 40% of GDP.
One third of Kosovo's two million residents are under the age of 14, and the
birth rate is the highest in Europe. This means that landholdings are
getting smaller and smaller, and since the terrain is too hilly for
mechanisation, productivity is too low to compete with imported - Serbian
and EU food products.

The Serbian minority in Kosovo (about 10% of the total population) is the
worst off, because it has lost its former privileges, and lacks contacts to
Kosovo's new bosses. Many young Serbs have already emigrated to Serbia
proper, and the remaining population would probably do the same, if they
could find a buyer for their farmland.

In economic terms, the NATO-Serbia war and UN protectorate over Kosovo has
meant a decade of stagnation. In 1989, the GDP per capita in richest part of
Yugoslavia, Slovenia, was 10 time higher than in Kosovo. Today Slovenia is
part of the EU, with a GDP per capita 16 times higher than Kosovo, and five
times higher than Serbia.

Few voices have been raised against this outrageous failure of the west. And
yet, Kosovo has a small, but well educated and westernised middle class,
based in the civil administration set up by the UN mission, and the army of
private contractors and "Non-Governmental Organisations" which the west used
to reorganize the society and provide a social base for its continued
presence. Profoundly opportunistic, these middle class layers would prefer
to work for the foreign donors, who pay better and are less violent, but, as
independence approached, many have attached themselves to one or the other
of the warlord factions. Unlike the rest of former Yugoslavia, very few of
these NGO activists have tried to organize or represent the disadvantaged
majority in society, let alone resist the twin predators of neoliberalism
and mafia.

This westernized middle class has had a central role in articulating and
transmitting the dominant ideology in today's Kosovo, a mixture of
neo-liberal obsession with private enterprise, coupled with a xenophobic and
clannish ultra-nationalism that justifies aggression against Kosovo's
national minorities, and legitimizes the various illegal traffics. By
expelling Albanians from the civil service and socially-owned enterprises,
Serbia's "communist" regime definitively severed Albanian attachment to the
social benefits of the Yugoslav system, and accelerated a return to pre-WWII
self-reliance and clan-based solidarity.

Kosovo nationalism also includes a massive sense of entitlement, with most
people believing that the European Union should provide massive and
indefinite financial support to Kosovo, to make up for its failure to
protect Kosovars in the past.

While the EU can be expected to bankroll the Kosovo state in the foreseeable
future, this will be conditional on the economy remaining open to western
investment in land, industry and services, and on a partial reduction in
smuggling and criminal activities. The EU will also subsidise infrastructure
projects (there is still no decent road link between landlocked Kosovo and
the Albanian port of Durres), but it will be difficult for Kosovo firms to
win more than a minor share of these contracts. Outside mining and
electricity production, the only other potential investments are likely to
be in the footware and textile sectors - Turkish and Greek companies are
already investing in neighbouring Albania, and the Kosovo government can be
expected to set its minimum wage so low as to attract some of this business.
East European governments are already engaged in a 'race to the bottom,'
with successive rounds of cuts to tax and business regulations to attract
investors. Though it is hard to see how Kosovo can compete with neighbouring
Macedonia, which offers a 10% flat tax and VAT rate, with generous tax
holidays, excellent road and rail links to Europe, and lower levels of
corruption and extortion.

While the EU will insist that Kosovo opens its economy to western
investment, it will continue to prevent legal migration of Kosovars into the
EU labour market, creating an explosive social situation for the government
of the newly-independent country.

In any case, the economic benefits of integration into the European space
will be less than those provided to Kosovo during the Yugoslav period,
before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) took charge of Belgrade's
economic policy in the mid 80s.

Adam Novak is the former representative of the Canadian NGO Alternatives in
Eastern Europe.